Mistake #9: I Forgot to Take Care of the Founder
This is the ninth post in a series about the mistakes I made starting up, and what I’d tell myself if I could go back.
I was 32 when I started Hyperleap.
Young enough to feel invincible. Old enough to know better. I chose the first one.
The startup consumed everything. Long hours, bad food, too much caffeine, no physical activity, and the particular kind of mental load that comes from carrying a company in your head at all times. I told myself this was what building looked like. That this was the price. That I would course-correct once things stabilized.
Things do not stabilize. You just get used to running on empty.
What a Year of This Looked Like
Within twelve months of starting, both my physical and mental health had quietly deteriorated.
I say quietly because it did not happen dramatically. There was no single moment of collapse. It was more like a slow dimming. Energy levels that used to recover overnight stopped recovering. Thoughts that used to feel clear started feeling heavy. The work that used to feel exciting started feeling like something I was pushing through rather than something I was drawn toward.
I was still showing up. Still building. Still doing all the things a founder is supposed to do.
But I was not really there.
The caffeine kept the machine running. The output kept coming. From the outside, nothing looked broken. From the inside, I was running a company on fumes and telling myself it was fuel.
The Morning It Became Clear
It was not a crisis that changed things. No health scare, no intervention, no external event that forced a reckoning.
One morning I just woke up and had a thought so simple it should not have taken a year to arrive: this is not me.
Not the startup. Not the work. Me. The person doing this. The person my kids would grow up knowing. The person my family needed to be present, not just physically in the room but actually there.
I thought about my two kids. About what it would mean to build something and not be there for them in any meaningful sense. About what kind of example I was setting, not intentionally but just by how I was living. About the version of myself I had been before the startup consumed everything and whether that person was still accessible.
Nothing we build matters if our mind is not in our control. That was the realization. Not that the startup was wrong, or that the work was wrong. That I had put the startup first in a way that had quietly cost me the thing that made everything else possible.
Four Days Without a Phone
I had come across Sadhguru and the Inner Engineering program. I decided to go for the retreat.
Four days. No phone. No calls. No updates from the team. No checking in on anything. Completely switched off from the startup and everything around it.
This was harder than it sounds. A founder who has built their identity around being available, around being the person who keeps things moving, around the idea that the company needs them at all times, does not easily let go of that.
What Inner Engineering gave me was not a philosophy or a set of rules. It was a direct experience of what it feels like when your mind is actually under your control. When the noise quiets. When the compulsive loop of thoughts about the business, the team, the metrics, the problems, loses its grip.
I came back after four days a different person. Not because the startup had changed. Not because any of the problems had been solved. Because I had changed. My relationship to the work had changed. My relationship to my own mind had changed.
What Changed After
The shift happened in a sequence I did not expect.
First, mental. The clarity that came from those four days did not fade when I returned. I had tools now. A practice. A different relationship with my own thoughts. The noise was still there, the startup is always generating noise, but I was no longer inside it. I could observe it rather than just react to it.
Then, physical. Once the mental load lifted enough to be managed rather than just endured, I had energy for the body. Movement came back. Food choices improved. Sleep improved. The caffeine that had been propping everything up became unnecessary, or at least optional rather than essential.
And then, gradually, the work itself improved. Not because I was working more hours. Because I was more present in the hours I was working. The decisions were cleaner. The conversations were better. The things that used to spiral into anxiety had somewhere to land before they became reactions.
Priorities became obvious in a way they had not been before. Not as a framework or a set of rules but as something felt. Family first. Health as the foundation that makes everything else possible. The startup as important, deeply important, but not as the thing that everything else is sacrificed for.
What I Got Wrong About Startup Culture
There is a version of founder culture that treats self-neglect as a badge. The hours, the grind, the sacrifice, the sleep deprivation worn almost proudly as evidence of commitment.
I absorbed some of that. Not from any one source, just from the general atmosphere of what it looks like to build something. The images, the stories, the posts from founders who seemed to live entirely for the company.
What that culture does not show is the cost. Not the cost to the company, although there is one. The cost to the person. The slow erosion of the things that make you a full human being rather than just a productivity machine with a company registered to their name.
A founder who is not well cannot make good decisions. Cannot be fully present for the team. Cannot think clearly about the things that matter. Cannot be there for the people who need them outside the company.
You are not a resource to be optimized. You are a person. The company depends on that person being okay.
What I’d Tell Myself Now
Your health is not a cost of building. It is a condition for it. Not a nice-to-have. Not something to return to once things settle. The foundation that everything else sits on. Without it, the building is on sand.
The startup will always feel urgent. Your body and mind will give you quiet signals before they give you loud ones. Pay attention to the quiet ones. By the time the loud ones arrive, a lot of ground has been lost.
Switching off is not weakness. It is maintenance. The four days I spent at the retreat felt like a luxury I could not afford. They were the most leveraged four days I spent in that entire year. Coming back reset was worth more than four days of grinding through the fog.
Find a practice that gives you access to your own mind. Not a productivity system. Not a time management framework. Something that addresses the actual source of the noise. For me it was Inner Engineering. For others it is something else. The specific practice matters less than having one.
Your kids will not remember your company’s growth metrics. They will remember whether you were present. Whether you were well. Whether the person who came home was actually home. That is the work that does not go in any investor update, and it is the work that matters most.
Eight Years Later
Health is non-negotiable now. Not something I manage around the startup but something I protect before everything else.
The practice Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering gave me has stayed. The relationship with my own mind is different. The priorities are clear in a way they were not at 32, not because I am smarter now, but because I have lived the cost of getting them wrong.
The startup is still here. So am I. And being here, actually here, for the company and for the people I love, turned out to require the same thing.
Taking care of the founder.
The bottom line: Health is the first thing founders deprioritize and the most expensive thing to lose. Physical and mental neglect do not announce themselves dramatically. They compound quietly until the person running the company is no longer really running it. Whatever the practice is, find it early. The four days I spent completely switched off changed more than the months of grinding that preceded them.
Have you had a moment where you realized something had to change? I’d genuinely like to hear.
I’m Gopi Krishna, founder of Hyperleap AI, where we build enterprise-grade conversational AI for small and medium sized businesses across the world. This is part of an ongoing series on the mistakes I made in my first years as a founder, written for anyone thinking about starting something of their own. Subscribe to Second Order AI on Substack to follow along.