Hustle Nearly Cost Me Everything | Adrian Locher, Serial Founder and Investor

I started pushing myself really, really hard. I started building two companies after my previous one at the same time, one located in San Francisco, the other one located in Berlin. I clocked in 120 flights in one year and then my life fell apart.

This is Melanie. And this is Christian. You're listening to Follow the Gradient, the weekly podcast with actionable insights about how to build a business while staying sane.

Welcome back to another episode of Follow the Gradient. Today we're diving into a every founder and every operator in the startup world, but honestly also beyond, has dealt with in some form or shape. It's this topic that is always there in the background, lurking beneath the pitch decks, funding rounds, the relentless push to build the next big thing. Yet it's rarely talked about openly. Or worse, just dismissed as, hey, this is just part of the hustle, deal with it. We're talking about mental health, about burnout and what happens when the weary drive that makes you successful starts to break you. Sure, these conversations happen, but usually behind closed doors. And when Christian and I went to look for founders who have openly and constructively shared their experiences and learnings, we realized how rare it is to talk about it in front of a microphone. That's why I remember so vividly when Adrian Locher, our guest today, told me about the moment he stepped onto a startup stage and for the first time in public, opened it up about his burnout, how he dealt with it, what he learned and what it cost him. It was one of those moments where I thought, man, more people need to hear this because even the most accomplished founders aren't immune to these challenges. So for those of you who don't know Adrian yet, he has built incredible companies. starting with his first venture at just 14 years old. And since then, he has co-founded several successful startups, including Dyneel, one of Switzerland's largest e-commerce platform, and Merantix, an AI group with three pillars. VC, an investment firm, an 80 people strong consulting firm, and thirdly, an ecosystem part with AI campus, which includes 1,500 members from 100 companies and the AI house that happens during the World Economic Forum each year. So on paper, it looks as if Adrian has it all. But his story is a stark reminder that what we see on the surface rarely tells the whole truth. Now, before we dive into this very insightful and important discussion, a quick note. This podcast is our side hustle to help founders navigate the chaos of startup life. If you find it valuable, subscribe to our free newsletter at followthegradient.io. This week's edition features exclusive insights from Adrian that he hasn't shared here on the podcast.

All right, but now let's get into this conversation. Welcome to the show, Adrian. So great to have you here. Now we dive directly into the topic. In the startup ecosystem, there's this unspoken rule kind of that you hustle, you grind, you push through. But as a recent Baldurton report about founders well-being highlighted, 70 % of founders and CEOs agreed that burnout due to stress is a really significant problem in the startup ecosystem. Now you yourself have built and scaled multiple companies. What's been your experience navigating this really intense world? I'll get right into it and start with what's most important for this conversation. And this is that I was going into a burnout or let's call it depression at the highest point of my career. After exiting my previous company, I basically stumbled into a phase where I was pushing myself even harder because I was like, okay, now I've had this success and I want to continue being successful and even more successful. And I started pushing myself really hard. I started building two companies after my previous one at the same time, one located in San Francisco, the other one located in Berlin. I clocked in the 120 flights in one year. And then my life fell apart.

Maybe because we're directly in the whole situation, if you look back, mean, sounds, mean, falling apart, a lie falling apart, I mean, that's already the obvious sign. But what were like triggers or red flags where you really thought, hey, this is no longer working. And how did it materialize in your daily life? Because there is this... Positive stress, yeah, like I don't need sleep, always on adrenaline, but there is a kind of point of no return, so to say. And what was it for you? You know, obviously now there's a lot of things I know and I have learned and I've changed and I can also feel myself much better today. Back then I didn't know I had symptoms, know, bad sleep, negative thoughts, spirals. I was very irritable. I generally didn't feel really well. And now looking back, I can totally see that. Back then I might have spotted some signs. But I kept pushing because that's what I knew. Pushing myself was something that made me incredibly successful as a founder, as an entrepreneur, and yet it broke me as a person. And of course that's stuff I know now, but back then also because there's so little talk about this and so little people openly speaking about, I just wasn't aware. And that is one of the reasons why I'm also very open about this, because I think it's a really important part of any journey. And we can only change things when we bring that to attention and create awareness for the negative sides of being a founder, of being an entrepreneur.

