There’s a marathon strategy called the negative split. You run the first half slower than you think you should. Then, when everyone else is hitting the wall at mile eighteen, cramping up and bargaining with God, you accelerate. You finish stronger than you started.
Most startup CEOs do the opposite. They sprint out of the gate at 80 hours a week — fueled by adrenaline, ambition, and the intoxicating delusion that they are, in fact, superhuman. Then somewhere around Series A, the wheels come off.
Notion Capital just published a research report called The Negative Split: A Data-Led Framework for Founder Endurance, and as someone who has been running peer advisory groups for CEOs since 2007 — long before “founder wellness” became a LinkedIn content category — I can tell you: they got it right. And buried inside the data is a finding that I’ve been watching play out, in real time, in real rooms, for nearly two decades.
The CEOs who finish strong don’t figure it out alone.
You’re Working More Than You Think, and Lying to Yourself About It
The report surveyed over 100 VC-backed founders. More than 40% work 60+ hours a week. Nearly 10% crack 80. And here’s the beautiful absurdity: most of them rate their physical health as a 7 out of 10.
The founders grinding past 80 hours a week? They’re the least likely to self-identify as burned out.
This is not resilience. This is denial wearing a Patagonia vest.
I have sat across from CEOs in peer advisory sessions who described their situation with calm, analytical precision — managing cash runway, managing investor expectations, managing their team’s morale — and then, when someone in the room asked a simple follow-up question, completely fell apart. Not because they were weak. Because they had been carrying it alone, and they had no idea how much weight they’d accumulated until someone else was in the room with them.
The report calls it the Endurance Effect — the idea that founders don’t avoid stress, they recalibrate themselves to withstand it. The pressure doesn’t shrink. You do. Which sounds aspirational until you realize “recalibrating to withstand punishment” is also how people develop drinking problems.
The Paradox Nobody Warns You About
Here’s the finding that should keep every scaled founder up at night — though frankly, something already is.
As founders scale their companies, their fear of failure goes up. Their sense of loneliness goes up. Post-Series A founders report a fear of failure rate of 75%, compared to 61% for earlier-stage founders. And 86% of scaled founders say running a company feels lonely, versus 79% pre-Series A.
So the more you succeed, the more terrified and isolated you become. Congratulations on your funding round.
But here’s the twist: that same cohort of scaled founders also reports higher confidence, more exercise, and dramatically less overwhelm. Pre-Series A founders feel overwhelmed more than half the week at a 51% rate. Post-Series A? It drops to 22%.
I’ve watched this paradox resolve itself in peer advisory groups more times than I can count. The fear doesn’t disappear. The isolation doesn’t either. What changes is that the founder stops processing it alone in their head at 2 a.m. and starts processing it in a room full of people who have been exactly there.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole game.
What the Research Says About Support — And What It Doesn’t Say
Let me be direct about something the report dances around.
It finds that founders strongly prefer high-trust, bespoke support — specifically one-on-one time with people who have been there. Former founders. Senior operators. People who understand the weight of a payroll you’re not sure you can make, a board conversation that didn’t go the way you needed, a co-founder relationship that’s quietly turning toxic. Generic wellness interventions don’t move the needle. Lived experience does.
What the report is describing — even when it doesn’t use the term — is a peer advisory group. Done right.
Not a networking happy hour. Not a speaker series. Not a peer group that devolves into group therapy or competitive posturing. A structured, confidential cohort of non-competing CEOs who meet consistently, hold each other accountable, and have enough shared context to call each other on their blind spots.
I started running these groups in 2007 because I had experienced firsthand what the absence of that structure costs. The lonely decisions. The echo chamber of your own team, who need you to be confident even when you’re not. The investors who are brilliant at capital allocation and utterly useless when you need someone to tell you that you’re about to make a catastrophic people decision.
What I found, and what this report confirms, is that the quality of a CEO’s peer connections is one of the most powerful predictors of their endurance over time.
What’s Actually in the Room
Here’s what happens in a well-run peer advisory group that doesn’t happen anywhere else:
People tell the truth. Your team can’t. Your investors won’t. Your spouse is exhausted. But a peer who has no stake in your company and no authority over you can say the thing nobody else will say — and you can hear it, because it comes without an agenda.
You see the pattern before it becomes a crisis. The report recommends founders track their own data — sleep, stress, energy, mood — and use it to spot problems early. A peer group provides an external data set. When three other CEOs in the room look at your situation and their faces do a certain thing, that is data. The kind you can’t get from a dashboard.
You learn from other people’s expensive mistakes. The report notes that athletes are far more receptive to advice from someone who has competed at their level. Same principle. When someone in your peer group walks in having just survived the exact crisis you’re currently approaching, that’s not networking. That’s an early warning system.
The isolation breaks. Eighty-six percent of scaled founders feel lonely. A peer group doesn’t eliminate the loneliness that comes with the role — you’re still the one signing the checks, still the one the buck stops with. But it changes the texture of it. You’re still the person walking the tightrope. You just have people in the stands who know what the tightrope feels like.
The Coaching Version, Without the Deck
A few things I tell the CEOs in my groups that the data supports:
Periodize your effort. Cycle hard pushes with deliberate recovery. Before your next fundraise or product launch, bank sleep and protect your calendar. Plan the recovery window before you even start the sprint. Recovery is not a reward for good performance. It’s the mechanism that makes the next performance possible.
Know which engine you’re running on. The report distinguishes between achievement-driven founders and those driven by affiliation or influence. Most founders start as achievement machines. As you scale and hand execution to your team, you may find the fuel has cut out. Understanding your own motivation isn’t soft — it’s operational intelligence. Your peer group can help you see it, because they’re watching you from outside your own head.
Build the right circle — deliberately. The report is explicit: founders want problem-solving peers, not sympathizers. Surround yourself with people who push you toward solutions, not deeper into your own narrative. That’s a design choice. It doesn’t happen by accident.
LinkedIn is not a support system. The report literally calls it out as an “unhelpful outlet.” One founder’s coping mechanism: “I unfollow these stories on LinkedIn so they don’t feed negativity.” The hustle porn is fiction. The overnight success stories are curated. The only thing more dangerous than believing them is producing them.
The Long Game
Since 2007, I have watched CEOs use peer advisory groups to navigate things that would have otherwise broken them: failed fundraises, board coups, co-founder divorces, pivots that looked insane and turned out to be genius, pivots that looked genius and turned out to be insane. I’ve watched founders walk into a session convinced they needed to fire someone and walk out realizing the problem was them. I’ve watched founders walk in thinking they were fine and walk out having finally admitted they were not.
The report closes with Shackleton’s family motto: Fortitudine Vincimus. By endurance, we conquer.
Shackleton is famous for leading his crew through an Antarctic expedition that should have killed them all. He is less famous — but should be more famous — for his understanding that the thing keeping those men alive was not individual toughness. It was their relationship with each other. The way the group held together when the ship didn’t.
Run the negative split. Start smart. Finish strong.
And for the love of everything, stop trying to finish alone.
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Glen Hellman is founder of CxO Elevate, an executive coaching firm for startup CEOs, and has been facilitating CEO peer advisory groups since 2007. He is a Distinguished Faculty member at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering, a turnaround CEO with multiple company exits, and — in a previous life that explains a lot about his tolerance for chaos — “Mr. Cranky,” an investigative tech blogger whose work contributed to FBI prosecutions of fraudulent startup executives.
