The pitch deck was perfect. The metrics were trending in the right direction. The team was strong. From the outside, Daniel Osei’s startup looked like exactly the kind of company investors dream about.
Inside, he was sleeping four hours a night and had stopped returning his mother’s calls.
“I kept telling myself it was temporary,” says Osei, who founded a B2B logistics software company in 2022. “Just get through this fundraise. Just get through this product launch. Just get through this quarter. But there was always another thing to get through.”
He eventually stepped back from day-to-day operations in late 2024, handing the CEO role to his co-founder. He describes the decision as the hardest and most necessary thing he’s ever done.
The Culture of Endurance
Startup culture has long celebrated the grind. The 80-hour weeks. The sleeping-at-the-office stories. The founders who “bled for their company.” This mythology is so embedded in the ecosystem that many founders internalize it before they’ve even started their first company.
The problem is that the mythology is selective. It celebrates the founders who survived the grind and built something valuable. It doesn’t talk about the ones who burned out, got sick, made terrible decisions under chronic stress, or simply stopped being the person they wanted to be.
“We only hear the success stories,” says Dr. Amara Nwosu, a clinical psychologist who works with entrepreneurs. “And in those stories, the suffering is always reframed as necessary. As the price of success. That framing is genuinely dangerous.”
What the Research Shows
The data on founder mental health is sobering. A widely cited study found that 72% of entrepreneurs reported mental health concerns, compared to 48% of non-entrepreneurs. Founders reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and substance use.
More recent surveys suggest the numbers may be getting worse, not better. The combination of economic uncertainty, rising interest rates, and a more difficult fundraising environment has added new layers of pressure to an already demanding role.
The Specific Pressures of Founding
What makes founding a company particularly hard on mental health isn’t just the workload. It’s the specific nature of the pressures involved.
Identity fusion. For many founders, the company becomes inseparable from their sense of self. When the company struggles, they struggle. When the company fails, it feels like personal failure. This fusion makes it nearly impossible to maintain perspective.
Isolation. Founders often feel they can’t be honest with their team about their fears, their investors about their doubts, or their friends and family about the reality of their situation. The loneliness of the role is profound and underappreciated.
Uncertainty as a constant. Most jobs have some degree of predictability. Founding a company means living with radical uncertainty — about the market, the product, the team, the funding — indefinitely. The human nervous system is not designed for this.
The performance of confidence. Founders are expected to project certainty and optimism to their teams, their investors, and their customers. Performing confidence when you don’t feel it is exhausting. Over time, it can become a kind of dissociation.
What Actually Helps
The founders who navigate this most successfully tend to share a few characteristics.
They have strong peer networks — other founders they can be honest with. Not mentors or advisors, but peers who are in the same situation and can offer genuine solidarity rather than advice.
They maintain at least one domain of life that is genuinely separate from the company. Exercise, family, creative pursuits — something that provides a sense of identity and competence that doesn’t depend on the startup’s performance.
They’ve developed a more nuanced relationship with the mythology of the grind. They work hard, but they’ve stopped treating exhaustion as a virtue.
And many of them have worked with therapists or coaches who specialize in the specific pressures of entrepreneurship.
The Conversation That Needs to Happen
The startup ecosystem is slowly becoming more willing to talk about mental health. High-profile founders have begun sharing their struggles publicly. Some investors have started asking about founder wellbeing as part of their diligence process.
But the cultural change is slow, and the mythology of the grind remains powerful.
“The thing I wish someone had told me,” says Osei, “is that taking care of yourself isn’t a distraction from building the company. It’s a prerequisite for it. You can’t make good decisions when you’re running on empty. You can’t lead people when you’ve stopped being a person.”
Priya Sharma is the Business Correspondent at The Pulse.