Burnout: Bogus Badge of Honor

So you yourself have been a Founder and CEO. Now you work with a lot of founders and CEOs, so I'm sure that you have seen some business practices and leadership practices that aren't so great. What are the top three not so effective leadership strategies that you've seen?

Well I mean, I think going back to sustainability. I think burnout is a real thing. And it's a real thing people started talking about just more recently. I feel like when I was running TaskRabbit, burnout was sort of expected. It was almost this badge of honor that an entrepreneur would get, you know, if they were working hard enough, but I don't think that creates a sustainable company or a sustainable culture. And when you have burnout across a team, then it's not a great place to work. The culture is bad. I mean we've seen so many bad cultures in Silicon Valley, right? And bad behavior.

When I look at those scenarios and those instances, and I think about the founders and their values and maybe the examples they could've been setting, then I think a lot of that could have been avoided as well. So that is just a philosophy we hold at Fuel, which is make sure that our founders know that we are behind them as people. I remember as a founder, I had investors sometimes that would tell me that I was posting too many pictures of my kids on Instagram.

Really?

That it didn't look like I was working hard enough. Oh yeah. Absolutely, okay. And that actually is the reality of a lot of founder experiences. And maybe particularly for the women, right, because maybe we are posting pictures with our families, and maybe we are a little more vulnerable to scrutiny in that regard.