SerpApi.Org
Humans generally abhor parasites, but we make exceptions for businesses.
Go online, and you’ll find a plethora of founders bragging about sleeping under their desks, living on energy drinks, canceling vacations, and working hundred-hour weeks. Yet nobody suspects anything like a tapeworm. They just call it “hustle.”
When you start a company, you enter into what biologists call a symbiotic relationship. You and your business affect each other in ways that go beyond leadership and work-life balance. You can grow together or die together.
It’s easy to track metrics that answer questions like, ” How is my company doing? and “How am I doing?” and still miss the most important question of all:
“How is our relationship doing?”
There are four main ways it can go.
Mutualism
Bees get nectar while pollinating flowers. Clownfish and sea anemones protect one another. Healthy companies operate in the same win/win way. Everybody benefits, and nobody is harmed.
Founders invest their leadership, judgment, and effort, and businesses produce opportunity, value, and wealth. As founders become more capable, companies become more profitable.
But you can’t create symbiotic success by being every organ in the organism. Delegation isn’t just a productivity hack. Gallup found that CEOs who delegate well generate more revenue and greatly outperform those who don’t. Buffer founder Joel Gascoigne learned the hard way. He totally burned out before deciding to redesign his company in a way that didn’t require his perpetual sacrifice.
Business parasitism
In nature, parasites hijack hosts and drain their resources. Tapeworms, ticks, and fleas happily feed on their hosts while harming them. Businesses can do the same.
Nobody boasts that their tapeworm gained weight, but X and LinkedIn are full of founders showcasing a growing company that’s nearly killing them.
In a 2025 founder survey, 83 percent reported high stress, 75 percent reported anxiety, and 54 percent said they burned out in the last year. A 2026 survey found 73 percent of California tech founders were experiencing persistent exhaustion and cynicism concealed beneath continued performance.
Burnout shouldn’t be a badge of honor; it should be a warning.
Even if revenue is rising, customers are clamoring, and investors are flashing cash, it doesn’t mean the symbiotic relationship is healthy. Parasites operate in stealth mode because they need the hosts alive to provide the good meal. It can be hard to realize they’re there.
Brian Balfour built one of the industry’s most respected growth companies without realizing he was headed for severe burnout. I got less than three hours of sleep each night for three years while helping a client build a multinational company across time zones. I knew it was a “sacrifice,” but I didn’t know it was collapsing my health and would take years to recover from.
Founder parasitism
If a founder acts like a tick, the company is likely to catch Lyme disease.Parasitic founders extract cash, control, attention, and ego while leaving the company weaker. Customer feedback gets ignored, and growth strategy shifts to protecting the founder’s reputation. Adam Neumann’s vision may have fueled WeWork’s amazing growth, but his founder-centric decisions fueled itscollapse.
It’s important to regularly ask (and honestly answer) this brutally uncomfortable question:
If I weren’t already CEO, would the board hire me today?
Mutual collapse
The final quadrant happens when mutualism breaks down.
Coral and algae help sustain one another unless the water warms up. If temperatures rise, coral weakens. As it weakens, it supports less algae. Less algae further weakens the coral, and they both enter a death spiral.
Startups can collapse the same way. Stress clouds judgment. Bad judgment weakens the business. The weaker business creates more stress. Each problem makes the next one more likely.
Nature doesn’t usually destroy things all at once. It works one feedback loop at a time.
Fundraising sprints can turn mutualism into parasitism. Rapid success can turn founders into prima donna parasites. Market changes can push things toward mutual collapse. And things usually drift before they break.
Hustling can’t fix this any more than watering every hour can help a dying houseplant growing in a closet. Nothing can stop markets from moving on or save products that customers truly don’t want.
Do a regular relationship check
Each week, ask yourself four questions:
- Is my business healthier than it was last week?
- Am I healthier than I was last week?
- If one of us is improving at the other’s expense, why?
- What’s one decision that moves us back toward mutualism?
Most founders measure revenue, runway, hiring, and customer growth. Few measure the health of the relationship that produces those numbers.
That’s the blind spot.
Your startup isn’t just a business. It’s a living partnership. Nurture the relationship, and both of you can thrive.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
“Click here to subscribe to the Inc. newsletter: inc.com/newsletters"