And what would you do differently in hindsight or what is what now that you have learned? Because there are people who seem to be able to have two companies or two things in two different time zones and stuff like that. So there must be something where you say this is not healthy. This is not under control. It's interesting. I do not know a single person that is very successful, that was not struggling with mental health, burnout, and or depression. It's just, we don't know because people usually don't talk about it. And on my journey, then I learned I started to also really dig into that topic. And there was one study that was done in, think, 2019 that revealed entrepreneurs, founders are two times more likely to suffer from depression, three times more likely to struggle with addiction, and 11 times more likely to receive a bipolar diagnosis than the average population. So this is really something that was a wake-up call for myself being like, okay, apparently it's normal. I'm not wrong. There's nothing wrong with myself, but it there's a lot wrong with myself, how I'm operating right now, how am I reacting to things and how much I'm pushing myself. And I think the biggest learning for myself was the acceptance of the fact that Some of my biggest strengths are also the biggest dangers to destroy myself and they're inherently linked to each other. think it was Tolstoy who said that the biggest and best traits of your characters are also inherently linked like a medal with the worst traits of your character. And you can't have one without the other. So

My learning was okay. need to accept the downsides of my character, my personality. And the biggest question in life is finding a way to manage, to find a balance with these two sides. So there is a struggle and I'm still struggling with a lot of stuff. The thing that changed is I'm much more aware of these. nuances and small things, I can find a much better balance now. And also I see the early signs of feeling unwell much earlier on so I can react to it. And when you zoom back to this moment, what were the first steps that you took to actively do something about it and like really to get out of this hole of depression and not knowing where your head is? You know, maybe we start one step earlier and when I say my life was falling apart, then I really mean it. And as it breaks my heart still today to talk about this, I missed the birth of my son because I was not there. I, I missed time and I did other things and I missed the birth moment of my son, which was my second child. I was very involved in the first one. And yet I missed the birth and I completely lost access to myself. I lost access to my back then wife. We separated, we divorced. This was really the lowest point in my life. And I had so much mental and physical pain at this very moment that I couldn't move anymore.

I could move forward, backward, left or right. And I was so much used to this pattern when something was not working, pushing harder, putting more energy on it. And at this very moment, I didn't have the energy anymore and that couldn't move anymore. And then there was this thought at some point that came up, okay, but if I cannot move outside, then maybe I need to move inside. And this is what really started my whole journey to get to know myself much better and figure all these things out that I've now learned. And when you now look back and you say, I now figured it out better and I now see the signs earlier. Like for those listening who are in a similar situation or just cannot move anymore and just think the only solution is that I even unpack in more hours. What do you advise based also on your experience? Maybe it's not what for other works, but what works for you to really make the shift? Because it's very hard to go from. 300 % to going inwards and taking care of yourself. I think there's a lot of things around this question. It's very deep. But I one thing that I learned and embraced is that it's perfectly okay to seek help. It's perfectly okay to be open about what's bothering you with your closest circle. And then you also realize that people start to open up.

around these things. So when I say I don't know a single successful person who was not struggling with this is well, as soon as you start talking about this more openly, people also usually start to share their experiences and how they struggle with things and how they deal with it. And when I say asking for help, I also mean therapy. So at this point, when I realized, okay, I need to go inside and obviously I had no clue how I started seeking therapy and I started doing therapy. And this was a tremendous revelation for me that there are certain things in your brain, in your body that you're not able to see until someone else from the outside helps you to uncover. And if you think about it, you know, for a long time, and I think it's not that anymore these days, but for quite a long time, and maybe also even in our parents' generation, going to a therapist was like a stigma. You don't do that. You're not sick. And if you think about it, we have people helping us in all situations of life. You know, in business, we have consultants, we have personal coaches for sports and yet... the most important part of ourselves, like our mental health, why don't we seek help there as well from the outside? And I think that was the biggest game changer in my life, realizing it's totally okay taking care of yourself and figuring these things out with the help of others. you know, In this therapy, one concept that I learned, it's very simple actually, is that you can try to organize life in three buckets. There are other concepts with, you know, more nuances and they're more complex, but this very simple com, but three buckets is, there's one bucket for business. There's one bucket for family and friends. And most importantly, there is one bucket for.

yourself. And if you only fill one or two of these buckets, then you will not have a balance in life. So you need to be very aware that there's three buckets and you need to carve out time for yourself so you can have a healthy balance. Especially you were talking about the impact it had on you as a father, also on your whole family situation. How do you protect today your life and your bucket of family and also people that mean a lot to you? How do you protect that? Because you're still like a very successful entrepreneur and you also have a lot of startups in your portfolio. So you could always work. And that is the mantra, I think, in startup land. Yeah, you know, I have rebuilt my life and I have rebuilt in it in a different way with very different priorities. And, know, first of all, I think with my ex-wife, we realized that we weren't the right partners to each other, for each other. So there was nothing wrong with one or the other side, but we weren't just not made for each other. And I think that then led us to a very calm. amicable separation and also led into a very beautiful co-parenting that we have with our kids, where we actually share the custody in a 50-50 manner. Kids are with me for one week, then they're with mom, and then they're with me for another week again. And I think this has changed also the way I think about family. At this point when I was struggling, and I'm heartbroken to say that, but family became a burden. to me. And it's terrible, right? If you say, if you think about that, but it's how I felt at that very moment. Now, family became a source of energy for me that I very consciously curate and maintain. This co-parenting situation now has led to a setup where the kids are with me for a week. And during that week, my clear focus is family and

