Among startup founders, more than half report burnout. But burnout rarely looks like what leaders expect. It does not look like absenteeism. It looks like presenteeism. People are at their desks. They are in the meetings. But they are operating at a fraction of their capacity. Roadmaps slip. Releases stall. And nobody connects it back to how the work was designed.

I know this firsthand.

I RANG THE BELL AND HAD NOTHING LEFT

In late 2021, I had just helped take Hippo Insurance public on the NYSE. Signing my name on that wall on the walk to ring the bell should have felt like the culmination of years of work. It was. And I was completely spent.

I had not built the right system around myself. I just absorbed more instead of designing for capacity. The combination of personal and professional commitments kept me in a chronic stress state that took nearly eight months to recover from. Leaving Hippo was the cut I had to make. I accepted that I could not heal while still carrying that load.

That period changed how I think about organizational design. It informs everything I advise on today.

IT IS A DESIGN PROBLEM, NOT A PEOPLE PROBLEM

Most startups resist the idea that slowing down could make them faster. Velocity is one of the most important drivers of startup valuation. Burnout quietly erodes it.

When founders default to extreme work models, they burn out their people and undermine their own ability to deliver. The instinct is to call that a people problem. It is a design problem. The question is not whether teams are working hard enough. It is whether the work itself is structured for sustained output or short bursts followed by collapse.

One of my clients, a Series B company, thought they needed to hire two or three more people on the sales team because the VP said the team was drowning. The real problem was that the CEO needed approval for every compensation decision, every deal exception, every contract variance. The VP was bottlenecked waiting for sign-off. The team was actually doing the work. We built a compensation framework and an exception approval matrix. That single design change freed up eight hours a week. No new hire needed. Better design won.

FOUNDERS SET THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

Here is what I would have done differently at Hippo. I would have designed my own role with the same rigor I applied to organizational structure. Capped my hours. Built in recovery windows before they became crises. Protected thinking time. Said no to stretch assignments that looked like growth but were actually just load.

Most critically, I would have modeled sustainable capacity instead of infinite absorption. Founders set the organization's nervous system. When you are in hyperarousal, your whole team lives there too.

The leaders who build companies that last do something counterintuitive. They slow down on purpose. They redesign work to reflect how humans and technology actually operate together. And when something breaks, they go back to the system rather than blaming the person closest to the failure.

If this resonates, I go deeper in the full Fast Company piece here.

Stay human, friends.

~Anna

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