Health concerns force startup boards, investors to press for work-life balance

From investors and board members to co-founders, everyone is now nudging the top deck to take some time to reset and rewind. After the funding winter, when there is constant pressure for growth, profitability, low funding, and public listing, these experts told Mint that it is now increasingly important for founders to strike a balance between work and play.

“The surge in health issues among founders is alarming. Yes, their jobs are demanding, and they push themselves hard. However, founders must realize they’re not invincible—burnout benefits no one,” said Kunal Bahl, co-founder of Titan Capital and Snapdeal. Titan Capital has invested in companies such as Dealshare, Mamaearth, Ofbusiness, Ola, Razorpay, and Urban Company, among others.

Marathon not sprint

According to Bahl, he advises his portfolio founders to prioritize their health. “Building sustainable businesses is a marathon and not a sprint, and hence leaders must prioritize their health as much as pursuing business milestones.”

Last year, in a social media post, Vidit Aatrey, the cofounder and CEO of Meesho, the social commerce startup, highlighted how his board member asked him to ensure a healthy work-life balance for his team. “Take care of your people. Seeing many people including CXOs getting burnt out and going on sabbaticals across companies. Lofty profitability goals have created massive stress across,” Aatrey’s post said quoting the board member.

This post from Aatrey highlights the high-burn environment that the startup founders, CXOs and the investors work under. In December, Greek yogurt brand Epigamia’s founder Rohan Mirchandani succumbed to a massive heart attack. Before that Rohan Malhotra of Good Capital passed away after a heart attack in October. In August 2023, omnichannel furniture startup Pepperfry’s cofounder Ambareesh Murty passed away in his hotel room in Leh due to a heart failure. He was in Leh with his company’s top deck for an offsite.

High-stress jobs

And they are not alone. The hallowed India Inc. is full of examples where the high stress jobs have consumed employees and top managers equally.

“Startup founders are more susceptible to pressure than an IT or bank employee because of the uncertainty hovering around their profession. For founders, funding is a matter of survival of their businesses and hence the risk they take is higher than their peer group working in other industries. Many have started taking some time out to pursue a hobby, but more are seeking therapy,” says Manoj Sharma, coordinator of the Service for Healthy Use of Technology clinic (SHUT clinic), at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (Nimhans) in Bengaluru, the startup capital of India.

While most founders experience stress, some have their own ways of dealing with it and some seek refuge in consulting their boards, and early investors. Most often, they also are dealing with family and personal issues which they have no one to share with, investors said. The stigma attached to mental health is here to stay and most founders and investors hesitate to talk about it.

Highlighting one such no-go area, Aparna Mittal, founder for Samāna Centre for Gender, Policy and Law said though investors are very thorough about their financial due diligence, they do not ask about the personal health of the founders. “Personal data of this kind will lead to breach of privacy. While there are psychometric tests to know more about the personalities of the founders, these are typically not used either for privacy concerns,” she added.

But things are now changing.

Best practices

From arranging offsites to ensuring founders take mandatory leaves, board members and investors are insisting on best practices not just for employees but also for the founders. “To be honest, a board meeting wants to cut to the chase, set tough goals and stretch targets. We would applaud hard work and long nights, but now we ask founders to slow down. To sleep, spend time with family and on themselves. We also advise them to invest in a good bed, good air circulation in office, healthy food, and reducing commute times, if possible,” said Anand Lunia, founder of India Quotient, an early-stage venture capital firm that has invested in marquee companies such as Sharechat and Lendingkart among others.

These investors have a simple mantra for founders: Take care of yourself. Eat, travel, live comfortably. Take time off. Spend an hour a day on yourself. Take secondary exits when feasible. Without fear of being judged.

“I won’t say it is a topic in all board meetings, but we try to cover in all personal conversations,” Lunia added.

And founders, too, now want to build routines to help them reset and rewind.

Unwind for health

For Jaydeep Barman, the co-founder and CEO of Rebel Foods, unwinding is a daily necessity. Apart from his ritual run each morning, Barman goes mountaineering once a year to reset and rewind. “I have made it a point that every year I would go away for 15 to 20 days and be in the mountains. And that has been a game changer for me. It’s meditative, it’s physical work, and what happens is because I must go for a climb or a trek once a year, I am practising throughout the year. So, six days a week, I’m running in the morning and doing some strength exercise, etc.,” he said adding that it has brought a certain amount of calmness in his life, like the morning run.

“It’s almost meditative for me.” Rebel Foods closed one of the largest funding rounds of 2024, where it mopped up more than $250 million from investors such as Temasek and KKR, and is likely to head for a public listing within the next 24 months.

Ankur Pahwa, managing partner, Peer Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm, said, “Unfortunately, founders have been convinced that they are superbeings who can take anything that comes their way, but this is a lie. Creating something shouldn’t have to come at the price of losing your true self, so it’s worth slowing down to speed up.”

At the end of the day, it’s the ‘joy’ and the ‘why’ of building that’s paramount, Pahwa added, “We have to collectively ensure, we don’t strip founders of their ‘why’ and hence steady and consistent acceleration on the path of ‘why’ always goes far.

Often, young founders of startups do not have 9-5 jobs and often work with little time for relaxation and proper sleep, doctors advise regular, moderate-intensity exercise and good sleep rather than intense workouts. “Intense exercise combined with sleep deprivation can release inflammatory chemicals like cytokines, which can rupture fatty (atherosclerotic) plaques lining the coronary arteries. This can lead to clot formation clogging the coronary arteries causing heart attacks,” warns Dr Akshay K. Mehta, an interventional cardiologist at Nanavati Max Hospital in Mumbai.