kids to be very concrete. day starts with getting the kids to school, spending the time together in the morning. Then I'm going to the office or whatever meetings. And then around five, I pick up the kids from school and then from five to nine, it's kids time. So I'm not available for meetings unless the house is on fire and it's quite the high bar. And then after nine, when the kids are in bed, I'm available again. And I do all my calls with my founders and I can do other calls with the West coast people, but from five to nine, I'm not available. And the big change of that led to much less of this guilt, of this guilt feeling that you have, you know, when you're working on your business, then you feel guilty about not being with the family. When you're with the family, you feel guilty, stop working for the business. So separating these things, carving out time that I then spend much more conscious. know, in the early years when I had kids, I was trying to manage, juggle situations where I was with the kids. I was on calls at the same time. then As you mentioned earlier, when your kids react to you, right. And whenever you're busy, it's definitely the moment where your kids will come and want something from you and then you can't give it. And then it starts feeling bad. It starts escalating. So in, in being a bit more strict in separating these things and very consciously spending the time, you actually create a lot of freedom. You talked about how you rebuild your life and how you rebuild that balance between business, mental health and personal life. And I think in the startup scene, there's sometimes seems to be an almost glorified 24 seven grinding mentality. And I think there was also Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb talking about how he

worked 82, a hundred hours a week in the early years of Airbnb, but now after the IPO, he still works 82, a hundred hours because there's always something going on. And interestingly, he also talked about the feeling of loneliness he had at times and the hard stuff going through. What is your take on, is it actually possible to build a successful business without these huge sacrifices or without this grinding mentality? There's two things to that. First of all, no, I don't think it's possible to build a successful company without making sacrifices. That's the hard truth. And second, I don't think it's the right mindset to do 80 to a hundred hours every week for the whole journey. The way I think about entrepreneurship is it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. If you think about high performance sports and how athletes operate, they have three stages. First stage is training. Then there's competition stage. Then there is the recovery stage. And there's no way you can jump the third stage. Otherwise you will drain your energy, will drain your body and it won't work. You won't get to high performance, really high performance again. So being conscious about that and being conscious about when you need to push super hard, i.e. compete when you're more in a training mode and when you're in the recovery mode, I think is the base for real long-term success. Can you expand more on these almost measures to make sure that you have a recovery mode and that you move from training and then competition to recovery? What are the boundaries you have felt work best to when you have family time or when you have friends time that you really find this recovery, despite the fact that the business just keeps on spinning?

think it's about knowing yourself. It's about figuring out what it is it, what is it that makes you recover? Everybody's very individual, right? So it can be many things, but the key here is to figure out what is it that is truly recovering you. So it's truly for yourself. And that might be family, but that also might be, and quite likely also really spending time with yourself where you only invest in yourself. I think, you know, for me, meditation, traveling to other countries, doing sports, workouts are ways to recover. Reading philosophy, reading books, spending time in deep talks. is a way to, is a way to recover for me that I now plan very consciously into my schedule. And it's non-negotiable. Right. I set blockers. I do make vacations where I'm sometimes not available. And I do that very consciously because I know this is the way for me to really recover. Skiing is another thing that makes me truly connect to nature myself and really gives me the ability to wind down. But it's very individual, right? So I think first of all, figuring out what it is that is truly giving you the opportunity to recover is the key fact here. What advice would you give founders or people in a leadership position to foster that type of awareness and culture in their teams, in the company, knowing that also they have to place sometimes a lot of demands on their employees, on their teams, but at the same time, they also need to be aware that their employees also

rely on that concept or have to maybe learn that concept of the three buckets which you just mentioned. You know, one thing is to talk. The better thing is to walk. So in being a role model and explaining how you think about these things, and then also how you act on these things, making it very transparent, I think is the key thing here. And you don't want to say, you don't want to tell people what they should do, right? Cause it's so individual, but in clear that What you do is also about self care and about, you know, these recovery phases and that they're important, creates awareness in people. And I think takes away the stigma of, you know, being offline, being off. Because as you mentioned earlier, this is really something that is deeply rooted in our startup culture. This feeling of, need to be available for 24 hours on seven days. And we know it's not healthy. Yes. There are phases where it's necessary. And this is also something I made very clear. You know, I'm like, I take care of myself and I'm responsible for myself, but I'm also responsible that the company works well. So if it's not working well, I am expected to be there, but I can be there also to the full extent because I have recovered before my batteries are charged. What do you say to founders who are concerned about showing weakness, that they always need to project strength and maybe they want to actively show that they are putting focus on their recovery, that they are also just human. They do mistakes. They have bad times, maybe longer bad times, or they have struggles. What do you say to them?

