Seven Books About Goats

A few years ago, I was three days into no sleep. Not the exaggerated “I barely slept” that people throw around at conferences. Three actual days. The deliverables at the startup I was working at had this wonderful property where finishing one immediately created two more, like some kind of productivity hydra. I was routinely up at two, three, four in the morning, staring at a screen, trying to ship something that would only generate the next thing I needed to ship.

And at some point during hour 70-something of consciousness, I went on Amazon and bought seven books about raising goats.

Seven.

I had decided, with the full confidence of a person who had not slept since Monday, that my wife and I were going to become goat farmers and cheesemakers. I had a vision. It was pastoral. It was peaceful. It was completely detached from reality. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area. We didn’t have land. We didn’t even have a yard. For crying out loud, we didn’t even have a patio. Nobody in my family has ever raised an animal more complicated than a domestic shorthair cat. But there I was, reading about dairy goat breeds at 3 AM, fully committed to a life of artisanal chèvre.

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My wife eventually talked me off the ledge. I took two weeks off, did absolutely nothing, definitely did not go shopping for goats, and came back at least sane enough to stop planning a second career in agriculture.

I was lucky. My version of burnout involved livestock fantasies and a very patient spouse. Other founders aren’t that lucky.

I usually write about the operational stuff. Hiring, metrics, culture, runway. The systems and structures that either scale with you or break underneath you. This week is a departure, and I think it’s an important one, especially for those of you who are reading The Next Gear for the first time.

Because the thing nobody tells you about building a company is that the company might be fine while you quietly fall apart.

According to a 2024 survey by Sifted, 49% of founders said they were considering quitting their startups. Not pivoting. Not fundraising. Quitting.

Data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm that has tracked executive departures since the 1960s, shows that 143 startup founders left their CEO roles in 2024. The year before, that number was 29.

A 2025 CEREVITY survey found that 81% of founders hide their stress from everyone around them. Over half hide it from their own co-founders.

That same CEREVITY research, which surveyed 127 California tech founders, reported that 73% experience what researchers call “shadow burnout.” That’s a clinical way of saying you’re exhausted and deteriorating but you keep performing because the alternative feels worse than the suffering.

A 2024 study published in PLOS ONE found that startup founders exhibit baseline cortisol levels comparable to emergency room physicians during peak shifts. Not during a crisis. Not during a funding round. As a baseline. That’s just Tuesday.

And here’s the one that should keep you up at night, if you weren’t already up: according to research by Dr. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor who has studied entrepreneurial mental health extensively, founders are roughly twice as likely to experience suicidal thoughts as the general population.

Jody Sherman raised $12 million for Ecomom and was, by every measure that investors and the press care about, on his way to something significant. He was also the only person at the company with access to the finances, carrying the weight alone, and battling clinical depression that nobody around him fully understood. In January 2013, he took his own life. He was 47.

Austen Heinz founded Cambrian Genomics at 28. He was doing genuinely pioneering work in DNA synthesis. A single viral article tanked his investor support almost overnight. He was 31 when he died by suicide in 2015. He had a history of mental illness that the startup ecosystem did nothing to account for.

Jake Millar founded Unfiltered in New Zealand in 2015, when he was 20 years old. He raised nearly $5 million. The company hit a $12 million valuation. Then COVID gutted the business, he sold it under pressure, and the weight of investor expectations and media scrutiny followed him even after the company was gone. He left the country. In November 2021, at 26, he died by suicide in Kenya. The pressure didn’t stop when the company did.

Three founders. Three different decades, three different business models, three different countries. The same outcome. The pressure was structural and the support was nonexistent.

According to CEREVITY’s 2025 research, 68% of founders actively conceal mental health struggles from their stakeholders. Sixty-one percent say the primary reason is fear of professional consequences.

Think about that for a second. The people running the companies are afraid that admitting they’re struggling will cost them their companies. So they don’t say anything. They perform. They grind. They buy books about goats at 3 AM.

Brad Feld, co-founder of Techstars and Foundry Group, was one of the first major investors to write publicly about his own depression. He’d been diagnosed with OCD in his 20s. In late 2013, he fell into a depressive episode that lasted six months. When he started writing about it openly on his blog, hundreds of founders reached out to him privately. Hundreds. All of them suffering in silence, waiting for someone with enough credibility to go first.

The whole system is designed to punish vulnerability. Investors want confidence. Boards want control narratives. Employees want stability. And founders learn, very quickly, that the only acceptable answer to “how are you doing?” is “crushing it.”

Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz in 2004 and spent over a decade building it into one of the most recognized names in SEO. He also burned out so badly that he stepped down as CEO. When he started over with SparkToro, he did something radical: he designed the company specifically to not destroy him. Small team. Profit-sharing. No venture capital pressure. In interviews with Reboot and Mixergy, he called it an “anti-burnout business” and said publicly that he wanted a company that gave him more energy than it took.

That’s a sentence worth reading again. A company that gives you more energy than it takes. Most founders don’t think that way. They assume grinding is the price of admission. Fishkin asked a different question: what if it doesn’t have to be?

Jerry Colonna, the executive coach behind Reboot, has spent years working with founders on exactly this problem. His core insight is one that I think a lot of founders get wrong: the hours, the fundraising, the impossible to-do list are usually what gets blamed. But the real damage happens when your identity becomes so fused with your company’s performance that a bad quarter feels like proof you’re worthless. You stop being a person who runs a company. You become the company. And when it struggles, you don’t just feel like you’re failing. You feel like you’re disappearing.

That reframe matters. The problem is identity. A lot of founders can’t separate “my company is having a bad quarter” from “I am a bad person.” And until you untangle those two things, no amount of meditation apps or vacation days will fix what’s actually broken.

I think about this a lot in my work with founders and growth-stage companies. So much of what I end up doing is building the organizational structures and systems that mean the founder can actually step back from being the load-bearing wall for every single function. When the company can operate without you holding it together with your bare hands at 3 AM, you get something back that burnout took from you: the ability to think clearly about whether this is still what you want to be doing.

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I’m not going to give you a listicle of self-care tips. You’re an adult. But there are a few things the research supports that are worth mentioning because most founders won’t do them until it’s too late.

Get into a peer group. The Young Presidents’ Organization has been running a model since 1950 where eight to 10 executives meet regularly and talk about what’s actually happening. It works. Having people in the room who have weathered similar storms and will give you unfiltered feedback is one of the most effective buffers against the isolation that makes burnout lethal. If YPO isn’t your speed, find your version of it. A founder group. A monthly dinner. Something where “I’m thinking about buying goat-farming books” gets a real response instead of a ridiculous LinkedIn post about what purchasing livestock literature taught me about product-market fit.

Talk to a professional before you need one. According to a 2024 survey of startup founders, 77% refuse to seek professional help. That’s like refusing to check your blood pressure until you’re having a heart attack. Therapy, coaching, whatever label makes you less uncomfortable; the founders who do it report measurably better outcomes. And you don’t need to be in crisis to start. In fact, the whole point is to start before crisis.

Move your body and quiet your mind. Researchers at Rutgers found that combining exercise and meditation twice a week for two months reduced depression symptoms by 40%. A controlled study. A meaningful result. Two things, twice a week, two months.

Don’t ignore what your body is telling you. This one is personal. I spent years pushing through warning signs that something was physically wrong because there was always a more urgent deliverable, always a launch that couldn’t wait. I put off doctor’s appointments. I skipped the routine tests most people are supposed to get. By the time I finally paid attention, I was dealing with something far more serious than it needed to be. That’s a story for another day, but the point is this: no product roadmap is worth more than finding out what’s happening inside your own body while you still have time to do something about it.

Admit what you’re carrying. To your co-founder. To your partner. To someone. The 81% who hide their stress aren’t protecting anyone. They’re compressing a spring that will eventually snap, and when it does, it takes out more than just them.

I never bought any goats. The books are probably still in a box somewhere. But I think about them sometimes when I catch myself answering emails at midnight or when another founder tells me everything is “going great” with the same hollow tone I used to have.

The goats were my brain screaming for an exit. The work had colonized every other part of my life until there was nothing left that felt like mine. And my brain, in its sleep-deprived desperation, decided the only logical solution was chèvre.

If you’re reading this and you recognized yourself somewhere in the last 2,000 words, I want you to know two things. First: you’re not alone, and the numbers prove it. Second: it’s fixable. The burnout, the isolation, the feeling that you can’t say any of this out loud. All of it is fixable. But you have to decide that fixing it matters as much as the next deliverable.

If you want to talk to somebody who once got so close to the edge that he almost threw away his career to go raise goats in a two-bedroom apartment, reach out. DM me on LinkedIn. I’m not selling anything. I just know what that 3 AM moment feels like, and nobody should have to sit in it alone.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7. Call or text 988.