I recently finished grad school, where I was pursuing my Master’s Degree in Psychology. That means I now have the room to grow my executive coaching practice. So I’m opening up ten new spots to founders, creatives or executives interested in working with me.

What’s the work like? In short, I’m somewhere between a therapist and an advisor. I meet with clients 2-4 times a month, helping them navigate the challenges of building and growing their companies in real time.

Here’s some of the things I help founders navigate:

• Brand building

• Fundraising

• Launch/marketing/press strategy

• Investor relations

• Co-founder dynamics

• Board dynamics

• Employee/team issues

• Legal issues/lawsuits/disputes

• Sales processes

• Personal issues and limiting belief systems interfering with work

That’s just some of it. With all of it, I’m using my operational experience and psych education to shape my approach.

If you’re interested in learning more, reply to this email or get in touch here. If you don’t think you can afford it, I always hold a few sliding scale spots for founders in a financial crunch. Get in touch.

Onto this week’s newsletter. Hope you enjoy.

H

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How to Get Out of a Spiral

A founder I work with reached out a few days ago in the middle of a spiral. The kind where you get bad news and suddenly you can’t think or see straight. If you’ve built anything, you know the feeling, and you may even be in one as you read this. It’s one of the most common experiences of building a company, and despite its prevalence, very few people know how to properly navigate it.

So, today I thought I’d write about the spiral, and how to navigate it properly. I draw on the work that top psychologists and executive coaches have already developed, backed by academic research.

Below I will share processes and tools you can use, tailored specifically for founders.

Why founders need their own methods

A lot of popular advice for navigating a spiral suggests stillness as the answer—to meditate, sit quietly with the emotion, let it rise and pass without acting. This approach works for many people, and the evidence behind mindfulness is real. But this approach doesn’t work for everyone.

Founders tend to be the people this approach fits least. The traits that push someone to start a company at all—initiative, a strong need for agency and autonomy, little patience for sitting on their hands—are among the least passive there are, and they are part of why founders build things rather than work for someone else. Sitting still with a feeling and waiting for it to pass is something founders are typically wired to be worst at, which is why so many try meditation, find it doesn’t take, and go straight back to trying to solve the problem instead.

The founder’s instinct to act is worth keeping, but it must be channeled correctly during a spiral. That is why I offer an approach below tailored specifically for founders. It takes the founder’s natural tendency to act, and orients the energy toward actions that will actually be helpful in a spiral, versus actions that will only make things worse. The process below focuses on actions that promote a quick recovery, and minimizes the time before you can act with clarity again.

Act 1: Tell someone

When a spiral hits, most founders’ instinct is to handle it alone. Surveys have shown that roughly one in three founders say they have no one to talk to about the hardest parts of the job. Some of this is because of the weight of the decisions themselves—you can’t easily tell your team what you’re dealing with and still expect them to show up the next morning, and the same caution often applies to investors and co-founders. Spouses, family and friends often don’t understand. So the hardest things get carried in private.

So, the first move runs deliberately against that instinct, but in a way that minimizes potential consequences: when a spiral hits, reach out to someone you trust, who has agreed to hold this role—a therapist, a coach, a family member, or a friend.

There is considerable research to support doing this. The psychologist Bernard Rimé has spent decades documenting how people reach to share emotional experiences rather than carry them alone, across cultures and kinds of events. Beyond the relief of not being alone with it, there are a few reasons it helps.

The first is that it forces you to articulate the problem. A spiral runs on vague, half-formed dread, and putting it into words for another person makes it concrete, and often smaller, or at least different, than it felt inside your head. This is the self-explanation effect, studied by the cognitive scientist Michelene Chi: explaining your reasoning out loud forces the implicit parts into the open, which tends to expose the gaps and the leaps that don’t hold up.

The second is that a trusted person in your corner takes some of the edge off the stress itself. The stress-buffering hypothesis, set out by Sheldon Cohen and Thomas Wills, holds that support blunts the impact of a stressful event while you’re inside it. Part of the benefit comes from knowing you have someone to call, before they’ve done anything at all.

The third is the simplest: someone gets eyes on you. On your own, there’s no one to notice that you’re in a crisis. Another person is an outside gauge, and they can check in on you.

One important thing to flag—this is, and should be, different than simply dumping your problems on someone. This should ideally be an arrangement agreed upon in advance. That’s why therapists and executive coaches are ideal for this work. If you plan to share with a family member, partner or friend, it helps to agree on their role in advance, getting their permission to reach out when you’re struggling, and setting expectations that you just need a safe space to share what you’re going through and get things off your chest. It’s important to clarify that you’re not looking for advice or action, you just need a safe space to share what you are going through, and someone to keep an eye on you. You may want to offer to be the same person for them when they are struggling.

None of this resolves what you’re spiraling about, but it’s an important first step. So make the call, and then begin the work below.

