 Hello, everyone. I'll start with a story. Almost exactly three years ago, I was living in San Francisco. We were taking part in 500 startups, which is a well-known startup accelerator. And to the outside world, I was living the dream. I was young, healthy, living in SF, and working on a company that I was truly passionate about. But on the inside, all I kept thinking was, this can't go on like this. This has got to change. Because how we were working wasn't really working, to be honest. We got up every morning around 6 AM. Then we had a check-in with the team in Finland at 7 AM. And then we kept grinding through the workday until we went to sleep around 11 or 12 in the night. And then we kept repeating from day until the next day. And to top it off, I had recently found out that I was pregnant with my first child. But that was also probably what kept me from burning out. Because when I returned from SF, I was forced to redesign my work and life routines. This is not an unusual or original story in any way. But it's usually a story that gets lost in the startup hype. So at the beginning of this year, when the Slush team went around asking people, what should we talk about at Slush? One of the most famous angel investors in Finland actually said that a number of startup founders had approached him recently, talking about how they were either exhausted, almost burnt out, or already burnt out. So today, at the heart of startup hype, that's exactly what we're going to talk about. And with Tommy and James, we've agreed on two guiding words for this discussion. One is honesty. We'll talk openly about our experiences. And the other is actionability. So we'll try not to get bogged down in the problem and the challenges, but share some of our experiences and the concrete solutions. So Tommy, I'll start with you. You have a similar experience to me. Indeed. Could you share that a bit? Yeah, for me, it started when we scaled up, also as you guys did. And we had worked in our company between Asia. We had some Mexican also. So we were running a quite wide span of hours in up. And as a CEO and founder, you constantly want to please everyone. So you want to please your customers and you want to please the employees, et cetera. And for me, the symptoms started as a physical symptom. So I was, in addition to running the startups, I got this great idea a couple of years ago to start training for Ironman competitions because early stage startup was obviously not enough. So it became quite tough. And I started getting horrible pains in my lower back and lower abdomen. And I thought it was related to training. So I started going to the doctors and we did all sorts of tests, everything you can do from blood to ultrasounds. And there was nothing wrong with me. But I felt pretty bad. And I kept going for a while doing that in extreme pain and by popping pills and trying to just move along because it'll get easier soon. But it doesn't. And it ended up with me then actually talking to a psychiatrist who said that maybe you should slow down a bit. So I slowed down. And I'm not currently doing any startup stuff except talking about how it is in the startups. I can relate with that. James, you research human performance for a living. What happens in the brains of people like Tommy and me when we work too much? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the literature would suggest that founders, entrepreneurs are statistically more likely to burn out or at a greater risk of burnout. And there seems to be a number of factors that predict that. I think one of the big ones is the passion. Actually, startup founders entrepreneurs are passionate. But that can be a double-edged sword. It can be a blessing. And it can be a curse as well. I think the second thing is that the startup founders entrepreneurs operate in an environment with a high degree of uncertainty. I think the third thing is that either in reality or perception, they feel like often they're operating without a safety net. And then finally, sometimes they can experience a degree of social isolation because of the pressures of working grinding, as you said, all the time. And in our brain, this can set off a cascade of outcomes. So we see too much stress. We see low positive mood. And that can start to actually interfere with certain cognitive capabilities, and one in particular called response inhibition. You can basically think about response inhibition like impulse control. So we work too much. We're too stressed. We don't sleep enough. Impulse control is reduced. But then unfortunately, that low impulse control actually makes it more likely that we'll do the things that reduce our impulse control even more. So when we finally get home from the mammoth day in the office and we sit in a seat and maybe we start watching Netflix because our impulse control is so low, it's not just one episode of whatever we're watching on Netflix that day. It's two, three, four. You've lost another two hours of sleep and then the cycle continues. And we get caught in these vicious spirals. And if we look at the bigger picture, this isn't obviously anything that's unique to entrepreneurs. There are some numbers that show that 40% of the workforce feel exhausted. So our companies want us to be innovative and creative and productive when really most of us would just like to take a nap, right? But like you said, James, passion is actually shown to be one of the reasons that entrepreneurs are in a very high risk of burnout. And it's also a specific type of passion. It's an obsessive passion. An obsessive passion is when we identify too much with our work. We define our identity through what we do and not who we really are. It's when we feel the urge, like a really strong compulsion to work 24-7, we sacrifice everything else for work. And actually what I find that a lot of our clients and a lot of entrepreneurs says that work is like an addiction. It's almost like heroin. They have to get