What Founders Need Right Now

An employee at Dell recently described their office as a funeral.

Not struggling. Not difficult.

A funeral.

The context: Dell had started charging for espresso shots that used to be free. Small thing. But it landed on top of layoffs and impossible workloads.

The post surfaced a reply from Rocco Seyboth, a longtime software marketer, who named something bigger. "We're in the AI dread era," he said. "There's almost nobody who is feeling positive vibes about their job right now."

He's right.

CFOs at large U.S. companies mentioned "efficiency" on 307 conference calls last quarter — up from 219 a year earlier. Efficiency is everywhere as a goal. The people being asked to deliver it are burning out.

The same feelings and thoughts are happening in early-stage ventures. A 2024 Sifted survey found nearly half of all founders were considering quitting that year. The words they used: overworked, exhausted, broken. The EY Entrepreneur Barometer found that 54% said their outlook was more uncertain now than at the start of 2025.

That's the world your founders live in. And right now, the quiet work — underneath the programming and the demo days — matters more than it usually does. Founders still need mentors and warm introductions. But what they may need most are hope and security.

Psychologist Charles Snyder spent his career studying hope. Not the greeting-card version. His finding: Hope isn't a personality trait you either have or you don't. It's a skill — a clear goal, the ability to see multiple paths toward it, and the belief that you can actually walk one.

That last part is what separates hope from optimism. Optimism is passive. It's a feeling that things will probably be fine. Hope is active. You know where you're going, you can see the routes, and you believe you're capable of moving.

That belief doesn't survive in a vacuum. It needs an environment where it's safe to admit you don't know the route yet.

Harvard's Amy Edmondson spent years studying what makes teams perform. Her most counterintuitive finding came from hospitals. She expected the best teams to make fewer mistakes. They didn't. They reported more — because they felt safe enough to say something. The same dynamic shows up in aviation. When co-pilots don't feel safe correcting their captains, planes go down. The industry only changed when speaking up — even upward — became expected. Not punished.

Most of your founders are sitting on things they're not saying out loud. To their investors. Their co-founders. Their teams. The more uncertain the environment, the less they speak. And the less they speak, the worse it gets.

You, whether a venture leader or a manager, are one of the few people in a founder's or employee’s life whose job it is to hold both their potential and struggle at the same time. That's not a small thing.

The most useful thing you can do is show a person a path they couldn't see on their own. Not encouragement — a specific route. Two concrete options are worth more than a hundred encouraging words, because hope isn't a feeling. It's a map.

What makes that harder is that most programs are accidentally training founders to hide. When you celebrate the ones who project certainty, you teach the rest that confidence is what gets rewarded. A founder who can say I don't know what to do in your presence is a founder who will actually figure it out. Most of them never feel secure enough to say when they need directions.

And many have never heard, directly and specifically, that you believe they can do this. Not the cohort. Not in a speech. One founder, one conversation. Founders hear what's wrong far more often than they hear what's right.

AI will do a lot for startups. Much of it's already remarkable.

But hope? Safety? The sense that someone sees you, believes in you, isn't going anywhere?

That's yours to give.

With love and trust,

Pat

These are the questions I actually want answered. Hit reply. I would love to hear from you and will definitely respond.

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