Act 2: Calm your nervous system

Bringing your body’s intensity down comes before any of the real work, for a reason: while you’re in a spiral, your thinking simply isn’t reliable. Any decision or message you produce in that state carries distortion with it, so there’s no point working the problem until the charge has come down. This stage is also quick—often minutes, not hours. There’s no single right way to do it, and the options below come from different corners of the research and clinical practice. Try one or two and see what happens.

These are the tricks that I use personally:

Scream.

This is a trick I learned a few years ago, and it’s my go-to whenever I need to calm down fast. I get in my car by myself, and I scream. Then I scream some more, and more, until the anger or anxiety is gone. It has never taken more than two minutes. At the end the problem isn’t solved, but I’m calm, and it’s hands down the most efficient way to calm down I’ve found. If you’ve never screamed before, that’s okay—just try it and I bet you’ll feel relief almost immediately.

To do this right, it’s important to do it until your energy runs out. Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in their book Burnout, describe the body’s stress response as a cycle that has to be run to completion. Vigorous physical discharge is the most efficient way to complete that cycle, and a scream carried all the way to empty is a loud, fast version of it—the same logic behind shaking it out, which I’ll cover below, routed through your voice. The part that makes it work is getting to empty.

Do breathwork.

If you don’t have the luxury of screaming alone in the car, this is the next best trick. You can usually do this quietly in your office or home without disturbing anyone around you.

The first is the physiological sigh: a double inhale through the nose—a full breath, then a second short sip of air on top—followed by a long, slow exhale through the mouth, repeated a few times. You can also use this trick for daily mood improvement, spiral optional. In a Stanford trial led by the neuroscientist Melis Yilmaz Balban, with the psychiatrist David Spiegel, five minutes a day of it outperformed mindfulness meditation for improving mood and lowering arousal.

The second is box breathing, used in military and first-responder training: in for a count of four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. A meta-analysis of breathwork trials found these practices reliably lower stress, though the effect is modest on its own and many of the studies were imperfect. That said, there’s no risk in trying it and seeing if it works for you.

Take a walk.

When the energy is too physical to sit and breathe through, move it. The easiest way to do this is to take a walk. The evidence is solid: a meta-analysis of 75 trials found walking reliably lowers depression and anxiety, with indoor and outdoor walking working about equally well, so the requirement is just moving.

Most of that is the payoff of walking regularly, but there’s an in-the-moment effect too: in a Stanford experiment, a 90-minute walk left people ruminating less, with quieter activity in a brain region tied to that looping kind of thought. A spiral runs on exactly that loop, so walking helps interrupt it.

Shake it out.

The idea here is simple: a threat winds your body up to fight or run—muscles tense, energy mobilizes—and in a spiral you do neither, so that energy has nowhere to go and keeps churning. Shaking or jumping spends it.

This approach has roots in trauma psychology: the trauma researcher Peter Levine built his Somatic Experiencing approach on the observation that animals tremble to discharge stress after a threat, and David Berceli turned it into a set of exercises, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, that deliberately let the body tremor. That said, you don’t need to follow any protocol for this—you can just jump up and down or shake out your arms and legs for a minute or two and see if it helps.

If you do one or two of these, often for just a few minutes, you’ll probably find you’re out of the worst of it. If not, stick with it a little longer—breathe or shake it out for twenty minutes, or take an hour-long walk. It’s worth spending the time you need here, and you’ll feel the spiral energy start to fade.

Act 3: Map the problem

Once the worst of the intensity has passed, you’ll usually still feel an overwhelming urge to act, and this next step gives this urge a job. We’re going to map out the problem that caused the spiral in the first place.

Here’s how it works: take the thing you’re spiraling about and map it out, as fully and expansively as you can. Put the trigger in the center, then write down everything connected to it—every component, every offshoot, every fear, including the ugly beliefs you’d rather not admit. Don’t organize it neatly, and don’t try to solve anything yet. You’re drawing the whole shape of the problem, including the parts that turn out to be imagined, which you can cross off later. Write down all of your spiraling thoughts, and don’t hold back.

This feels counterintuitive—the fear is always that writing it down will pull you deeper in. But the research points the other way. The cognitive scientist Sian Beilock, now the president of Dartmouth, and Gerardo Ramirez found that writing about worries before a high-pressure test improves performance. Beilock suggested the same should hold for a big presentation or a hard conversation. In the study, getting the worry onto the page appeared to free up the working memory it had been consuming.

In short: writing it down gets it out of your head, which frees up working memory and makes you better at making decisions. If you want to make good decisions, get your problems—all of them—down on paper.

Why get everything down? It’s the same principle from clearing your nervous system. What makes these processes work is that they are exhaustive. If you leave anything lingering, whether it’s physiological energy or cognitive load, the process won’t be over, and you will still have difficulty thinking clearly and making sound decisions. The physical exercises, as well as this written exercise, are designed to clear your system fully.

