APPROACH

Founder and stakeholder relationships shape both venture outcomes and personal wellbeing. Yet they’re often deprioritized in favor of what feels more urgent...

...until it’s too late. 

We take a preventative, research-informed approach to relational health inside ventures that focuses on:

  • Practices that enable adaptivity
  • Boundaries that ensure integrity
  • And acceptance of truth as it presents itself in various phases of the venture. You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. 

For this we:

  • Work both with individual and collective development to enable personal, interpersonal, and venture-level success.
  • Tend to each individual’s growth as carefully as we tend to the whole.
  • View a startup as a living, evolving organism, not a mechanical system.
  • Embrace the discovery and actualization of each part of that organism.
  • Cultivate truthfulness about what is needed for individual and collective growth.
  • Teach team members how to have difficult, possibly vulnerable conversations about what they truly want, need, and can offer

Startup culture ≠ burnout culture.

Startup culture doesn’t have to mean burnout, isolation, and broken relationships — but too often, it does. Hustle is glorified, while the human cost is ignored, despite clear evidence.

Nearly 88% of founders experience mental health challenges, including anxiety, chronic stress, and burnout.* Up to 72% say entrepreneurship has harmed their mental health**, yet most don’t seek support. Many even hide their struggles from co-founders, reinforcing a culture of silence and isolation.

This isn’t just a personal issue — it’s a venture risk. Poor team dynamics and co-founder conflict are among the leading causes of startup failure. Stress, misalignment, and unresolved tension quietly erode both people and performance.

That’s why we take a preventative, research-informed approach. Culture starts on day one — long before product-market fit — and it shapes how founders show up, stay well, and succeed.

*Source: https://founderreports.com/entrepreneur-mental-health-statistics/
Sample size: 227 entrepreneurs from 46 countries

**Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2023/04/29/startup-founders-report-entrepreneurship-is-taking-a-toll-on-their-mental-health/
https://www.startupsnapshot.com/research/the-untold-toll-the-impact-of-stress-on-the-well-being-of-startup-founders-and-ceos/
Sample size: 400 early-stage startup founders