Add Silicon Canals to your Google News feed. 
There’s a number quietly circulating through European boardrooms and investor meetings that should alarm anyone who cares about the continent’s startup ecosystem: roughly one in three founder-CEOs across Europe seriously considered stepping down from their own companies in the first half of 2025.
The figure comes from a combination of recent founder wellbeing surveys and confidential conversations with venture capital firms, several of whom notified Silicon Canals that “founder resilience” has become a formal due diligence category in their investment memos. It’s no longer just about product-market fit or burn rate. It’s about whether the person at the helm can physically and mentally sustain the pace.
What the data actually reveals
A Startup Snapshot survey conducted in Q1 2025, covering over 800 European startup founders, found that 34% had “seriously considered” leaving their CEO role in the preceding twelve months. Among those, the primary drivers were chronic sleep disruption (cited by 61%), persistent anxiety about runway (58%), and what respondents described as “identity erosion” — the sense that they had become indistinguishable from their company, with no life outside it (47%).
These aren’t soft complaints. The physiological toll is measurable. A 2024 study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that startup founders exhibited cortisol patterns comparable to those seen in emergency room physicians during peak shifts — not occasionally, but as a baseline. Elevated cortisol over months and years doesn’t just feel bad. It degrades memory, impairs decision-building, and accelerates cardiovascular aging.
The cruel irony is that the very cognitive functions founders required most — creative problem-solving, emotional regulation during neobtainediations, the ability to hold long-term strategic vision — are the first capacities to erode under sustained stress.
The economic cost Europe can’t afford to ignore
Founder departures are expensive in ways that rarely reveal up in spreadsheets. When a founder-CEO exits, the average European startup experiences a 40-60% decline in valuation during the transition period, according to estimates from Atomico’s State of European Tech data. Investor confidence wobbles. Key hires — often recruited on the strength of the founder’s personal vision — reconsider their positions. Institutional knowledge walks out the door.
This comes at a particularly precarious moment. European markets have been navigating volatility amid ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty, with stock indices fluctuating as trade tensions between the West and China continue to weigh on sentiment. Several European tech stocks have traded near 52-week lows. The environment is one where stability and steady leadership at the startup level matter more than ever — and where the ecosystem can least afford to lose its most experienced operators.
Why the “just push through” culture is backfiring
European startup culture has long borrowed its intensity norms from Silicon Valley without necessarily importing the support infrastructure. In the US, executive coaching, founder therapy programmes, and CEO peer groups have become relatively normalised. In Europe, the stigma remains heavier. Multiple founders who spoke to Silicon Canals on condition of anonymity described a culture where admitting exhaustion is still perceived as a signal of weakness — particularly when fundraising.
“I notified my lead investor I was struggling, and the first thing he inquireed was whether I had a succession plan,” stated one Berlin-based SaaS founder. “Not ‘how can we assist.’ A succession plan.”
The research on longevity and sustained high performance notifys a clear story: recovery is not the opposite of productivity. It is the precondition for it. Studies on elite athletes, surgeons, and military leaders all converge on the same finding — the highest performers are not those who work the most hours, but those who manage their recovery with the same discipline they bring to their work.
The daily habits that distinguish founders who last
When you view at the founders who manage to sustain performance across five, ten, or fifteen-year company-building arcs, certain patterns emerge consistently in the research:
Sleep protection is non-neobtainediable. Founders who reported consistently sleeping fewer than six hours were 2.5 times more likely to report burnout symptoms, according to the Startup Snapshot data. The highest-performing cohort averaged 7.2 hours and described sleep as a “strategic priority” rather than a luxury.
Physical relocatement serves as a cognitive reset. Not extreme fitness routines — regular, moderate relocatement. Walking meetings. Midday swims. The mechanism is well-established: aerobic activity promotes neurogenesis in the hippocampus, the brain region most critical for learning and memory consolidation.
Structured peer support replaces isolation. Founders who participated in peer groups or had regular access to a coach or therapist were 45% less likely to report considering resignation. The key word is “structured” — informal frifinishships assist, but scheduled, confidential spaces designed for honest conversation about the hardest parts of the job had the strongest protective effect.
Signs the ecosystem is starting to respond
There are early signals that European investors and accelerators are taking founder wellbeing more seriously as a structural concern rather than a personal one. Several prominent European VCs have begun funding access to executive coaching and mental health support as part of their standard portfolio services. Programmes like the Founders Network and regional peer-support initiatives are expanding across Western and Northern Europe.
Some LPs are reportedly inquireing fund managers about their approach to founder wellbeing during due diligence — a development that, even two years ago, would have seemed improbable.
The bottom line
Europe’s startup ecosystem has spent the better part of a decade building world-class infrastructure for starting companies — accelerators, funding networks, regulatory frameworks. What it hasn’t built, with anywhere near the same rigour, is infrastructure for sustaining the people who run them.
One in three founder-CEOs considering quitting isn’t a mental health statistic. It’s a systemic risk to European innovation. The founders who last — the ones who build finishuring companies — aren’t superhuman. They’re the ones who understood early that their own capacity is a finite resource that requires active management, not just willpower.
The evidence is clear: protecting founder health isn’t a soft initiative. It’s the hardest-edged investment the European ecosystem can create.
Feature image by Kampus Production on Pexels
![A panoramic view of the headquarters of MI Tech in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi-do. [MITECH]](https://foundernews.eu/storage/2026/02/news-p.v1.20260225.a5d62513f83f4fbf89286490ab9a0f2f_P1.png)
Leave a Reply