If you want more structure than a free-form map, there’s a well-known version aimed squarely at this kind of mind. Tim Ferriss calls it fear-setting, the deliberate pre-meditation of what could go wrong: you write down the worst things you fear, and then, for each, what you might do to prevent it and what you’d do to repair the damage if it happened anyway. It’s the same idea—getting the whole problem, including your worst fears, on paper—with a frame that tends to shrink the fears as you work through them.

Either way, by the end you’ll probably be exhausted, but you won’t be spiraling, and you will have used the energy productively. Most people brace for the exercise to deepen the spiral and are surprised to find it does the opposite.

Done properly, these steps cannot leave you worse off than you started. In my experience, they work every time. You’ll have discharged the energy, you’ll have seen the real shape of the problem, and from there, you can make much better decisions.

Until next time,

H

If you’d like to dig deeper

• Michael Freeman et al. on mental-health conditions among entrepreneurs, Small Business Economics (2019), and Startup Snapshot’s The Untold Toll on founder stress and concealment.

• Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm on the limits of mindfulness, and the dropout data on sitting practices.

• Rauch & Frese and Brandstätter on the active temperament behind entrepreneurship.

• Annette Stanton on emotional approach coping—engaging a feeling rather than avoiding it.

• Bernard Rimé on the social sharing of emotion.

• On founder and CEO loneliness: many have no one to talk to, and HBR on the loneliness of carrying the decisions.

• Michelene Chi on the self-explanation effect—talking your reasoning out loud exposes the gaps.

• Sheldon Cohen and Thomas Wills, the stress-buffering hypothesis, Psychological Bulletin (1985).

• Julianne Holt-Lunstad on the health risks of isolation and loneliness, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2015).

• Fincham et al., a meta-analysis of breathwork trials, Scientific Reports (2023), a small-to-moderate benefit, and Melis Yilmaz Balban’s Stanford cyclic-sighing trial, Cell Reports Medicine (2023).

• Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and David Berceli’s Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises.

• Sian Beilock and Gerardo Ramirez on writing about worries before a test, Science (2011), and the broader expressive-writing literature (Pennebaker and others).

• Bluma Zeigarnik on how unfinished concerns stay active in the mind, and Masicampo and Baumeister’s “Consider It Done!”—capturing or planning one can quiet its pull before it’s resolved.

• Susan Nolen-Hoeksema on brooding versus reflective pondering.

• Tim Ferriss’s fear-setting, adapted from the Stoic premeditatio malorum.

• Alison Wood Brooks and Jeremy Jamieson on reappraising arousal as useful.

• Related approaches: RAIN (Michele McDonald’s framework, popularized by Tara Brach); the distress-tolerance skills of dialectical behavior therapy (Marsha Linehan); and acceptance and commitment therapy.

I’ll be in Vancouver and New York this month, and will plan to host some small founder gatherings while I’m in town. If you’re a founder/maker/aspiring founder/newsletter reader who would like to join, reply to this email and say hello. I’ll send you an invite to what I have planned.

That’s all for now,

H

Reading the Everlane situation

Here’s my read after looking at the publicly available facts. The original founder, Michael Preysman, had been gone for five years before this sale. L Catterton, a private equity firm, took a major stake in 2020 and eventually became the majority owner. By the time the Shein deal closed, Everlane was carrying about $90 million in debt. L Catterton and the current CEO had been quietly looking for a buyer or new investor for over a year. The board approved the sale over the weekend. Common stockholders are reportedly receiving nothing.

The decision doesn’t appear to have been made by anyone you’d recognize as a founder. It was made by a board, controlled by a PE firm, in a process driven by debt that had to be cleared. Once a board has decided to sell, its legal duty is to maximize value for shareholders, which in practice usually means taking the highest bidder regardless of what the brand stood for. That’s how a sustainability-focused, radical-transparency brand ends up sold to a fast-fashion company that represents close to the inverse of those values.

In short—sales are way more complicated than people realize, and almost never a moral decision of the founders. I will continue to demystify the sales process below—not to discourage you from building, but to prepare you for it.

Where founders actually land

According to data from Correlation Ventures, which has analyzed over 27,000 US venture financings, there is roughly a 1 in 10 chance a venture-backed founder walks away with meaningful money from a sale. The rest either don’t make it to a sale at all, or they sell but don’t make money from it.

The first group—the companies that don’t make it—is the one most people picture when they imagine startup failure. The company runs out of cash, and they shut down.

The second group is the one rarely talked about. These are the many companies that sold—sometimes for headline-grabbing numbers, sometimes without specifying the sale price—but where the founders walked away with little or nothing. Publicly, it looks like great news. Privately, the founders are processing the fact that the years of work didn’t translate into the outcome they were told it would.

This is the group I want to spend time on, because many founders end up here—much more than you realize. We just don’t talk about it.

What a sale actually is

A “good” sale often goes like this: A strategic buyer wants the company badly enough to pay a real premium. The company has multiple competing offers and gets to choose. These are the sales people are usually picturing when they imagine an exit, and they’re real—but as the data above shows, they’re also rare. The vast majority of venture-backed companies that sell are selling for a different set of reasons entirely.

