Asher's Blog

This is the version of a founder we all see: the person who appears at team meetings with a plan, speaks to customers with conviction, answers investors with confidence and continues describing the future as though it remains completely visible, even when the present has become uncertain. People see the decisions, the energy and the belief, but they rarely see what happens afterwards, when the meetings are over and the founder is alone with the questions that could not be brought into the room.

This is why I sometimes say that founders do not get tired in public. I do not mean that founders are not allowed to be human, admit difficulty or ask for help, and I certainly do not mean that exhaustion should be hidden until it becomes a mental-health crisis. I mean that founders carry a particular leadership responsibility: they must not transfer every unprocessed fear in their minds to the people who depend on them for direction.

A founder’s emotional state does not remain private simply because it begins inside the founder. The team watches the founder’s language, energy and decisions for signals about the future of the company. When the business enters a difficult period, employees are not only asking whether the strategy will work; they are also trying to determine whether the person who first persuaded them to believe still believes.

That creates a difficult balance. A founder must tell the truth about what is happening without making the team carry panic that has not yet been converted into facts, choices and action. The organisation needs honesty, but it also needs leadership. Those responsibilities are not opposites, although combining them requires far more emotional discipline than most people realise.

The founder carries more than a job title

In an established company, belief can be distributed across a recognised brand, a healthy balance sheet, longstanding systems and layers of experienced management. In a young company, much of that institutional confidence has not yet been built, which means that employees, customers and investors often place unusual weight on the founder’s judgement and behaviour.

Early employees usually join before every question has been answered. They accept that the product may change, the market may be uncertain and resources may remain limited for some time. What holds the group together is not certainty in the ordinary sense; it is a shared belief that the problem is worth solving, the company is capable of learning and the leaders will continue searching for a credible way forward.

The founder therefore carries part of the team’s belief. This does not mean employees have no personal agency or that the founder must become the centre of everybody’s emotional life. It means that when evidence is incomplete and the organisation is under pressure, people naturally look towards the person who has the broadest view of the business and the greatest responsibility for its survival.

Research on emotional contagion in organisations helps explain why this matters. Organisational-behaviour scholars Sigal Barsade, Olivia O’Neill and others have examined how emotions move through groups and shape cooperation, judgement and performance. A leader’s mood is not mechanically copied by every employee, and sadness or concern does not automatically produce failure, but emotional signals influence how people interpret ambiguous situations. If a founder communicates uncontrolled panic, the team may begin protecting itself before the founder has even established that the situation is hopeless.

The founder’s task is therefore not to perform happiness. It is to create enough emotional steadiness for the organisation to examine reality and act intelligently.

What my team did not see

Less than two years ago, I went through an extremely challenging period in my business. I suspect that when I tell the complete story in the future, many people who worked with me or observed the company from outside will be surprised by how difficult that period actually was.

During the day, I attended strategy and operational meetings, reviewed work, made decisions and continued helping the team see where we were going. I had to remain present because the business could not pause while I processed the seriousness of what we were facing. People still needed clarity, customers still needed to be served and important obligations still had to be met.

My nights looked very different. I spent them thinking deeply about how we would get through the situation, examining alternatives and trying to identify the decisions that would give the business a way forward. I developed a smaller strategic group around me because a founder should not attempt to carry a genuine crisis entirely alone. We considered different routes, tested assumptions and worked towards a model that could sustain both the company’s immediate responsibilities and its longer-term ambition.

I did not tell the wider team every fear that crossed my mind because many of those fears were not conclusions; they were possibilities that still needed to be investigated. If I had presented every worst-case scenario as though it were already happening, I would have created anxiety without creating understanding. The team would have received the emotional weight of the problem without possessing the information, authority or context required to solve it.

However, not showing panic was different from lying. I still had a responsibility to communicate what people needed to know, make difficult decisions when necessary and avoid promises that the facts could no longer support. Leadership during a crisis is not the art of convincing everybody that nothing is wrong. It is the ability to say, with honesty, “This is what we know, this is what we do not yet know, this is what we are doing about it, and this is what I need from you now.”

Truth and confidence must remain together

Some founders confuse inspiration with permanent optimism. They believe that protecting the team’s belief requires them to describe every metric positively, conceal serious risks and continue making confident promises after the underlying assumptions have changed. That approach may postpone a difficult conversation, but it eventually destroys the very trust the founder was trying to preserve.

People can handle difficult news better than leaders often assume, especially when the news is delivered with context, respect and a credible response. What damages a team is discovering that leadership knew the truth but chose to manufacture a different reality. Once employees conclude that the founder’s confidence is merely performance, even genuinely positive updates begin to sound suspicious.

The founder must therefore distinguish between emotional containment and informational concealment. Emotional containment means processing fear before communicating, separating facts from imagination and speaking in a way that helps people act. Informational concealment means withholding material facts that people require to make decisions about their work, livelihoods or responsibilities. The first is part of mature leadership; the second can become manipulation.

Jim Collins’s account of the Stockdale Paradox in Good to Great offers a useful model. The principle is to retain faith that you will ultimately prevail while confronting the most difficult facts of the current reality. The two sides belong together. Confidence without facts becomes delusion, while facts without any belief in the possibility of progress can turn into surrender.