their fix, right? And sadly, I can relate to that. But I prefer to think of it like chocolate. A moderate amount is OK. But go overboard and it becomes unhealthy. Can you sort of recognize yourself in that not very flattering image of an addict? Yeah, definitely. And it's like social media in a bit. It's like these micro rewards you get when you help your customers. So not a problem. I mean, we had calls from Malaysia, like 12 o'clock in the night sending us to fix some bugs. And I just jump out of bed and like, let's fix this. And then you get a reward when you solve it. That's like 1 o'clock in the night. I should be sleeping. But as long as I get these rewards and I feel like, yes, my company is moving forward, it's incredibly hard to stop doing it. I mean, when you put off your phone for an hour, you're like, oh, what's happening? So it's the same kind of thing. So especially when you own the company, it's like, if you don't do it, you feel like, OK, now if we fail, it's going to be my fault. So yeah, that addiction is tied to personal finances and other things. So it's really hard to just lay off. Yeah. What would you say, James? Are we addicted to stress? Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting question. Because I mean, stress inherently isn't necessarily good or bad. It's our response to it. And actually, I think the evidence seems to be quite clear that with some stress, that kind of stimulation actually can be quite positive for performance. So it's a question of degrees, really. And I think there's also individual difference. There's some quite interesting literature around something called character strengths. And actually, this idea that we've all got strengths. Many people will be familiar with this strength-based approach. But actually, some of the negative behavior that sometimes we see in ourselves isn't actually a consequence of a weakness. It might actually be the overuse of a strength. And so I think we can have too much stress. A little bit of stress might be a good thing. Too much, obviously not. But also in terms of some of these characteristics that you described, this kind of passion, can be great. But if it becomes obsessive passion, this overuse of passion, then it's probably going to come back and bite us eventually. But you talked about dopamine. And we are dopamine-seeking creatures. That quest for dopamine actually has driven a lot of our success as a species. Whenever we anticipate novelty, finding something new, our brain secretes dopamine. And also, as you mentioned, the constant reward that you get, these micro-accomplishments. And again, I think that can be incredibly positive. But it's actually the overuse of that, which is then going to end up with problems. Maybe we should just start off by maybe not looking at those weaknesses, but maybe start maybe looking at our strengths as the source of our greatest possibility. But sometimes our downfall as well. I mentioned in the beginning that having kids probably saved me from burnout. I know probably not everyone has that experience. But I think that one of the things that helped me there was that I used to define my identity a lot through my work and my professional success. And when I became a mother, I had something else to stand on, something else to base my self-worth around. But becoming a parent also sort of forced me, very literally forced me to redesign my routines in my everyday. So let's talk more about these routines and how do we actually avoid that obsessive passion taking over our life. Tommy, you mentioned earlier that you've been home much of 2018 with your dog to rebuilding your life. What are some of the things that you find that work for you and that you wish you had done before? Well, first of all, when I burned out, I wrote about it on LinkedIn in the finish. And I noticed that the reception was huge and a lot of got a lot of people telling me that we don't, I don't have the courage to come out and tell they were afraid of investors or other things. And so that was like, okay. And then I wrote another piece about the emptiness that arrives when your identity is kind of in your job. And I felt like, who am I? Like, what's my purpose here? And it became really painful in the summer to have that existential kind of crisis on the same page. But I started introducing new kind of rules as Dua Lipa says. I, for example, have a mobile free zone in my bedroom. So it cannot come in. So I leave it in the living room and it was difficult in the beginning, but now I'm actually, if I even try to take it in, I feel like this doesn't belong in the bedroom. And then I start off with a lot of, I do a lot of meditation now. So when I wake up in the morning, I do 20, 25 minute meditation, mindfulness meditation. I do some yoga. And after maybe two or three hours of being awake, I start looking at what I'm gonna do today or males and stuff. So compared to a couple of years ago, while I'm waking up in bed, like what's the male situation? What's the slack groups or whatever it was, total difference. So not when I wake up and not before I go to sleep. So really hard kind of rules and they are now become habitual. So it works. Yeah, I've got a question for you actually in relation to that. So when you reflect back on your entrepreneur career and the principles now that you've started to put in place in your kind of, what would you call it, holiday? Yeah, fun employed. Is there anything that you're doing now that you think you might have been able to integrate when you were an entrepreneur more actively? I would have taken holidays, I mean real holidays. Taking a week or taking two weeks doesn't solve anything. Like you gotta detach from work for real and really try to take three, three, four weeks in a row without looking at your mail because I know entrepreneurs going on holidays a couple of days and then you're like, should I just watch what it is, you know, what's going on? So yeah, like pure detachment because