Most sales happen because something forced them. The company is running out of cash, or an investor pulled out at the last minute, or a debt position needs to be cleared, or a strategic buyer made a move that, because of investor pressure, can’t be refused. Sometimes the founder has a health crisis or a major life event that makes continuing impossible.

In all cases, good and bad, founders don’t fully control the decision. In most venture-backed companies, preferred shareholders hold a separate veto right over any sale, which means the founder needs their approval to sell at all. In the other direction, drag-along rights typically allow a majority of preferred shareholders to force a sale that the founder doesn’t want, on terms the founder didn’t choose. Investors also usually hold board seats, often a controlling number of them, which gives them additional influence over both whether to sell and who to sell to. In practice, this often means investors are the ones with the legal power to decide when an exit happens.

There are several different shapes a sale can take. An extended sale process gives you time and lets you choose your buyer. An auction process opens you up to multiple buyers at once. An ABC, or assignment for the benefit of creditors, is when a financial firm takes over your assets and finds a buyer on your behalf, often used as an alternative to bankruptcy. An acquihire is when the buyer is really after your team, and the company itself gets wound down in the process. Each one carries different odds for the people involved, and is usually chosen based on runway available and company position.

Even when the sale price sounds healthy, the math underneath often isn’t. The waterfall of who gets paid in a sale follows a strict order. Creditors get paid first—any outstanding loans, credit facilities, or debt secured against the company’s assets has to be cleared before anyone else sees money. This is what happened with Everlane, where roughly $90 million in debt had to come out of the sale price before the question of equity holders even came up. Preferred shareholders—your investors—get paid next, according to the terms in their original agreement. Their initial investment, often a multiple of it, comes out before common stockholders see anything. Founders are paid last, if at all. More acquisitions go this way than the press releases suggest.

In summary, most sales are driven by forces outside the founder’s control, and the math rarely produces a meaningful payout for the people who built the thing. It’s also a part of the process that gets very little public discussion.

Why companies get bought

The other side of this question is just as important. Founders tend to imagine that a buyer wants what they want, which is to see the company continue and to honor what was built. But buyers buy for their own reasons, and most of those reasons have very little to do with preserving the company’s original vision.

Some buy to control. They want the market position, the customer list, or the channel that the company has built, regardless of whether they intend to keep the product running in any recognizable form. Walmart’s $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet.com in 2016 is one example. Walmart wasn’t buying Jet to keep operating Jet—it was buying Marc Lore and his team to build out Walmart’s own e-commerce infrastructure. Within four years, the Jet brand had been absorbed and shut down. The earlier-stage version of this is the strategic investment arm of a large corporation taking a minority stake in a smaller company, often years before any acquisition. Research published in Strategy Science by Ji Youn Kim and Haemin Dennis Park found that early corporate venture capital funding makes a company significantly less likely to reach an IPO, especially when the founders are first-time entrepreneurs. The corporate investor’s strategic interests start shaping the company’s direction from the moment they’re on the cap table, often deviating from the founders’ original vision.

Some buy to kill. The acquired company poses a competitive threat, and removing it from the market is the point of the acquisition. This pattern is well-documented enough that economists have given it a name. A 2021 study in the Journal of Political Economy by Colleen Cunningham, Florian Ederer, and Song Ma found that in the pharmaceutical industry, roughly 7% of acquisitions were “killer acquisitions” in which the acquirer bought a smaller company specifically to discontinue a competing drug under development. At earlier stages, this can look like a strategic acquirer buying a small competitor through their corporate venture arm and quietly winding down its product, which tends to get very little public attention.

Some buy to change. Beyond repositioning the brand, this category often seems to be driven by ego or hubris—the acquirer believes they can run the company better than the founders did, or wants to put their stamp on it. Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr in 2013 is one well-known example. Marissa Mayer publicly promised “not to screw it up,” and by 2019, Yahoo’s parent company, Verizon, sold Tumblr to the owner of WordPress for under $3 million, a value destruction of more than 99%. The current Everlane–Shein situation is another version of the same dynamic. At smaller scales, this pattern shows up often in consumer brand acquisitions, where strategic acquirers take a beloved DTC brand and try to “professionalize” it into something bigger, often killing the qualities that made customers love it in the first place. Walmart’s $310 million acquisition of Bonobos in 2017 followed a similar arc—Walmart sold Bonobos in 2023 to a different buyer for $75 million, roughly a 76% decline.

And some buy because that’s the only thing they know how to do. They aren’t builders. They have capital to deploy, and so they acquire what other people made and try to make it work inside their structure. The smaller-scale version is the aggregator—wealthy individuals or firms buying portfolios of brands they have no operational competence to run. We’ve seen a lot of this the last few years.

