Hi friends 👋,

Happy Sunday!

Few months back I talked to a founder—solo, 18 months in, finally profitable—who told me he was “exhausted in a way sleep can’t fix.”

He’d just brought on his first full-time hire. Someone to “take things off his plate.”

Three months later, he was working more hours, not fewer.

Why? Because he’d turned himself into a servant.

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Let’s start with what nobody talks about at demo day:

54% of founders experienced burnout in the last 12 months. 46% say their mental health is “bad” or “very bad.” 75% reported anxiety. Only 6% had zero mental health issues.

49% of founders are considering quitting in the coming year. 61% have considered leaving their company. A third are solo founders.

This isn’t “startup hard mode.” This is unsustainable.

And here’s what’s wild: a study found that 5% of startups fail directly because of burnout—and the real number is likely higher when you count indirect causes like poor decision-making and team mismanagement.

You know what causes that burnout? The belief that you need to be everything to everyone.

The co-founder who needs you to make every decision.

The first hire who can’t move forward without your approval.

The investor who expects you to have all the answers.

You’re not building a company. You’re building a dependency system with you at the center.

Here’s how it usually goes:

You start solo. You do everything. Product, sales, support, ops, marketing. You’re a machine.

Then you bring on a co-founder or first hire because you’re drowning.

Finally, relief, right?

Wrong.

Now you’re:

You’ve gone from “doing everything” to “doing everything plus being responsible for someone else.”

This is servant leadership at the early stage: becoming the blocker you hired someone to remove.

As one successful founder put it after his exit: “Hiring full-time employees before product-market-fit was my biggest mistake. Until this point you will be frantically trying many ideas, sometimes weekly. Any one other than a co-founder will soon get frustrated by the changes of direction and eventually wonder if the compensation they are giving up on elsewhere is worth it.”

But even with a co-founder, the pattern repeats.

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65% of startups fail due to conflict among co-founders. Not product. Not market. Not funding. Co-founder conflict.

And you know what causes most of that conflict?

Unspoken expectations about who’s supposed to serve whom.

The pressure and solitude of startup life forces founder conflict to erupt earlier than in any other relationship. Rapid role evolution during hypergrowth means roles change before you have time to actually build a relationship and focus on personal growth.

Here’s what happens:

As relationship therapist Esther Perel (who now works with co-founders) puts it:

The servant leadership trap makes this worse because one person becomes the “giver” and the other becomes the “taker.”

And neither of you signed up for that dynamic.

Forget the corporate leadership advice. You’re not managing a team of 20. You’re working with 1-3 people, trying not to die.

Transparent leadership for indie founders means:

Your co-founder: “Should we add this feature?”

Servant response: Thinks deeply, weighs options, gives answer.

Transparent response: “What problem does it solve? What would you do if I weren’t here? Walk me through your thinking.”

Your first hire: “How should I prioritize these tasks?”

Servant response: Creates detailed priority list, manages their workload.

Transparent response: “Which one moves the needle most? What’s blocking you from deciding?”

You’re not being unhelpful. You’re building someone who can make decisions when you’re asleep, sick, or focused on something else.

Servant leaders give orders. Transparent leaders explain why.

Instead of: “We need to ship this by Friday.”

Try: “We’re losing 5 customers a week to this bug. If we don’t fix it by Friday, we might lose the big prospect we’ve been chasing. I need you to own this—what do you need from me to make it happen?”

Now they understand:

Early-stage founders make hundreds of decisions a week.

Most of them invisibly.

Then your co-founder/hire has no idea how you think, so they can’t make decisions without you.

Start narrating your thinking:

“I’m prioritizing this customer over that one because they’re paying 5x more and are in our target market. That’s the filter I use—revenue + ICP fit. Use that framework and make the call yourself next time.”

Now you’ve taught them how to think, not just what to do.

Paul Copplestone (Supabase founder) after his first failed startup: “Only hire someone when you have a problem that’s ‘big enough for a full-time hire.’ Not a theoretical problem or an opportunity, a burning problem you can only solve by hiring someone.”

But once you hire them? Let them own it.

Even when:

If you jump in and “save” them every time, you’re not building a team. You’re building a support system for your martyrdom.

36% of startup founders are now going solo, more than double the 17% in 2017—largely because AI and automation mean one person can do what used to require a team.

This is the real lesson: build the company to not need you, not to need you more.

Tools:

The goal: your co-founder or first hire can run the company for a week while you’re sick/traveling/burned out.

If they can’t, you’re the bottleneck.

Here’s where most indie founders get stuck:

You hire someone to “help.”

But you don’t actually give them anything to own.

Why? Because:

So you end up in this weird limbo where you’re paying someone but still doing everything yourself.

The fix:

Valerie Krämer (second-time founder): “Hire less but experienced people vs. a lot of cheap and inexperienced ones. A 4-person team (a product person, an engineer, a designer, and a marketing/community person) can get you very far from the get-go.”

But also: Actually let them do the thing.

Pick one thing—customer support, sales, ops, marketing—and say: “This is yours. I’m here if you need me, but you own this.”

Then bite your tongue when they do it differently.

To be fair: there are moments where you need to jump in.

When your co-founder/hire is genuinely stuck on something they’ve never done before: Don’t let them drown. Show them once, then they own it next time.

When something’s on fire and there’s no time: Just solve it. But debrief later: “Next time this happens, here’s how you handle it without me.”

In the first 2 weeks of someone new: They need context. Give it. But with a hard deadline: “After week 2, you’re making these decisions.”

The problem is when servant mode becomes permanent mode.

Solo founders now represent 36% of new startups in 2024, but only 17% of those securing VC rounds.

Why? Investors assume solo founders will burn out or become bottlenecks.

And they’re often right.

But the solution isn’t to just “get a co-founder” or “make your first hire.”

The solution is to build like you’re going to be gone next week.

If your company stops when you stop, you don’t have a company. You have a job with equity.

Transparent leadership for indie founders isn’t about being a “good manager.”

It’s about building something that survives you taking a vacation, getting sick, or deciding to work on something else for six months.

It’s about teaching people to fish instead of being the person they call when they’re hungry.

And most importantly: it’s about not destroying yourself trying to be everyone’s hero.

You’re not a servant. You’re a founder.

Act like it.

Have you felt the servant leadership trap? Hit reply—I read every response.