The Toll of Stress on Startup Teams and Its Link to Founder Well-being
Startup Snapshot, a think tank uncovering the unspoken realities of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, has released its latest report, The Untold Toll (Part 2): Navigating Stress, Wellbeing, and Burnout in Startup Teams.
The emotional and mental state of startup teams has emerged as one of the most overlooked drivers of company performance. Startup Snapshot illuminates the unseen side of startup life through global data collected from startup employees. It’s the first study of its kind, and the findings are candid, revealing, and deeply human.
The startup grind is taking a heavier toll than expected. Only 10% of employees anticipated that startup life would harm their mental health, yet 80% say it has. Burnout affects 50% of employees, and 52% report anxiety, surpassing even the rates reported by founders themselves.
Founder stress quietly cascades through the organization. While only 10% of founders openly share their emotional challenges with their team, 57% of employees say they regularly notice signs of founder stress through tone, energy, and facial expressions.
This unspoken tension shapes culture and affects how safe and stable employees feel. Teams led by highly stressed founders report 16% lower work wellbeing, 14% higher burnout, and 16% lower psychological safety.
The most significant stressor for employees isn’t workload or pay, but uncertainty about what’s happening in the startup. Yet only 18% say their founders are fully transparent about the company’s challenges.
Transparency directly affects employee performance. Employees working under transparent, communicative leaders experience 19% higher work wellbeing and 26% lower turnover intention. When people understand what’s happening and why decisions are made, they feel secure, valued, and connected to the journey.
The research makes it clear: Founders set the tone for stress and well-being across their startups. When leaders neglect their own mental health, that stress spreads to employees, driving burnout, disengagement, and long-term cultural damage. Startup Snapshot will continue to investigate the emotional and psychological landscape inside startups. If you want to be part of this dialogue, reach out to yael@startupsnapshot.com.
My partner Seth Levine has an important new book out today titled Capital Evolution: The New American Economy.
I saw it last night at the Boulder Bookstore in the New Hardback Non-Fiction section (bottom left in the photo below) and am going to the launch event at Composition Shop in Longmont. Join us, say hello, and buy some books!
I love the tagline from the flyleaf: “The future of capitalism isn’t left or right – it’s forward.“
In our over-politicized world, Seth and his co-author, Elizabeth MacBride, do an outstanding job of defining capitalism clearly and explaining how it evolved into today’s approach. They deconstruct the contemporary arguments “for and against,” examine challenges with many existing practices, and paint a new and compelling path forward.
Seth and Elizabeth have been working on this book for over two years. I read an early draft around a year ago and gave them a lot of feedback, so it’s been a joy to see it take shape.
Unlike my largely anecdotal books, which draw on my experiences, often with sidebars from others sharing theirs, Seth and Elizabeth did deep research for this book. I fondly remember showing up at Seth’s party barn at his house one day to see the large dining table covered with hardcover books on economic theory, the history of business (and capitalism and economics), and a bunch of other stuff he was reading as part of his extensive research.
As with Seth’s other book, The New Builders, it is both extremely substantive and eminently readable. I encourage you to buy and read a copy of Capital Evolution: The New American Economy.
Google seems a little confused.
It was even confused about my age the other day, but at least it has that right now. It was a little confused on December 1st.
I mean, c’mon Google. Use all those chips you have to get it right!
My father Stan and I in our default states.
lsof -ti:3000 | xargs kill -9 2>/dev/null; npm run devI’ve been wandering up to 60 for a while. During my extreme-extroversion around Give First: The Power of Mentorship I described myself as “almost 60” a bunch of times just to try it on.
It feels comfortable.
Several people responded with “60 is the new 40.” Nope. Not even close. I most definitely do not feel like I did when I was 40. On my annual birthday run this morning (at least 1 minute for each year), I just plodded along, even though I comfortably covered 65 minutes. I sleep more (good), I care less about a bunch of stuff (good), but my energy is lower and the fatigue is ever present (bad).
I’ve definitely shifted into a new mode over the past year. I’m still on a bunch of boards for Foundry and deeply involved in several companies. But I’m much less focused on the broader technology industry, uninterested in many of the things that are going on, and tired+bored of the arc the narrative about technology and society has taken.
In contrast, I’m much more interested in people I care about. Not big groups of them, but the one-to-one relationships. My real friends are wonderful. The deep relationships are what have meaning to me.
I recently told Amy that I enjoy all the CEOs I’m working with. While I’ve always been friends with many of them, this is the first time that I can recall feeling a genuine friendship with all of them. I know that something new will be fucked up in my world every day, so that has nothing to do with these relationships. Instead, how we deal with whatever new fucked up thing will happen means everything.