This isn’t necessarily a moral failing. It’s largely how the market works. Buyers tend to act according to their own incentives, which are usually structural and financial rather than mission-driven, and the founders who built the original company often have limited influence over what happens after the deal closes.

The sale itself

Even when the sale happens and the money clears, the experience tends to be harder than founders are told to expect. This is true on two levels—what happens to your role, and what happens to you personally.

For one, founders often don’t get to leave when the sale closes. Most acquisitions include an earn-out, a retention bonus, or restricted stock that vests over two to four years. To get the full payout, the founder has to stay and work for the acquirer, often inside a culture they didn’t choose, running a company that no longer feels like theirs. This is what’s known as “golden handcuffs,” and it traps founders in a version of their own company that they can no longer shape. Many leave the moment the vesting cliff is up, sometimes walking away from significant remaining money just to be free of the situation.

The second category is more personal, and it’s the one the industry is just starting to talk about. Even founders who sell for large sums often describe what comes next as one of the hardest periods of their lives. Vinay Hiremath, who co-founded Loom and sold to Atlassian for $975 million in 2024, wrote publicly about the aftermath, where his relationships fell apart and he spent a year disoriented and searching for what to do with his life. Markus Persson, who sold Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, posted publicly on Twitter that he had “never felt more isolated,” and his very public unraveling became its own news cycle.

There are quieter but common versions of these post-exit problems. Founders who get taken advantage of because they don’t know how to set boundaries around their new wealth. Founders whose marriages and friendships don’t survive the transition. Founders who burn through what they earned because the money never felt connected to anything real. A 2015 University of California study found that 49% of entrepreneurs reported experiencing some form of mental health condition during their careers, and the period after a major sale is one of the times these patterns most often surface. There is now a growing category of support groups specifically for founders dealing with post-exit depression, including The Exit Club, which Louis Debouzy founded after his own sale left him struggling with anxiety and emptiness he had never experienced before.

The point of naming all of this isn’t to argue that selling is bad. The point is that the sale itself is rarely the clean, freeing event it’s described as, even at the high end. If you’re expecting the exit to be the reward for all of the hard work and struggle, it is statistically almost certain that you will be disappointed.

What to do instead

Again, I’m not saying not to build. I’m saying to build with these truths in mind.

Here’s how I suggest you approach things, knowing what you know now:

The first is to become comfortable with the reality and the risks. It’s still great, and often necessary, to raise capital. Some businesses can’t get to launch without significant funding—consumer hardware, deep tech, biotech, anything capital-intensive—and venture capital is often the right tool for those companies. The point of this piece isn’t to argue against raising money. The point is to argue against raising money without understanding what you’re actually signing up for.

The founders who navigate the fundraising landscape best are the ones who know the math. They know what their preference stack looks like, what their investors need from an outcome to be happy, what kinds of buyers their cap table will accept, and what the realistic distribution of outcomes is for a company in their position. They’ve already accepted that an exit might not happen, and that even if it does, it might not produce a meaningful payout. None of that stops them from building. If anything, it makes them more deliberate about what they’re building and why.

That combination of knowledge and fearlessness comes through in fundraising. Investors can feel the difference between a founder who is desperate to raise and a founder who has internalized the reality of what they’re asking for. The first founder is at the investor’s mercy. The second founder has leverage, because they have already done the work of understanding their own risk.

The second is to make early profitability the goal. This is a different orientation than the standard venture playbook, which treats profitability as a problem for later and growth as the only metric that matters now. Both can be true at the same time—you can grow aggressively and still build toward profitability—but the founders who get there earlier have many more options when something goes wrong.

In practice, this might mean building a business model that can sustain itself sooner, or it might mean choosing investors who actually want profitability rather than ones who only want growth. There’s a growing category of funds designed around this. Calm Company Fund uses a structure called a Shared Earnings Agreement that doesn’t take equity upfront and lets founders buy back ownership through profits. Indie.vc has been investing in companies on a clear path to profitability since 2015. TinySeed runs a year-long accelerator for capital-efficient B2B SaaS companies and has funded over 210 startups across six continents. There are others too.

There are also more options now for non-equity financing than there used to be. Lighter Capital and Capchase offer revenue-based financing, where you borrow capital and repay it as a percentage of future revenue without giving up ownership. Hercules Capital and other venture-debt lenders provide larger loans to venture-backed companies, usually as a complement to equity rather than a replacement. SBA loans remain one of the more underused options for founders building toward profitability. None of these are right for every business, but the menu of options outside traditional venture capital is wider now than it has been in a long time.

The deeper point is that profitability is what gives a founder real optionality. A profitable company can keep operating without anyone else’s permission. It can choose its buyer, or choose not to sell at all. It can raise on its own terms, or not raise. The math in the rest of this piece—the preference stack, the forced sales, the buyers who don’t share your vision—is largely the math of companies that need outside capital to keep going. The fastest way out of that math is to not need it.

