CONTACT

APPROACH

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

...until it’s too late. 

That’s why we take a practice-based approach, focused on developing the communication skills, self-knowledge and truthfulness foundational to relational health and venture success including:

  • 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. 

We’re not a checklist, or a one-off workshop to tick an HR box.

You are a living system, and so is our approach.

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

  • Teams often overlook early indicators that something is off. 
  • The resulting unattended ‘relationship debris’ then accumulates until it has stacked so high that it becomes a problem that can no longer be ignored.
  • At that point, the accumulation of the debris is often weighed against the founder(s) continuing within the initiative. Because the relational skills haven't been practiced along the way, these founders also find themselves without the ability to clean it up (while their runway starts to run out).
  • To many former founders, this process only becomes obvious after the fact.

Early indicators

Continuing with the venture

Relationship debris

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