now I notice because I write a lot of stuff that when I do the detachment actually I become a lot more productive and when I get a good night's sleep I get more productive. So it's like, hmm, I think I wasn't that productive before. Because I was constantly on the edge of fatigue, basically. So yeah, take the holiday. Yeah, that's good. I totally agree. And I think that the vacation culture we have in Finland is actually a good model for that because most companies are away for the entire month of July and because everyone else is away you're also allowed to be away in a way that other countries maybe don't have because I find that on a two-week vacation the first week is sort of about detaching yourself and then the second week is about ramping up again back to work. So really that three, four weeks is usually needed. Yeah, and I think in the startup scene I mean what I've heard and what I've talked about with other founders is the fear of even like proposing a four week holiday or even coming out of the kind of if you start feeling bad and you maybe don't even wanna tell your employees or you don't wanna tell your investors. You feel like am I gonna get the next funding round if I tell them and am I gonna get replaced? And it's a lot of components. It's kind of a vicious circle. I think you talked about that as well. So it needs that all the stakeholders around the company need to kind of accept and understand that productivity comes from actually taking a rest and not pushing, pushing, pushing. This is a lot about what your research is about, the importance of relaxation and recovery for work performance. Could you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, I think what's become clear. I recently finished a study where I tracked 100 knowledge workers for 14 days and during that time I used a variety of different devices and systems to measure things like stress, mood, cognitive performance, sleep, their working patterns, how they recovered. And a number of very interesting relationships emerged in that which is supported by other forms of literature and other studies as well. It seems like one of the really fundamental variables that then seems to predict a lot of these other variables in the chain that eventually results in either sustainable performance or burnout is actually recovery. And when I talk about recovery, often I use this, an academic framework called recovery experiences which breaks recovery down into four components. One of the components you mentioned already Tommy and that's detachment, which is our ability to switch off or not. The second component is relaxation. So it's having these experiences where you sit back, put your feet up, you actually start to decompress. The third component is something called mastery. So these are actually experiences that we have which could be within work or maybe outside of work but where we challenge ourselves, we broaden our horizons, we learn something new. These things actually seem to restore us and finally control. Because actually when we feel a sense of autonomy over how we distribute our time and our energy, we can actually find that quite restorative. Obviously the converse is if we've got a lack of control then that can really drain us. And so I think one of the challenges is how do you integrate those four components of recovery into life? Now I think sometimes we need these grand gestures like you described which is you take a big holiday, two weeks, maybe a year. But actually switching off is a skill. And sometimes I think we, often people come to us with my work at Hintzer and they say I can't switch off in the evening, I can't get to sleep. Well actually that process of switching off could start with micro switching off periods through the day. And that's something that many of us have lost. You just watch what happens in this venue when people are waiting for a coffee. Maybe someone's talking to someone else but most of the time, five seconds, the phone comes out. So my challenge really to us all is rediscover the micro recoveries, the little moments to detach in the day and then maybe build on that with some grander gestures and bigger switching off periods on top of that. Yeah. Well what I did myself when I started redesigning my routines was to look at critically at my day, like what were the critical points in time that had a big impact on everything that came after. And one of those points in time was between when I left from work and when I came home. So I designed something which I call my coming home routine and it actually starts already at work. And what I do as the last thing before I leave is write my to-do list for the next day because that sort of empties my head of all those things that would otherwise be nagging me and having me cranky all night at home. And then when I leave, I do something which is relaxing. It can be listening to some music or doing a meditation or just walking an extra lap around the block. And then when I come home, I leave my phone on the hallway table. So there's a dedicated place there for it and that's where I usually leave it and that's sort of the way to force myself to actually detach from it. Otherwise I would be checking my email compulsively all the time. You're still doing it? Once in a while, once in a while. There's some really engaging email thread, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean it's interesting. Some statistics suggest that we check in on our communication tools once every six minutes. And actually one of the things that I look at in the research that I've done recently is the length of the work day that's actually defined by the period of time between when you really switch on and you really switch off. So some studies suggest that most people check their smartphone within 15 minutes of waking up in the morning. And then many of us are checking it right into the moment before we try and go to sleep. And actually there seems to be quite a