H

If you’d like to dig deeper:

The data on what actually happens to venture-backed companies

The most-cited research here is from Shikhar Ghosh at Harvard Business School, based on more than 2,000 venture-backed companies that raised at least a million dollars between 2004 and 2010. Harvard Business School News, “The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail” — available free online.

The distribution of venture outcomes

Correlation Ventures has published the most comprehensive breakdown of return distributions across the venture industry, analyzing tens of thousands of US financings. David Coats, “Venture Capital — We’re Still Not Normal,” Correlation Ventures (2023) — available free on Medium.

How the preference stack works

Carta’s plain-language guide is the most accessible overview I’ve found. Carta, “Liquidation Preferences: Standard & Non-Standard Terms” — available free online.

What acquisitions actually look like from the buyer’s side

Elad Gil’s chapter on M&A in High Growth Handbook is the clearest treatment of how acquirers think and how acquihires get structured. Gil is a former VP at Twitter and one of the more prolific founder-investors in the Valley. Elad Gil, High Growth Handbook (2018)

The research on why acquirers buy

Two peer-reviewed studies are worth knowing about. The first is the “killer acquisitions” paper, which documents how often large companies buy smaller ones specifically to shut them down. The second looks at how corporate venture capital changes the trajectory of the startups it invests in. Cunningham, Ederer & Ma, “Killer Acquisitions,” Journal of Political Economy (2021) Kim & Park, “Two Faces of Early Corporate Venture Capital Funding: Promoting Innovation and Inhibiting IPOs,” Strategy Science (2017)

Alternative capital models

A small but growing set of funds operate outside the standard venture model, each with a slightly different approach to backing profitable, sustainable companies. Their thesis pages are useful reading for any founder thinking about whether traditional VC is actually the right fit. Calm Company Fund Indie.vc TinySeed

Non-equity financing for startups

For founders who want capital without giving up ownership, there are more options now than there used to be — from revenue-based financing to venture debt to SBA loans. Lighter Capital Capchase Hercules Capital SBA Loans

A few things to share—

Next month, I graduate with a Master’s Degree in Psychology. It’s been two of the most remarkable years of my life, returning to academics with the intent of understanding the patterns of human behavior that drive us (as well as hold us back, individually and collectively). It has given me context for everything I witnessed and experienced during my time as an entrepreneur, and I’ve been able to apply it to advising and coaching work in real time.

When I graduate, I’ll have significant time back, and I plan to use it writing here about everything I’ve learned as it relates to entrepreneurship and the founder journey.

With that time, I also plan to expand my advising and coaching practice. Serving the founder community has been deeply rewarding work. So far, I’ve worked with AI founders, creative agency founders, B2B startup founders, fashion founders, CPG founders, and even Hollywood actors and directors—all facing variations of the same challenges. I look forward to bringing more people into the work.

If you’re interested in learning more about working with me, please fill out an application here. I reserve a number of sliding scale spots for those who need pricing flexibility, so please apply even if budget is a consideration.

As I return to writing here, I’d also like to know what you want to read—questions, topics, problems you’re sitting with. If you have something specific, submit it here.

One more thing: I’ll be in New York later this month and I’m donating office hours to three New York founders who read this newsletter. If you’d like a free hour, fill out this application and note your interest in a New York meeting. I’ll select three and notify you next week.

That’s all for now,

H

It’s been a while since I’ve written—I’d blame that in part on being busy with grad school and work and parenting, and in part on the psychological phenomenon I write about below. It felt timely to write about something that most people I know are struggling with at the moment. I hope you find it useful.

That’s all for now.

H

The Freeze

I want to talk about something I’m seeing across the board right now, in my clients as well as in my community. People are overwhelmed. The political climate, the economy, the pace of change, the sense that systems we depend on are unstable or untrustworthy—it’s a lot. And on top of that, most people are also navigating real complexity in their businesses and personal lives. It’s compounding.

What I’m noticing is that a lot of people have quietly stopped moving. They’re still thinking. They’re still consuming information. They’re still worried. But they’re not taking action, because at some level they’ve concluded that nothing they do will matter against problems this large. And I understand that conclusion. It’s logical. One person volunteering, calling a representative, starting a project, showing up to a meeting—none of that is going to fix the economy or change the political landscape on its own.

But I want to make a case for doing it anyway, and not for the reasons you might expect.

What’s actually happening when you shut down

When your nervous system encounters a threat that it determines is too large to fight and too pervasive to escape, it defaults to a third response: freeze. This is the oldest survival mechanism we have. Your body activates—stress hormones fire, you’re alert, you’re on—but you don’t move. Psychologically, you’re pressing the gas and the brake at the same time.

Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a physical threat and the kind of ambient overwhelm most of us are living in right now. Political instability, economic uncertainty, the sense that the problems facing your country or your community are too complex and too far outside your control—these register the same way. If the path forward is unclear and involves too many variables you can’t influence, freeze is what you get.

This is biological, not personal. It’s not a reflection of how little you care or how strong you are. But it does have real consequences, and most people don’t realize how much this state is costing them.