I’m writing a lot. Give First: The Power of Mentorship may be my last non-fiction book. I’ve shifted to fiction and software. I’m having a ton of fun with both, bringing a beginners mind to the mix, even though I have the right kind of muscles for each from my past experiences.
While I haven’t solved my post-exertional malaise issue, I’ve settled into an understanding of it and how it impacts me physiologically. I’m experimenting with a bunch of things, keeping the ones that work and punting on the ones that don’t. And yes, pilates is magnificent.
On to the next decade …
Give First is now available to pre-order in Audiobook format (it will be officially released on 12/2/26).
I’m the reader, so if you are an audiobook person, you’ll have to listen to me for a few hours. It was fun doing the recording (I’ve done the audio recording for two other books – Venture Deals (Jason and I alternated chapters) and Startup Life.
Give First Audiobook on Amazon
Give First Audiobook on Audible
Give First Audiobook on Apple
Other links via RBmedia
I’ve been a long-time Cory Doctorow fan. His new book Enshitification is delicious. Yup – I understand that a shit emoji doesn’t inspire deliciousness.
Now that I’m back in hibernation (and figuring out what it actually means), I’m reading and writing a lot. I’ll probably blog some (a little, a lot, who knows) while in hibernation because I work out ideas by writing and putting them out in public (even if I don’t pay much attention to the feedback or engage) is a different type of writing for me than just “writing privately” (which is mostly a thing called journaling and valuable to me, but different …)
Cory invented a new word: enshitification. Here’s what Wikipedia says as of today:
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
Nailed it. His examples are superb. I don’t use Facebook products anymore (I guess I’m supposed to call it Meta) because of how awful they are and how awful the company is (oops – yes – I have WhatsApp on my phone because several people in my world insist on using it, but it mostly just sits dormant for me.) I am so exhausted by Amazon and its endless quest for more margin from everyone, including all the companies that it depends on to be useful. Google is “entertaining” to me as they systematically destroy so many companies that enabled them to be amazing in the quest to become an AI company. TwitterX bwahaahahaha. And I don’t even want to bother with the enshittification of so many other things in the tech world that Cory doesn’t touch on but that fit within his thesis.
Cory deconstructs, in fascinating detail, what has happened with each of these companies.
While I don’t agree with all of Cory’s politics (e.g., I was not a fan of Lina Khan and the Biden-era FTC), I love that he’s willing to take strong positions and then back them up. But, the regulatory dynamics and regulations as part of his solution for Enshitification is only a modest part of the book. And, even though I don’t agree with all of it, his arguments have a lot of validity and useful things to understand, especially around the concept of regulatory capture and how it contributes to enshitification.
If you like sci-fi, read Cory’s stuff. If you are in the tech industry and want to be forced actually to think, read Cory’s stuff. If you are far left or far right, don’t bother, since you won’t be motivated actually to learn anything. But if you aren’t part of the “far left/right” and you are willing to read, think, and consider your position on things, read Cory’s stuff.
I love to read. I love everything about books. LLMs will not replace good writing anytime soon, although they have mastered the art of slop. Oh, and I love communities of people who love writing and reading.
Authors & Innovators is a free, community-based event happening on October 30th in Newton, MA, for entrepreneurs, students, CEOs, venture and angel investors, and anyone interested in business. I attended in person a few years ago, and this year I will be there virtually with my book Give First: The Power of Mentorship (and a video). Larry Gennari created it a while ago, and if you like books, writers, readers, and entrepreneurship, it’s a blast.
Their overall goal is to introduce new ideas, foster meaningful dialogue, and move their motivated audience to read business books and engage with other like-minded entrepreneurs to learn more about the exciting journey of building a business!
This year, their theme is The Resilient Entrepreneur. They will be celebrating the spirit that drives founders to adapt, evolve, and thrive. Through thought-provoking conversations with visionary authors and business leaders, we’ll explore how resilience fuels innovation, creativity, and growth—both personally and collectively. From navigating uncertainty to cultivating curiosity and courage, this event shines a light on the mindset and community that empower entrepreneurs to turn challenges into catalysts for change.
The event is complementary, but registration is required at www.authorsinnovators.org.
I recently joined Dan Caruso on The Bear Roars podcast, and our conversation brought one thing into focus: we’re living through a shift that’s not just changing what we build—it’s changing how we learn, lead, and collaborate.
We talked about AI, quantum computing, and robotics, but what we kept coming back to was access. How do we make sure every learner, founder, and educator has the tools—broadband, curiosity, and the freedom to experiment—to participate in this next era? The challenge isn’t the technology itself; it’s building the human systems around it that help people adapt and thrive.
