Why Founders Are Breaking... ...and How We Can Build a Healthier Start-up System

When my last start-up collapsed, I remember the quiet more than the noise. My endless pinging Slack and WhatsApp channels went still, investor and creditor emails stopped, and the pressure to constantly be resilient and on it, gave way to the reality of exhaustion. What struck me most wasn't that we'd failed, it was how familiar that feeling was to every founder I spoke to afterwards. Almost all of them had been there too, even the ones that seemed to be parading success, too many were silently carrying the weight of a system that makes burnout feel like a badge of honour.

We talk a lot about innovation in this country, but much less about the human cost of it. According to research by Startup Snapshot, 72% of founders report struggling with their mental health; a separate study by Balderton Capital found that nearly half of UK founders experience burnout at some point in their journey. Yet the pressure to chase outsized growth and to become the next "unicorn", continues to dominate how success is measured. There are plenty of young 'bucks' willing to chase the unicorn mantle and pay the price of adopting the toxic pressures of the latest 996 type fad (banned in China in 2021 by the way) as if working every hour God sends is somehow proof of excellence, commitment and a recipe for success. But is this approach by founders or the organisations that profess to support them, really going to grow our entrepreneurial ecosystem at a pace that will survive?

The tension between investor expectations and founder sustainability isn't new, but it's becoming existential. Founders are expected to grow fast, raise faster, and exit faster still, every newbie founder is immediately asking where can I get funding, as opposed to how do I build revenue. And this is often in markets that reward storytelling and glossy decks over substance. Of course that model has created a handful of global success stories, but it's also left behind thousands of entrepreneurs who could have built strong, enduring businesses if the incentives were different and their support was real. It's time we stop telling founders to be more resilient and start fixing the system that keeps breaking them. So here is how I think we could be doing this.

1. Redefine success beyond the exit
The UK start-up ecosystem is still hooked on a narrative imported from Silicon Valley, one where success equals exponential growth, venture funding, and an eventual exit. But that model fits only a fraction of businesses. In reality, just 1 in 10 UK start-ups ever achieve a high-value exit. The rest, the local tech firms, shop keepers, service providers, creatives, agencies or community-focused innovators are quietly generating jobs, paying taxes, and solving real problems. We need a broader definition of success: one that values longevity, local impact, and founder wellbeing alongside financial return. Imagine if founders were celebrated not for how much they raised, but for how many people they sustained, including themselves.

2. Reform funding incentives
Investors often talk about "founder-friendly" capital, but the structure of most funding including the UK grant system, still rewards speed over substance or experimentation over solid foundations. Venture models expect ten-fold returns within a decade, forcing an artificial growth curve and accelerated spend pressures on companies that might otherwise thrive at a steadier pace. What if we shifted the metrics? Funds could experiment with patient capital structures - tying returns to revenue stability or founder retention rather than sheer valuation on future potential. Government schemes like SEIS and EIS could evolve to recognise sustainable growth as a qualifying outcome. And grant bodies could require wellbeing and sustainability metrics alongside financial milestones. A truly healthy ecosystem wouldn't just seed innovation - it would protect it long enough to mature and encourage UK founders to stay here rather than moving elsewhere to get elusive Seed funding or beyond, just when they have proven product market fit and started to generate revenue..

3. Make founder wellbeing a board-level KPI
It's extraordinary that in 2025 we still treat mental health as a personal issue rather than a business one. Burnout doesn't just cost founders their wellbeing; it destabilises teams, product pipelines, and investor portfolios. Every founder who quietly crashes takes a slice of innovation with them.

Wellbeing should be part of governance - just as ESG and DEI are. Accelerators and VCs could implement "founder health audits," offer mental-health stipends, or require co-founders to take rest periods post-funding. A resilient business begins with a resilient founder, but resilience isn't about endurance - it's about support.

4. Democratise access to expertise
One of the most practical reforms we can make is to reduce isolation by opening access to fractional expertise. Most founders can't afford a full-time CMO, CFO, or compliance lead, they can't even afford one 3 days a week, yet these are exactly the roles that prevent early mistakes and burnout. Shared networks - where founders can access top-tier experts on flexible terms - offer a path forward.

Fractional models turn knowledge into infrastructure. They spread cost, speed up learning, and stop founders from trying to do everything themselves. Where is the accreditation in this space, whilst it floods with ex-corporate managers, masquerading as experts and positioning themselves as fractional assistance for founders when they have no knowledge of the founder/start-up or even scale up space? And how can the UK Ecosystem help founders continue to find quality support once they graduate from the free mentors, who are kindly 'giving back' whilst founders learn how to raise funding in the hundreds of investment prep based incubators and accelerators we have in this country?

We have a culture of disregard for expertise. Our over 50yr olds, our real statesmen and women of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, are cast aside by many start ups, negating their expertise, and experience. We only seem to value those who have made vast amounts of money, as if they are the only ones who know how to build a business. We don't fund our real entrepreneurial statespeople, we don't employ them or support them very well, and we certainly don't respect them as founders or experts.

We don't need every start-up to reinvent governance, marketing, or HR from scratch. We just need to connect founders with the people who already know how to build a start up. We need to stop abandoning founders once they leave the coddling of an accelerator. And we need to stop abandoning our experienced founders once they leave start-up or scale-up life.

5. Build an empathy-based ecosystem
Finally, we need a cultural reset. For all the talk of community, start-up culture still glorifies the exceptional - the unicorn, the headline round, the heroic comeback. What's missing is space for honesty: the messy middle, the years when growth is slow and belief wavers. If investors, media and founders themselves began sharing what didn't work as openly as they share wins, we could normalise failure as part of innovation, not the end of it. In countries like Finland and Denmark, "failure conferences" are mainstream; they attract policy makers and investors who want to learn from what went wrong. The UK could do the same - embracing recovery, not punishment, as part of entrepreneurship's natural cycle.

6. Recognise founder wellbeing as national economic policy
A potential solution is right in front of us, if we look to other countries that have already started to hardwire founder sustainability into their innovation frameworks. Finland funds mental-health and burnout prevention for entrepreneurs through its regional business centres; Denmark's Growth Fund provides low-interest loans for second-time founders; and Singapore's Startup SG Founder scheme subsidises mentoring and capability-building, not just capital. The UK, by contrast, has no co-ordinated policy for founder wellbeing or recovery. Innovate UK, DSIT and local Growth Hubs could change that - by treating founders as critical national assets, not expendable resources. Lets face it our small businesses make up the vast majority of the UK economy, and each of those is led by a founder who put everything on the line to set up and build their business. If the government can measure carbon footprint and DEI in grants, it can measure founder health too.

Rebuilding from the inside out
When I speak to founders today, whether that's in one of my vast network of WhatsApp groups, networking events, or simply talking about my book on LinkedIn, I hear the same phrase over and over: "I thought it was just me." It never is. The exhaustion so many of us feel isn't a personal flaw - it's a design flaw in the system we're building within. If we want innovation that lasts, whether this is in the tech space, retail, fashion, farming or aviation we need to stop treating founders as disposable. That means changing how we fund, how we measure success, and how we care for the people doing the building. Because in the end, the health of our startup ecosystem won't be defined by how many unicorns we create - but by how many founders we keep standing.