Stop killing yourself so your startup can live

And how to change the narrative

Your startup is not the most important thing in your life.

The vast majority of founders believe it is and spread that lie by example. We have normalized and celebrated sacrificing everything for our startup.

We idolize the founder who doesn't eat, sleep, stop working, take vacations, shower, change clothes, see friends, spend time with family, and is perpetually broke.

We glorify the college dropout founder who sleeps in their investor's offices and Elon Musk who sleeps on the Twitter couch, tweeting at 4:00 am.

We have accepted that as long as our startup is growing, it doesn’t matter how wide and deep we sacrifice our health, relationships and well-being. In fact, we aspire to it. It’s like a collectively enforced right of passage into “rockstar” status. 

The cost has been brutal.

I apologize.

And I invite you to help me change the narrative.

We must idolize and prioritize our well-being first and foremost. 

We must celebrate and value rest, vacations, meaningful relationships, and taking care of our body, mind, and soul - above everything else.

We must fill social media with posts celebrating how many hours we slept, how much time we spent with our loved ones, how much exercise we did, and how long we meditated for instead of how much revenue we generated or money we raised. 

Humans have a sad tendency of overvaluing the non-essential things in life and de-valuing the essential ones by taking them for granted.

The “end justifies the means” attitude to entrepreneurship has to end - it’s a slow but effective well-being suicide. 

We need:

• investors to factor in lack of well-being as a risk factor and nudge their portfolio founders to prioritize it as much as the bottom line.

• accelerators to teach about well-being and train founders on how to optimize for it just as much as they do for product-market-fit.

• founders to step up, build community, and share more of the essential things of the startup life as cause for celebration. 

It takes all of us, but it starts with you. 

Let's stop killing our health, relationships, and well-being so that our startups can live.