Dan introduced the idea of the “super-professional”—someone who doesn’t just use AI, but grows alongside it. What stood out to me is that the real advantage won’t come from mastering the tools themselves, but from staying endlessly curious and open to learning. That mindset of give first—sharing what you learn as you go—feels more important than ever.
Check out the episode here:
Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gMMqrCzH
Apple: https://lnkd.in/gunRWYEH
YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gBzY_fHR
Amazon Music: https://lnkd.in/gkwEvPaY
While “vibe coding” was a catchy phrase when I first heard it, something about it felt like a head fake to me. And, now that I’ve leveled up to “competent individual software developer” again (after 33 years of not writing any code) I think it’s the wrong phrase. Instead, I’d refer to what’s going on as AI Pair Programming.
When I started playing around with AI-related coding tools last Christmas (because, well, I was bored), I had zero skills with contemporary software development. While I hadn’t written any production code since 1992, I played around with a new programming language every few years. Perl. Ruby. Ruby on Rails (sort of, not really). Python. Clojure. I could do Hello World and a few other simple things, but I never really got past basic CSS, tooling, or deployment stuff. I had a Github account and would futz around with it, but quickly get tired of trying to figure out why I didn’t care about a PR. And damn, so many CLI things.
For Level 1, I downloaded Cursor. After trying to figure out how Django actually worked (yet another online course), gave up, and decided to use Next.js. That led me to Vercel, reinforced by a few friends in their 20s who told me that all the cool kids were using Vercel (although Render, Digital Ocean, and AWS all were the beneficiaries of my credit card.) Pretty soon, I was using Cursor to fight with Vercel, Supabase, Clerk, and Github. After realizing Auto was no fun, I shifted to Claude 3.5. Dinostroids resulted (security holes and all …)
For Level 2, I got a little more serious. I discovered Linear, fought with Notion, and came up with a few ideas and a broader hypothesis around how things might work. I built a v0.1 of a thing.
For Level 3, I decided Lovable might be a better way than Cursor given that everyone was talking about it. I wasted about $200 on it, built a really cool design by vibe coding, but then watched it get very, very confused as it tried to go from simple design to something that actually worked that had some data complexity and AI calls. I thought about trying Bolt and Replit but quickly realized, after too much scrolling around on the web, that I’d likely run into the same issues.
So, I went back to Cursor and put a lot of efforts into my system prompt, tuning things, watching Cursor evolve quickly on a number of fronts (MCPs – yippee!, Agent mode as default – finally) while simultaneously watching my Cursor bill go up. It was easy to decide to go to Max mode and spend $200 / month instead of $20 / month when dinner in Aspen costs at least $100 / person no matter which restaurant you go to.
I hung out at Level 4 for a while. Cursor kept improving. Claude 4 came out. Auto mode still went off the rails and broke all my code. I started refactoring things and realized that the amount of cruft in my code was absurd. Little bugs turned into fatal flaws when I tried to have Cursor fix something. I learned about “git reset –hard HEAD”. I spent way too much time fighting with config issues on localhost:3000 (at least I’d figured out how to make Cursor always start the server on localhost:3000). I started using Docker. I was baffled that Cursor couldn’t remember stuff I told it the prior day, but intellectually understood why this was. I mean, memories.
The end of my joy at Level 4 was when ChatGPT 5 came out and was free on Cursor for a week. At first, it felt fast. Wheeee. Lots of stuff changing. It seems to be working. And then, after a few days, holy shit what a tangled mess of code it generated. Why are all my API routes suddenly broken. Console statements everywhere. UI elements in different parts of the application doing the same thing but look totally different. I went back to Claude and did another code review and major refactor. So many Vercel build errors. I finally embraced CI/CD. And Prettier. And Husky. Suddenly, I ran out of my monthly Cursor credits and shifted to usage-based pricing. $800 later, I realized that there was no reason for me to be using Opus or the thinking models for what I was doing.
Level 4 was a huge drag. But it was also when I started thinking of this as AI pair programming. The AI (or agent, or sub-agent, or whatever you want to call it) is my pair with hands on keyboard. It can type much faster than me. But I have to watch and constantly look over its shoulder, give it feedback, point at the stuff that needs to be done differently, and document what is important to remember to do.
And then I discovered Claude Code. This didn’t happen until Claude Code 2 came out at the end of September and corresponded with Sonnet 4.5. After my ChatGPT 5 I went back to Claude (and Sonnet) and started referring to Claude Sonnet as “Claudia” since she was my pair programmer. I thought about Claudia as a pair, related to her as I would a human pair programmer, and changed my approach. But when I loaded up Claude Code 2 in my terminal (I mean, just type “Claude”) I immediately leveled up again.
So – I’m now at Level 5 in the video game. It’s changed from a game of vibe coding to AI pair programming. And, it’s still fun!