What prolonged freeze is costing you

Stress is your body’s way of preparing you to act. It gives you energy and focus so you can do something. The problem with freeze is that the stress response activates but the action never comes. The cortisol and adrenaline that were supposed to fuel movement have nowhere to go. They just sit in your system.

When this goes on for weeks or months, the effects are predictable. Cortisol stays elevated. Sleep deteriorates. Immune function weakens. Digestion suffers. Anxiety increases because the stress was never completed and compounds. Your body is still waiting for you to finish the response.

There’s a subtler effect that I think matters even more. The longer someone stays in this state, the more their sense of their own capability fades. Psychologists call this self-efficacy—your belief in your own capacity to act effectively. It doesn’t disappear all at once. It erodes in the background, quietly, until even manageable actions start to feel disproportionately hard. Not because they are hard, but because the internal sense that you’re someone who can make things happen has gone quiet.

This is what concerns me most. The overwhelm isn’t just leaving the big problems unsolved. It’s gradually reducing your capacity to act on anything—including the basic responsibilities in your business, your family, and your personal life that are actually within your control.

When engagement isn’t the same as action

Something I see a lot right now is people who are deeply engaged with what’s happening—reading constantly, talking about it, feeling the weight of it—but not actually moving. That engagement can feel like it counts for something, and in some ways it does. Being informed matters. Being in community matters.

But there’s a meaningful difference between a conversation that helps you process and move forward and one that keeps you cycling through the same distress. The second kind—where you’re rehashing how bad things are without ever shifting toward what can be done—actually increases anxiety and deepens the feeling of powerlessness. It can even cancel out the benefits of social connection, which is worth pausing on. The thing that should be helping—talking to people who understand—can become another thing that keeps you stuck, if the conversation never goes anywhere.

The difference is usually easy to feel if you’re honest with yourself. After a conversation about the state of the world, or your industry, or whatever the hard thing is—do you feel like something shifted, even slightly? Or do you feel heavier? Are you exploring what’s possible, or confirming what’s wrong?

This isn’t a reason to stop talking about hard things. It’s a reason to notice where your conversations are taking you.

This isn’t contained to you

Something most people haven’t considered is that their own frozen state radiates outward. Emotions and behaviors move through groups below conscious awareness. When the people around you—your partner, your kids, your team—see you disengaged or shut down, they absorb that as information. If the people they trust and look to aren’t acting, the unconscious read is that action isn’t possible or isn’t warranted.

This is how collective paralysis builds. Not because everyone independently concluded that the situation is hopeless, but because everyone is reading each other’s stillness and matching it. Each frozen person becomes evidence for the next person that freezing is the right response.

The good news is that the reverse is equally true. When someone starts moving, the people around them feel it. Movement itself communicates something to the people who are paying attention to you, whether they’re conscious of it or not.

Why action works, even when it can’t solve the problem

For fifty years, the prevailing theory in psychology was that helplessness was learned—that when people were exposed to situations they couldn’t control, they learned to stop trying. In 2016, the researchers who originally proposed that theory revisited it with fifty years of additional data and concluded they had it backwards.

Passivity is the default. It’s what the brain does automatically when circumstances are threatening and the way forward is unclear. What actually has to be learned, through direct experience, is that your actions can change things. There’s a specific neural pathway that only activates when you take an action and experience a result. The researchers called it the hope circuit.

The part that matters most: this circuit only activates from the lived experience of doing something and seeing something change. Your brain updates its sense of what you’re capable of through experience, not through insight.

At a basic level, your nervous system needs the experience of agency in order to function. And it doesn’t need the action to match the scale of the problem. It needs you to move from stuck to not stuck. That’s the change that needs to be made.

What this looks like in practice

The action can be small. It can be local. It can be unrelated to the thing that overwhelmed you, like simply choosing to take a walk. What matters is the experience of choosing to do something, doing it, and registering the result.

Volunteer somewhere. Attend a community meeting. Start the project you’ve been sitting on. Make the phone call you’ve been avoiding. Finish something around the house that’s been nagging at you. The scale matters less than the completion. Each time you move through that cycle—decision, action, result—the next action becomes more accessible. Self-efficacy rebuilds through repetition.

There’s also solid evidence that helping others in particular produces measurable changes in brain chemistry—more dopamine and oxytocin, less cortisol. People who volunteer regularly report lower depression and a greater sense of purpose. But the mechanism underneath is broader than volunteering. The mechanism is agency itself, and reminding yourself that you have it.

The honest case for doing it anyway

I want to be direct about the math here. Your individual action is probably not going to solve a systemic problem facing your country. That’s true. And I think the instinct to dismiss individual action because it can’t fix the whole thing is one of the main reasons people stay frozen. It feels rational. Why bother if it won’t change anything?

Here’s what it will change. Your cortisol will come down. Your sleep will improve. Your anxiety will decrease—not because the external problems went away, but because your body finally got the signal that you’re not trapped. Your self-efficacy will start to rebuild. You’ll be more present and more capable for the people who depend on you—your family, your employees, your community.

