EXHAUSTION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

For the past 5 years, when people ask me how I am doing, my standard response has been “I’m exhausted.” And it’s true. As an entrepreneur and business owner managing multiple initiatives, rest and recovery time has been severely lacking.

Thinking about this earlier this morning—the constant fatigue, the continual movement from country to country, and the fragmentation of each day into tens or hundreds of decisions and communications—got me thinking about three attributes any startup founder will need to deal with during his or her career.

1.     Exhaustion (and Recovery)

One thing few MBA courses or seminars will teach is the constant background of exhaustion. The idea of work-life balance when running a startup is usually theoretical, if not entirely fictional, for most startups and scaleups, most of the time.

Founders and business owners need to be ready for 6+ days a week, 10-12 hours per day. In China, the “996” work culture has emerged to describe this: from 09:00 am to 09:00 pm, 6 days a week.

But the real problem is that work never leaves you. You are constantly thinking about the next steps, past decisions, or cash flow and runway. Your messages are incoming 24/7.

It’s the literal parable of a hamster, running endless circles on a wheel. And if you have a family, this challenge multiplies.

So, keep in mind that if you do set off on an entrepreneurial journey, trying to balance exhaustion and recovery are no small matters. And if you are considering investing in a startup or founder team, ensuring collective founder health and avoiding burnout over time is critical.

2.     Consistent Effort over Time

The natural corollary to working under chaotic conditions and exhaustion is the necessity to ensure consistent effort over time. Founders often succumb to the agile project management format: highly intense sprints towards a rapidly emerging set of product features or services.

The problem is when we overstretch and then stop. Intense periods of high effort are followed by lethargic periods of stasis or contemplation.

Part of this is necessary and is likely an unconscious fatigue balancing effort. Part of this is trying to absorb and communicate the genius of short-term flow state to the rest of the team.

Achieving consistent effort over time means structuring your work to ensure what lean management refers to as takt times: the necessary time needed to complete a task professionally without unbalancing the work schedule or effort while leaving enough time for necessary adjustments.

And in a startup, remember that in addition to your MVP and traction, you need to ensure that the often frustrating work of accounting, compliance, contracting and HR is critical to assure real development over time. Especially when funding rounds and due diligence start.

3.     Avoid Mistakes / Make Grounded Decisions / Take Nothing for Granted

Most failures are not caused by unforeseeable disasters. They are caused by obvious errors executed under fatigue or under deliberate cognitive error.

When you are tired, when you are enthusiastic, when you are invested in your own creation, you tend to make decisions because you want to make them, not because you have truly understood the scope of your decision.

As a result, a lot of mistakes get made. I would estimate that at least 50% of our success to date comes from avoiding predictable mistakes.

Given this reality, spend some time thinking how you will make decisions in your company or among your founders.

Remember that your job is not to be friends with anyone. You can be friendly, but at the end of the day, the objective mutual and collective self-interest of your company must prevail.

This means:

• Always having a plan A, B and C, because plans do go wrong;

• Looking at management as a data-driven sequence of actions;

• Always asking “why” and “what if” when planning your corporate decisions and future;

• Understanding the level of risk and what could go wrong, or right;

• Perhaps not hiring family members, no matter what their apparent qualifications;

• Checking and double checking all vendor offers and insisting on contractual revisions;

• Recording decisions, monitoring outcomes, and improving how decisions are made.

All of this is core management. And sadly, in a rapidly-growing team of exhausted founders, this is what typically goes wrong.

As founders, our goal is not to avoid exhaustion. Our goal is to build systems that survive it.

The journey continues.

Onwards.