You've been running on empty for months

Most founders are carrying more than they let on. The financial stress they’ve normalized. The spiral that lives in their head at 2am. The pattern they know is getting in their way but can’t seem to stop. And most of them assume this is just what building looks like and that the weight is part of the deal.

This issue of the Midnight Text is going to challenge that.

Recently we brought Quinn Fitzgerald into one of our cohort learning sessions. Quinn is a founder turned coach who built and sold her company in 2023, and now works exclusively with founders on managing their inner worlds in order to build, raise, and lead successfully. She also runs a fundraising sprint program specifically designed to help founders get through the raise without losing their minds in the process. Quinn is part of lume, the founder performance lab that combines coaching, diagnostics, and health science to help you scale without breaking.

What happened in that room was one of the more honest hours I’ve seen in a cohort setting. Founders got real about working until 6am to avoid sitting with their anxiety, about turning down life changing acquisition money, and more.

We’re sharing it here because these conversations deserve a wider room. All founders remain anonymous. But these are real moments from real people who are building right now, probably feeling a lot of what you feel.

Quinn opened with a simple image: a cup. The cup represents your energy, and it has three rules.

First, it’s never static. Your energy is always moving, always changing. Second, it depletes faster than it refills. If you’re going at 100% every day, sleep doesn’t fully restore you, so you wake up already behind. Over time you stop noticing and low becomes your normal. Third, what fills your cup is completely unique to you. What restores one founder may drain another.

Most founders she works with think they’re running at 100%, when in reality they’re running at 60% of a cup that’s already half empty. And they’ve been doing it so long they’ve forgotten what full actually feels like.

Quinn’s reframe wasn’t about doing less but about being more strategic. Instead of asking how do I go 100% all the time, start asking when do I actually need to be full? A big pitch. A hard conversation. A fundraising sprint. Those moments deserve a full cup. The Tuesday afternoon admin block probably doesn’t. You can identify the high-stakes moments in advance and intentionally fill up before you hit them, and you can pair the draining work with something that restores you after.

Quinn used a roller coaster analogy: You don’t have to just ride it. You can see the loop coming, fill up before the drop, and refill again after, so you don’t stay depleted on the other side.

34% of founders experience burnout. Quinn’s argument is that this isn’t inevitable. It’s what happens when you treat well-being as a sacrifice to the business instead of an investment in it.

For a lot of founders, that might look like slowing things down. And that’s really scary. But if you can see slowing down as being in service of speeding up after, then it becomes productive in and of itself. It’s a bit of a reframe hack that’s often needed for founders to actually carve out that time and activity.

One of the founders in the room opened up about his financial stress. He wasn’t sleeping well. He was working until the early hours of the morning partly just to avoid sitting with the anxiety of it.

He had turned down an acquisition offer that would have been enough money to change his life. He said no because it would go against everything he was building toward, the whole reason he started in the first place. He didn’t regret it, but he was carrying it.

Quinn asked: So, you literally have the option to solve your financial stress right now, and you’re choosing not to. What are you actually prioritizing instead?

And he answered: the work means something to me. I’m not going to push KPIs for someone else’s mission just to buy a nice car sooner.

That’s not a financial problem, she said. That’s an investment in your personal well-being. The trade-off is real, and it’s hard, but it’s intentional.

When you only look at what you’re giving up, you miss what you’re actually getting in return. You’re not bad at managing your finances. You’re choosing something harder and more meaningful instead. Those are different things, and treating them the same is how founders end up feeling like they’re failing when they’re actually just building something they believe in. So when you close your laptop in the early morning hours, try to redirect your brain to what you’re choosing and getting, rather than giving up, as hard as that might be.

Another founder in the room opened up about the mental load of being a solo founder. There’s no one to reality-check it. No one to look at you at the end of a hard week and say, yeah, that was brutal, or no, you’re not imagining it. The weight is always there, and it’s always only yours. You can talk to investors, advisors, or mentors, but there’s a version of honesty that none of those relationships quite allow for.

Quinn recommended finding a listening partner whose sole purpose is to give the founder room to offload – to hear the problems and not try to fix them. “You can preface it with: ‘I’m going to vent right now. I might say some things that sound extreme. I don’t mean any of it literally. I just need you to listen and not try to help.’”

That framing matters. Because a lot of founders do have people they could call. They just haven’t given those people permission to show up in that specific way. And so the spiral stays in the echo chamber instead of getting out.

This same founder noticed that when she took a couple of days off and actually stepped away, she came back different: more clear, grounded, and able to see what was actually in front of her instead of just reacting to it. She hasn’t let herself do it more than that one time because the business doesn’t pause just because she does. For a solo founder, every hour you’re not working is an hour no one is.

Quinn suggested finding a process that enables her to take time off and also feel calm and able to disconnect. That could mean setting up AI agents that alert her if something has gone wrong, or having an employee (if available) do the work even if that means it won’t be perfect. Or, time blocking 1-2 hours each day where she only does the urgent things and puts the rest aside for later. Creating a process that enables a solo founder to take a break will in turn give the business some new life after. Again – taking time away to fill your cup becomes in service of bettering the company.

The last thread started when one founder admitted that the person he most needs to say no to is himself.

He kept going back to things that were already good enough, editing them up to 100%, spending an hour on something that didn’t need more than ten minutes. He knew the pattern but couldn’t seem to stop it.

Quinn’s advice was if you’re doing everything at 100%, you’re actually doing yourself a disservice. The perfection is getting in the way of you being able to show up fully, to sustain yourself in your business, to get things done quickly, and most importantly, you’re not going to learn fast enough. When Quinn was a founder, what she thought was her absolute best work turned out to not be that good at all. And if she’d just shipped the 60% version earlier, she would have learned that lesson faster and gotten to the actual 100% on the second try.

The advice she gave was practical: Give yourself a scale before you start something. Does this job need 100% or can I ship it at 80%, 60%, even 40%? Some things deserve everything you have, but most things genuinely don’t. Make this call before you’re already three hours deep into something that needed to go out yesterday. And then trust the decision you made when you were clear-headed, not the one your inner critic is making at midnight. And ship it. Then learn.

72% of founders face mental health challenges. The job asks you to carry an enormous amount, and almost nothing in startup culture gives you permission to put it down, even briefly, without feeling like you’re falling behind.

Quinn works with founders one on one through the hardest moments of starting a company, helping them figure out how best to fill their cup, reframe unhelpful thoughts, hack the mental loops that get them stuck, and put processes in place that enable healthy living. All of which, in turn, helps their companies thrive. If anything in this issue resonated and you want to explore working with her, she coaches on lume, an executive coaching platform built specifically for founders and early-stage operators. It’s worth a look.

Take good care,

Alexis

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