That’s the first ripple. The second is that the people around you will register your shift and feel permission to move. The third is that their movement ripples out into their circles. None of this is theoretical. Behavioral contagion is well documented. Action spreads the same way that freeze does.

If everyone reading this newsletter took one action this week—not a grand gesture, just one deliberate move out of stuckness—the collective impact would be real. Not because any single action would fix a systemic problem, but because several thousand people who were contracting would be expanding instead. They’d be healthier, more present, more engaged, more available to the people and communities around them.

But even setting the collective aside—you should do this for yourself. Because you will feel better. Because you’ll sleep better and be less anxious and show up differently for the people in your life. That is reason enough, and everything else that comes from it is a bonus.

If you’d like to dig deeper

Everything above is grounded in research I’ve encountered in my academic studies or through my own personal research. If any of it resonated and you want to dig in further, here’s where to start:

The freeze response and your nervous system

The newsletter describes how your nervous system defaults to freeze when a threat is too large to fight and too pervasive to escape. This comes from polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges. Deb Dana’s book is the most accessible entry point—it translates the neuroscience into plain language and includes practical exercises.

Deb Dana, Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory (2022)

Learned helplessness, the hope circuit, and why passivity is the default

This is the centerpiece of the newsletter—the 2016 reversal showing that helplessness isn’t learned but is the brain’s default, and that agency has to be actively built through experience. The paper is the primary source. Seligman’s memoir tells the full story in readable form.

Maier & Seligman, “Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience,” Psychological Review (2016) — Free full text

Martin Seligman, The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism (2018)

Self-efficacy — how your belief in your own capability erodes (and rebuilds)

The newsletter describes how prolonged inaction gradually reduces your sense that you can affect outcomes. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy is the foundation for this. His original paper is the shorter read; the book is the comprehensive treatment.

Albert Bandura, “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change,” Psychological Review (1977)

Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997)

Co-rumination—when talking about problems makes them worse

The newsletter describes conversations that keep you circulating through distress without arriving anywhere. The research term for this is co-rumination, and Amanda Rose’s work established the concept. Her 2021 review is the most current and readable summary of two decades of findings.

Amanda Rose, “The Costs and Benefits of Co-Rumination,” Child Development Perspectives (2021)

Amanda Rose, “Co-Rumination in the Friendships of Girls and Boys,” Child Development (2002)

Emotional contagion—how your state spreads to the people around you

The newsletter describes how emotions and behaviors move through groups below conscious awareness. The largest study on this used nearly 700,000 Facebook users and showed that emotional states transfer without any direct interaction or nonverbal cues.

Kramer, Guillory & Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2014) — Free full text

The health effects of helping others

The newsletter mentions that volunteering produces measurable shifts in cortisol, depression, and sense of purpose. The umbrella review below synthesizes decades of research on this across mental, physical, and social health outcomes.

Sheringham et al., “Exploring the Effects of Volunteering on the Social, Mental, and Physical Health and Well-being of Volunteers: An Umbrella Review,” Voluntas (2023) — Free full text

We had all encountered the same predatory archetype.

While some details differed between our stories, the pattern was remarkably consistent: Once our companies all reached a certain threshold of success, a new potential employee would be introduced through mutual professional connections. This person’s credentials were always strong—impressive resume, experience with major brands, high-profile connections.

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My short answer: business IS psychology, whether you know it or not. And the more you're aware of this, the more successful you'll be.

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I have something exciting to share: after nine years of living in Sonoma County, I have moved to Los Angeles.

Though I’ve never lived here, it feels like a homecoming in a lot of ways. I’ve been traveling to Los Angeles for work for over a decade. LA was Haus’ largest market, and many of my prior investors and customers live here. There is a massive ecosystem here of brands, startups, creatives and storytellers—all communities I identify with and love.

What will I be doing here? Continuing to build my coaching practice and being of service to the founder community.

So, if you are in LA, let’s connect. I look forward to being a part of this community.

H

(PS—For those new here, this is me.)

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Investors can already see the fault in this argument, but most of us engage in this pattern more often than we think.

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I believe with every bone in my body that if you have the itch, you should be a founder. And I'd like to help you make the jump.

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In physics, friction is what makes movement possible—without it, we’d slide aimlessly or remain stuck. The only way to eliminate friction entirely is to exist in a vacuum, a space devoid of interaction, challenge, and growth. Some people attempt this metaphorically—isolating themselves, avoiding difficult conversations, clinging to rigid belief systems.

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So I stopped, faced a charging wolf head-on, and just as it was about to attack, I quickly reached out and grabbed it by the scruff of its neck. Immediately, it went limp—as harmless as picking up a kitten.

Thrilled with this discovery, I carried the docile wolf, still grabbing it by the scruff of its neck, over to show the others, still running for their lives.

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