How many hours should founders work? My story
Chronic pain, burnout, and healing
A few months ago, I posted a poll in YCombinator’s internal forum: “How many hours do founders work?” This prompted a rich discussion with a ton of helpful comments shared from the YC community. Ultimately hours worked trades off against the risk of burnout, and it’s hard in the day-to-day to see whether your own choices are heading you down that path. I certainly didn’t think mine were. I shared several Substack posts on this topic and in those was light on details about my own burnout experience. However, I always find I value reading the personal stories of other founders who have walked the path before me, and in that spirit I’ll share my own experience of chronic pain, burnout, and healing in case it’s helpful for others.
One of the YC-isms that stuck with me from my time during the batch was: “There are only two reasons companies fail: they run out of money or the founders give up.” I was determined not to fail - I had always succeeded in my life - and this founder journey would be no different. I worked reasonable hours as a founder: fewer hours in a week sitting at my desk than when I had been a management consultant, but many more hours than I did during my years at Meta. And my brain did critical processing when I was asleep or “not working” - many creative insights would come through at those times when I wasn’t trying to bang out another email. I maintained healthy habits - running every work day during the pandemic, strength training, healthy eating, regular bedtimes. For the most part, I’d take the weekends off except during high crunch times like fundraising. I was often too exhausted to do anything in the evening during the workweek except flop around my house with my partner, but I’d prioritize time with friends on the weekends.
I thought I was doing a good job balancing it all. I never felt the intense stress of the founder journey or experienced the extreme stress symptoms I had heard of from other founders - waking up with night sweats, clumps of hair loss, or panic attacks. For the vast majority of the time I was running my company, I really enjoyed it. It was my favorite job I’d ever had. Intense, challenging, and it pushed me to my limit, but in a way that I enjoyed. It reminded me of my time at MIT - hard, but doable. I had the benefit of working on a problem that was near and dear to my heart, serving a community I encountered in my day-to-day life on a regular basis who would recognize me and reiterate how valuable this thing was that we were building, how life-changing it was.
And yet, slowly over time, I had had recurrent chronic pain in the right shoulder of my back, right along my spine. This wasn’t a surprise to me - I have had severe scoliosis with three curves in my spine since childhood, and my prognosis was that they would likely worsen over time with gravity. As the company progressed, my pain got worse. In the early days it would be mild; sometimes I’d go to my partner and ask for a massage, and then it would feel better. Four years in, it was so severe I’d need to peel myself away from my computer to lie down and rest, and nothing would relieve it. It was as though my pain was telling me “chill the fuck out and take a goddamn break.” At least one day a week, my pain would tip into this level, and I’d be out for the rest of the day, often lying on the couch in tears.
I was a solo founder. I didn’t think I could run a company while taking off half a day a week. And yet I didn’t know what to do. We hadn’t run out of money, and I wasn’t ready to “give up.” We had built a product people loved, we had figured out monetization, and the company was doing better than it ever had. But I knew I needed to take time to focus on my health, and I knew I couldn’t run the company while doing it.
At exactly the right moment, a women applied to a marketing executive role we had open who was heads and shoulders above the other candidates. As I looked at her resume, I realized she was qualified to run the company I had built. Her background was perfect for the gaps we had, and I felt I could teach her the rest. Within weeks, she was the CEO of Plura. A few weeks after that, I headed to the Amazon jungle in search of answers to my chronic pain from indigenous plant medicine (western medicine had only turned up more pain).
I’m now a year out from my role shift from CEO to Chair of the Board and I can happily report that I’m 98% free from pain. I healed my pain through a modality called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (a mindfulness-based approach to relieving the symptoms I was experiencing) and substantial stress reduction from no longer running my company day-to-day. I learned so much along my journey; I’ll share a few notes here in case they are helpful to others experiencing their own chronic symptoms:
Chronic symptoms, including chronic pain, often rear their ugly heads during times of heightened or prolonged stress. (Pandemic anyone?)
They often have an underlying explainable cause, so you attribute the pain to the initial injury or “cause” even if that injury has healed or nothing has changed. (For me, scoliosis)
To heal from chronic symptoms, you need to first believe - truly believe - that your pain is “neuroplastic.” “Neuroplastic” means that although there may be an underlying “cause”, the pain is errant signals sending you a danger message when your body is not actually in danger. (My time in the Amazon jungle helped me with this; away from the company and all the sensory overload and stresses of our modern world, I had zero pain for two weeks straight despite sleeping on the worst beds of my life. Coming back from that experience, I knew my pain was not structural, it was created in my brain.)
It is possible to “retrain your brain” to rewire these errants pathways via mindfulness / meditation (I used a modality called Pain Reprocessing Therapy)
The book that changed my life is called The Way Out by Alan Gordon. It outlines Pain Reprocessing Therapy. By the time I was done reading it, half my pain was gone. And the rest was gone after working with a Pain Reprocessing coach for a few weeks. I found this so helpful that I’m planning to complete the Pain Reprocessing Therapy training so I can help other founders as part of my founder coaching practice.
As I build my next business, I think about what I learned the first time around, and I try to do things differently. I’ve spent a lot of time in the year since I left reflecting on what long-term health and balance look like for me, and what taking a more holistic look at my life as a human looks like. I want to be able to build the next thing for ten years, not four. For four years I could “skimp” on social plans, delay starting a family, take limited vacation and time off, and run on “hot” 90% of the time. I learned I can’t do that for ten years straight. And that’s another YC-ism - it takes a decade to build a lasting, incredible company, so we need to be thinking in terms of habits that support that timescale. If we don’t we’ll never achieve the ambitions we have in front of us.
My own experience of burnout taught me a valuable (and painful!) lesson: honor my body, rest when I need to, and build sustainably, whatever that looks like for you. I’ve learned to listen to my body and build my own way. When I support founders as their coach, I invite them to find whatever this looks like for them, so that they can achieve their ten-year vision.
I have only a few spots left in my coaching practice. I work with top decile post-series A founders who want to understand their underlying emotional and behavioral patterning in order to grow themselves and their companies. I only work with folks who are introspective, caring, and disciplined. If this sounds like you or someone you know, reach out via lunarayemail@gmail.com.