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Practice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
A panellist said founder burnout was a problem funders should design for
In short
On stage in Melbourne in 2024, a panellist disclosed being close to burnout and argued that investors, incubators and accelerators should build mental health support into their processes before asking founders to self manage.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Before the entrepreneurship panel at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne began, one of the panellists told Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, that they were close to burnout. Once they were on stage Gold asked whether he could share that, and the panellist agreed. “I’m hanging by a freaking thread”, the panellist said they had told him that morning. They were teetering on total burnout, did not know how to stop working at 150 kilometres an hour, and were absolutely shattered. They offered to give out hugs, and said they might need one themselves.
The panellist linked the exhaustion to two things at once: the life of an entrepreneur, and what they called the autistic condition. A driving purpose and a passion kept them going, they said. Without them they would be in a complete cave of existential horror. They described autistic people, themselves included, as very prone to burnout, because they were managing so much more at any given time.
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Sources the story draws on
- The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families (opens in a new tab), Springer (SpringerLink)
- The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families (bibliographic record) (opens in a new tab), IDEAS/RePEc
- Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew: Defining Autistic Burnout (opens in a new tab), Autism in Adulthood 2(2), via PDXScholar, Portland State University
- StartupWA Report Reveals WA Founder Mental Health Crisis, Meshpoints Opens $150,000 Wellbeing Challenge (opens in a new tab), Startup News
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