In the relentless world of startups, “work-life balance” often sounds like a fantasy. But for the founders we’ve spoken to, balance isn’t about switching off - it’s about learning when to breathe. Each has faced burnout head-on, and their stories reveal how modern tech leaders are redesigning success around sustainability rather than sacrifice.
Kirin Sinha, founder and CEO of Illumix, has spent nearly a decade merging the digital and physical worlds through augmented reality. But behind the innovation came exhaustion. “I thought I’d sleep after we shipped,” she laughed, recalling the all-nighters leading up to her company’s first major game launch. “And of course, it was the exact opposite.”
Her approach today isn’t balance - it’s intentional imbalance. She embraces periods of deep focus followed by deliberate reflection. “Headspace is everything in entrepreneurship,” she told us. Kirin carves out time to read, particularly The Alchemist, which she uses “to get perspective when you’re defining your own goal in your own way.”
For Kirin, mental clarity fuels creativity; recharging is part of R&D.
After decades in the energy sector, including senior roles at BP and Essar Energy, Ifty Nasir founded Vested, a platform that helps startups distribute equity to employees. His shift from oil executive to startup founder wasn’t just professional - it was philosophical. “At what stage do you have enough money?” he reflected, describing how personal loss led him to reassess his priorities.
Still, old habits die hard. “There are so many reasons entrepreneurs may want to walk away from things,” he admitted, “but you need a huge amount of tenacity and resilience.” Ifty channels that persistence into purpose. His decision to make Vested a remote-first company was as much about wellbeing as efficiency. “By 2018, we realized people were just commuting in to sit with headphones on,” he said. “So, we made it optional. It changed everything.”
For Ifty, balance isn’t time off - it’s giving people ownership and trust.
Michael Tessler, who co-founded BroadSoft in 1998 and sold it to Cisco two decades later for $1.9 billion, has learned to treat rest as strategy. “Sometimes the market just stalls,” he reflected. “What we do as entrepreneurs is work three times harder. What I should have done was take the week off and recharge.”
Today, as Managing Partner at True North Advisory, Tessler mentors founders to avoid that trap. He urges them to “spot the lull and rest in it,” reminding them that exhaustion rarely leads to insight. After years of leading global teams, he now works “with curiosity instead of pressure,” helping others build what he calls endurance with empathy.
From Grind to Growth
Across their journeys, a pattern emerges: these founders haven’t conquered burnout -they’ve learned from it. Kirin’s cycles of creative intensity, Ifty’s emphasis on collective ownership, and Tessler’s reflective pacing all point to a new kind of leadership. In tech, balance isn’t about stepping away from ambition. It’s about staying in the game long enough to make it meaningful.
“You can’t run after everything all at once,” Kirin said. “You need to execute at a really high level at what you do.”
That might just be the most balanced definition of success yet.
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