A founder in a difficult season should be able to tell the team that revenue has fallen, a deal has been delayed or the company must reduce costs, while still explaining why the problem is solvable and what decisions are being taken. People do not need a leader who denies the storm; they need a leader who can read the weather, protect the vessel and continue making sound decisions.

Protect the obligations that preserve trust

When a company is under pressure, the founder’s priorities become visible through the obligations the company continues to honour. Salaries and agreed employee benefits are among the most important because employees have organised their lives around the expectation that the company will keep its word.

If the business can no longer support its current team size, it may be better to make a difficult reduction than to retain everyone while repeatedly failing to pay them. Layoffs are painful and must be handled lawfully, humanely and transparently, but avoiding a necessary decision does not protect employees if the eventual result is months of unpaid salaries and a disorderly collapse.

This is why founders must watch cash flow before the emergency becomes visible. Payroll dates, tax and pension obligations, customer funds, critical suppliers and debt commitments should not appear as surprises. The leadership team should understand the company’s runway, the timing of receivables and the conditions under which expenditure must be reduced.

Investors also deserve honesty and responsible stewardship. A founder who has accepted risk capital has a duty to work seriously towards multiplying it, but no responsible person can guarantee that every investment will succeed. The duty is to use capital intelligently, report material developments truthfully, avoid reckless decisions and keep searching for a value-preserving outcome while a credible path remains.

Sometimes that outcome will be continued growth. At other times, it may require a pivot, partnership, acquisition, sale or orderly wind-down. A founder should try to end the startup story well, even when the ending is not the one originally imagined. Ending well means preserving as much value as reasonably possible, treating employees and customers fairly, communicating with investors and refusing to disappear simply because the story has become uncomfortable.

Carrying belief does not mean refusing to pivot

The team’s belief should not be attached so rigidly to one product that changing direction feels like betrayal. Early investors and employees often back the founder and founding team partly because they believe those people can learn faster than the market changes. When evidence shows that the original approach is not working, preserving belief may require a thoughtful pivot rather than stubborn repetition.

A founder should explain why the previous hypothesis no longer appears sufficient, what has been learned and why the new direction offers a better opportunity. This is different from changing ideas every few weeks because the founder is anxious. A credible pivot grows from evidence: customer behaviour, revenue, product usage, regulation, cost structure or a newly discovered advantage.

The founder continues to carry belief by demonstrating that the company’s conviction is not blind attachment to a feature. The deeper belief is that the team can understand a meaningful problem, create value and keep learning until it finds a model capable of enduring.

This is particularly important for founders building in Nigeria and other African markets, where currency movements, infrastructure limitations, policy changes and the cost of capital can invalidate assumptions that appeared reasonable only months earlier. A business may still be solving a valuable problem while needing to change its pricing, distribution, market, financing structure or product scope. The founder’s confidence should be strong enough to support adaptation rather than making adaptation look like defeat.

The founder needs somewhere to be tired

Saying that founders should not spread unprocessed exhaustion across the company does not mean they should have nowhere to express it. A founder who has no safe place to be uncertain will eventually become isolated, emotionally numb or incapable of making good decisions.

The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon arising from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, characterised by exhaustion, growing mental distance or cynicism towards work and reduced professional effectiveness. Although burnout is not classified by the WHO as a medical condition, its description is important because it shows that exhaustion cannot be solved simply by demanding more inspiration from oneself.

Founders need trusted spaces in which they can speak without destabilising the organisation. Depending on the person and the seriousness of the situation, this may include a spouse, close friend, co-founder, board member, mentor, therapist, pastor, executive coach or another experienced founder. The important thing is that the listener must be capable of helping the founder process reality rather than merely amplifying fear, leaking confidential information or offering comforting advice without understanding the business.

Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety is also relevant. Psychological safety does not mean removing standards or allowing every emotion to dictate organisational decisions. It means creating an environment in which people can admit mistakes, raise risks, ask for help and challenge assumptions without being humiliated. Founders need that environment too, even if the people who provide it are not the entire workforce.

There should be rooms in which the founder can say, “I am tired. I am worried. I do not yet know the answer.” The purpose of those rooms is not to remain indefinitely in despair; it is to convert private anxiety into clearer thinking, wise counsel and responsible action before returning to lead the wider organisation.

Recovery is part of the work

During prolonged pressure, founders often treat recovery as a reward they will permit themselves after the crisis has ended. The problem is that some crises last for months or years, and judgement deteriorates when a person operates continuously without meaningful rest, perspective or connection.

Recovery may involve sleep, exercise, prayer, therapy, time with family or a temporary reduction in exposure to nonessential decisions. It can also involve changing physical and intellectual environments. A road trip, a short journey, a hike, time in a different city or attendance at a thoughtful event can interrupt the narrow mental loop in which every thought has become another version of the same problem.

The founder does not need to know in advance exactly what insight will emerge from changing environments. New conversations can expose assumptions that had become invisible. Meeting another founder may reveal that a supposedly unique crisis is a recognised stage of company building, or that somebody elsewhere has developed a model worth adapting.

