Founding a startup is a cognitive sport.

Most founders treat themselves worse than their company treats its infrastructure. Just build things as fast as possible. Don’t worry about what’s going to break until it falls apart. There’s no time. The phrase “tech debt” is a cliché because it is everywhere. “Founder physiological debt” is the same.

I’ve been watching the gap between founders and the help they need for over thirty years. The data underneath it is grim. Founders are 50% more likely to report a mental health condition than the rest of the population. 72% say the job has affected their mental health. Only 23% see anyone about it.

The gap isn’t denial. Most of the founders I know are aware the job is mentally taxing. They just don’t have an obvious place to go. The standard system is fragmented. A therapist who’s never met your doctor. A doctor who’s never seen your sleep data. A nutritionist your assistant booked once. Bookmarked podcasts that you never get to.

Unless a founder prioritizes their mental health, nothing happens.

What founders actually need is what every other high-performance field has had for decades. One team, one plan, and one dataset that looks at the whole person continuously. Elite athletes have it. Special operators have it. Concert musicians have it. But founders never have.

Until now.

I’ve been an investor in Meru Health for a while. Meru is a clinical mental health provider and their approach is rigorous enough to treat severe and treatment-resistant conditions, with fourteen peer-reviewed outcome studies from Stanford, Harvard, and UCSF.

This month they launched Meru Health Advanced, the most complete program they’ve built. It treats mental and physical health as one system.

Technically, Meru Health Advanced is a lifestyle medicine program. Lifestyle medicine is a recognized branch of medicine built around six pillars: nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management, social connection, and the avoidance of risky substances. Most people pursuing it assemble it themselves from six providers across six apps. Meru Health put all six on one team: psychiatrist, therapist, registered dietitian, care navigator, and health coach. One shared plan. A continuous stream of biometric data over six to twelve months.

Here’s how the pillars work.

Nutrition. A registered dietitian who looks at what you actually eat, not a generic plan from a podcast.

Sleep. Continuous biometric monitoring, so the team sees the real picture instead of what you tell them you slept.

Stress management. Evidence-based therapy from a clinician who has already read the other clinicians’ notes.

Physical activity. Tied directly into the rest of the plan, not handed off to a separate trainer.

Social connection. Treated as clinical input, not a soft factor.

Substance use. On the table from the first conversation, not the fifth.

Psychiatry. On the team from day one, because the line between mental and physical performance is fictional, and the founders who pretend otherwise pay for it later.

One team. One plan. One dataset. Six pillars. Six to twelve months. Run by clinicians who have done this for forty-five thousand patients. Available on a self-pay basis.

Meru Advanced is the first thing I’ve seen that lets a founder run themselves the way they’d address key business issues: deliberately, with data, and with a team paid to make them better at their job.

If you’re a founder, this is worth your money. Start here, or email Meru and tell them that Brad sent you.

Disclosure: I’m an investor in Meru Health.

We just announced our investment in Meru Health. If you recognize Meru Health, it’s because I wrote about it in January as part of my explanation of Freestyle’s Leadership on Mental Health. I highlighted what Josh Felser and his team at Freestyle were doing, which included underwriting 100% of the cost for two programs – Meru Health and Hoffman Institute, for all of their founders.

We got to know Kristian Ranta and his team at Meru Health through Josh. Freestyle is one of our 32 partner funds (where we are LPs) and most of our new direct investing activity is in conjunction with one of our partner funds.

Forbes wrote a detailed profile of the company and the investment in Foundry Group And Slack Are Backing A Virtual Therapy Startup That Raised $8.1 Million and we are excited to be part of Meru Health.

Over the past two months, I’ve been asked almost daily if “VCs are investing during the Covid crisis.” Generic questions like this are impossible to answer, as “VCs” are not a singular archetype (there are many types of VCs with different strategies, goals, personalities, and constraints.) So, I answer it from the frame of reference of what we are doing at Foundry Group.

In general, I think the best answers are examples.

For me, the Covid crisis started on March 11th. This was the first day I worked from home and haven’t left my house since then. We were planning to have our CEO Summit in Boulder on March 12th and 13th but cancelled it on March 9th. My parents were coming to Boulder on March 12th for a long weekend and to celebrate my dad’s 82nd birthday. My brother Daniel and I decided to cancel their trip and told them the night of March 11th. Bryan Leech at iBotta hosted the first “Denver Business Leaders” call the morning of March 11th. So, when I look back and mark this moment in history, it started for me on March 11th.

Since then, Foundry Group has closed three new investments.

• Fritz.Ai (partner fund: Uncork): March 25th
• Code Climate (partner fund: USV): May 11th
• Meru Health (partner fund: Freestyle): May 13th

We generally make about 10 new investments a year. While it’s not spaced out monthly (we don’t try to manage timing that granularly), if you look back to when we started Foundry Group in 2007 we’ve done a maximum of 14 new investments in a year and a minimum of 8 new investments.

When asked if we are investing, I answer “yes – on the same pace as we always have.” We have a deeply held belief that time diversity in investing matters, and the key is to keep the same pace of new investments no matter what is going on in the macro.