strong predictive relationship between something called after hours connectivity. So the kind of work that we do on devices, phone calls, teleconferences, outside of normal work hours and how that actually predicts a much shorter rest period which is the interval you describe between when you get home and you try and go to sleep and also a much longer work day. And so sometimes we can't control that and that's just the way life is. But I think one of the challenges that we have, I think as entrepreneurs, as business people is actually that we have technology and tools now that enable us to be on all the time. So how can we rediscover how to rest and recover? And I think we mentioned it before, someone mentioned it here that this actually requires some systemic solutions. It requires a conversation at a leadership level, at a team level, not just individuals trying to do this. We need to start to really rethink and redesign work and life as companies as well as as individuals. It's definitely a systemic issue and you so often see companies who say, oh, we take the health and well-being of our employees really seriously and we want to work on stress. But then senior management is in those email conversations at 11 p.m. sort of reinforcing those bad habits. And what I find often in our work with clients as well is that everyone wants sort of a simple solution and a quick fix. Just tell us how we will fix stress for everyone. But what I usually talk about is that stress management or life management is a bit like fashion. One style doesn't fit all. It's a bit like telling everyone here to wear the same pair of jeans and the same black shirt. We would look completely ridiculous, a bit like 1989. But it's really a part of... Everyone needs to find their own style to manage their life and their own things. And those probably change with the season or when your life develops and changes. And then secondly, we need to actually get those systemic changes happening in companies and on top management level. What would you do if you would start a company right now? What would you do differently in that company culture? Yeah, that's a very good question. People have a habit of going back to old bad habits again, so it's hard to say. But I would definitely try to lead by example by actually taking time off because, as you said, as long as the managers are there, it's almost a gun to your head, like we expect you to reply to these mails. But if they would just not reply, maybe they could lead by example of we don't appreciate that. But in the end, I think I've met so many startup CEOs that are actually feeling quite bad. And when people start losing money, that's when stuff is going to start happening for real. When investors start having too many startups failing because of burnout or fatigue, then when it hurts the wallet, then we have the attention. So you can say that burnout will disrupt the investment scene a bit by force. But I would just try to encourage people to go on holidays and not do it implicitly with a gun to their head. I wouldn't want, even if I would like to reply to that mail at 11, I would not do it in theory. In theory. I mean, I think it's interesting. You talked about individual difference and kind of finding your own rhythm. And I've got, perhaps, a controversial view on entrepreneurs and founders that I think that many others are a different species in some ways. I think that probably the best example I could give is I work in sports as well. And I have the privilege to work with some very interesting athletes and some extreme sports athletes. And I had the conversation with someone the other day who was a base jumper and close proximity wingsuit flyer. And you will never stop her from being a base jumper or a wingsuit flyer. Her life would be much safer if she was not a base jumper. But actually as a human performance scientist and in terms of the team around her, actually their role is not to try and stop her base jumping but it's to help to give her the tools, the skills to be able to do that more skillfully, more effectively, more safely. And actually I think there's a case when we look at entrepreneurship, we look at people who are in senior executive positions, any kind of high pressure role in the workplace that maybe we need to accept that we're working with extreme people. You know, actually people with this extreme passion. And actually there's probably some things that we could encourage them away from but that maybe we need to be creative about finding patterns, rhythms, equipping people with tools so that they can work more sustainably, maybe accept as you said with seasons that there are these extreme periods where you will be maybe solving problems at 1 a.m. in the morning. But then give them the tools and the perspectives so that they can do that more sustainably, so that they can modulate. And people talk about balance. I actually think balance is a myth. You actually think the key really is to find out what your acceptable boundaries are and then try and navigate within there because we're only balanced when we're dead, if we're honest. We're always growing or decaying. How can we manage that process along the way? No, definitely. Well, what a comforting thought. Yeah, I think it's a comforting thought that us entrepreneurs do not need to stop jumping. We should continue jumping but maybe we need some of those tools and strategies to, as a safety net or as a second parachute, to save us when that first parachute doesn't open. Yeah, and you know, and I know, and you know that, you know, the feeling when you're a startup and you close some deal or investment drone, I mean, that high you get is like, wah! You don't wanna, you wanna, you wanna experience that again, but you just need to find the balance, as you said. But I wanna feel that again sometimes. So let's end on a high. Yes. Thank you so much for the discussion. We will continue in the Founder Studio in 30 minutes. Thank you.