I would encourage founders to speak with other founders deliberately, including people they do not yet know personally. A respectful message on LinkedIn can explain the challenge briefly and request a short conversation. Not everybody will respond, and no founder should disclose sensitive company information carelessly, but a few candid conversations can produce useful perspective. Sometimes an acquaintance formed around a difficult question becomes a genuine friendship.

Events can serve the same purpose when approached intentionally. The objective is not to collect business cards or escape the company through constant networking; it is to meet people, encounter different models and give the mind enough new material to see possibilities it could not see while trapped inside the same routine.

Recovery should also include structural changes. If one person is approving every decision, holding every customer relationship and solving every operational problem, a weekend away will not correct the system that created the exhaustion. The founder may need stronger leaders, clearer delegation, improved dashboards, fewer priorities or the courage to stop work that no longer justifies its cost.

Let the team see humanity without making it carry helplessness

There is a risk that the phrase “founders don’t get tired in public” could be interpreted as an instruction to become emotionally inaccessible. That would be a mistake. Teams do not need founders who pretend to be invulnerable, because invulnerability makes honesty unsafe and encourages everyone else to hide their own struggles.

A founder can say, “This has been a demanding quarter, and I have felt the weight of it,” without saying, “I have no idea whether we will survive, and all of you should be afraid.” The first statement acknowledges humanity while preserving leadership responsibility. The second transfers an unprocessed burden to people who may have no ability to act on it.

The distinction is not whether emotion is visible. It is whether the emotion has been processed enough to be communicated responsibly. A founder may acknowledge disappointment, apologise for a mistake, explain that a decision was difficult or admit that an answer has not yet been found. In fact, appropriate vulnerability can strengthen trust because it shows that confidence does not require pretending to know everything.

What the team should not receive is helplessness from the person responsible for leading the search for a solution. If the founder genuinely has no remaining belief in the company, the honest response is not to perform inspiration forever; it is to examine alternatives, involve the board and make a responsible decision about what comes next.

A practical discipline for difficult seasons

When a founder enters a difficult period, I would recommend a disciplined process rather than relying on motivation alone.

First, establish the facts. Separate confirmed numbers and events from feared possibilities. Determine the runway, obligations, revenue trajectory, critical dependencies and decisions that cannot be postponed.

Second, create a small circle for complete honesty. This group should have enough context, discretion and competence to interrogate the situation without turning every discussion into either panic or empty encouragement.

Third, decide what the wider team needs to know. Communicate material facts, explain the response and make responsibilities clear. Do not provide false certainty, but do not announce every unfinished fear as though it were a conclusion.

Fourth, protect trust-bearing obligations, especially salaries, customer money, sensitive data, statutory commitments and promises on which other people have materially relied. If the company cannot sustain its structure, make difficult decisions early enough to preserve dignity and continuity.

Fifth, generate alternatives. Consider changes to product, market, pricing, team structure, financing, partnerships and operating costs. Do not wait for one promised investor, customer or partner to become the only possible rescue.

Sixth, build recovery into the operating plan. The founder’s capacity is a company resource, but it is not an infinite one. Rest, counsel, exercise, spiritual life and time away from the immediate environment should be treated as part of sustaining judgement rather than evidence of insufficient commitment.

Finally, keep reviewing the evidence. Perseverance is valuable when the company is learning and credible possibilities remain, but repeating the same action without new information is not automatically courage. The founder must remain hopeful enough to continue and honest enough to change.

What it really means not to get tired in public

Founders do get tired. They experience fear, disappointment, loneliness and moments when the responsibility feels greater than their present capacity. The public may not see those moments, and sometimes even the team will not understand their full weight.

The answer is not for founders to become actors who manufacture certainty. It is for them to develop the emotional discipline to choose where, when and how uncertainty is expressed. The team deserves truth, but it also deserves truth that has been organised into direction. Investors deserve honesty, customers deserve continuity and employees deserve leaders who take obligations seriously.

When I think about the difficult period I navigated, I do not remember it as a season in which I never felt tired. I remember it as a season in which tiredness could not be permitted to make the most important decisions. During the day, I continued to lead; at night, I searched for a way forward; and around me, I built a smaller group capable of helping me think until possibilities became a strategy.

That is the responsibility behind the statement that founders do not get tired in public. It does not deny exhaustion; it gives exhaustion an appropriate place. It asks the founder to remain truthful without becoming destabilising, hopeful without becoming delusional and vulnerable without handing the organisation a burden it cannot carry.

The founder may not always have the answer, but the founder must continue to lead the search for one.

References and further reading

• World Health Organization, “Burn-out an occupational phenomenon”.
• Sigal G. Barsade and Olivia A. O’Neill, “Emotional Contagion in Organizational Life,” Research in Organizational Behavior, Volume 38, 2018.
• Amy C. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety Does Not Equal ‘Anything Goes’” and The Fearless Organization.
• Jim Collins, Good to Great, particularly the discussion of the Stockdale Paradox.
• Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, particularly the chapters on the psychological pressure of leading a company through difficult periods.