I would say stop bullshitting yourself mostly and start creating trust by being an authentic leader. And when thinking about the learnings from this phase for me, one thing really was in what kind of team do I need around myself to be the best version of myself? And that first of all involves self-knowledge. Knowing what you're good at and what you're not good at and knowing where you need other people to complete yourself and managing people around you that are really great requires building a lot of trust. You only have high performance teams with a super high level of trust and trust is created when people understand you and when people feel that the way you're operating is authentic in being transparent about what you got at and whatnot. And also what might bother you, you're not showing weakness, I think, but you're creating much more trust, commitment also to go for the big goals. I want to go back to one thing you said in the very beginning about you had in retrospect, a lot of early signs, right? That you were moving towards a point where everything will be falling apart. Giving advice to the people who may be in that situation and don't realize it, or they have a slight understanding that there might be something off, but also maybe challenges to acknowledge that or to deal with that. What were for you the early signs people really should pay attention to? That's a great question. And I thought about that also for a very long time and I still do. So it's still part of my journey reflecting myself, of course. You know, in the early days, I always thought building is what drives me. As a kid, I started building wooden cars. Then I started building computers. Then I started building software. Then I started building companies. So I'm a builder. And I always thought that's the main thing that drives me.

In this super critical phase, I also realized that fear was driving me. Fear of not being successful, fear of not being loved, fear of not being recognized. And I started to understand fear as the most important human emotion. And there's a lot of evolutionary reasons why that is. because we are the people who survive because we were more afraid of others and other things. I started to understand fear as not something negative, but something extremely valuable as a KPI that something is off. Something is going on that is not right and needs attention. And a lot of these early signs, I could then at the end, translate actually into fear. And when I feel that today and it manifests in very different ways, but when you then start looking at it a little deeper, I myself then usually realize, but it's something that I'm afraid of. And then I'm like, great. My body, my brain tells me that something is off. So I need to look into it. I need to figure things out. And then I can. unpack it and basically also act upon it. So acknowledging that something is off and I'm not doing well. think for me in the beginning was the biggest hurdle, right? Because this self acceptance of I'm not well for me was the biggest obstacle in the beginning because I was like, I'm always great. And it was just not imaginable in the beginning that I could feel bad. I could feel sad. I would always put more energy and then move on. So stopping and taking a break, going inside was not part of my way to operate. And today it is. And so I take time to look at these things and think about it, reflect about it. And then I start acting upon it. That's, I think, the biggest change that

happened in my modus operandi. And you really need to admit it to yourself in order to actually act on it and build again in a sense. Now, like we have talked a lot about you and what your early signals are. We also talked about being a role model. I truly believe that if you say there is that you should take time off, but you always write your employees at three o'clock in the morning on a Saturday. I'm not sure like what you want to achieve, but it's not authentic. They also are intelligent enough that somehow they then interpret that as maybe you don't mean it, what you say. So walking the talk is truly important, but how do you as a leader also spot early signs? Because what I found, and you also talked about that, it took you quite a while actually be so honest with yourself to also have the self-esteem to talk about it, to make space. And we all know, I mean, I had. a lot of interactions with investors where they were proud or excited that some founders would reply at three o'clock in the morning and know it wasn't during fundraising, but just in general. So how do you as a leader also spot early signs and help maybe those who are first-time founders and haven't realized it yet that it is a marathon and not a sprint always? You know, the way I work with my founders and our portfolio companies, it was a pretty close, is a pretty close way, right? Because we're early stage investors. So we're there in the first days, in the first hours. So it's quite intense and it also builds a really good relationship. And whenever I see first signs of unhealthy behavior, I just talk to people. I bring it up.

And I'm like, look, we need to talk about KPIs. We need to talk about growth. We need to talk about the next funding round, but we also need to talk about you because you're the company's most important resource. So if you fail, the rest fails too. And there's this very simple image that he can tell people, you know, in the airplane, when they explain the emergency procedures, it's about putting the mask on yourself first. before then helping others. So if you're not doing well, you cannot be a great resource for the company, for your team. So I directly bring that up and then also do mentoring coaching conversations. I carve out the time whenever it's needed, whether it's 11 PM or six in the morning, because everything else is blocked. I will make the time also on the weekends, just to show the importance of topic and create this awareness. Yeah, I think it's so important. now if you could go back to Adrian who didn't realize what is going on and who was hustling and putting in more hours, like what would you say to him at the lowest point of your life now looking back? That's a fantastic and almost philosophical question, right? Because I was also asking myself a lot of times whether I could have become who I am today without going through that really difficult, really painful phase. And I'm also asking myself whether I needed that pain to change.

I don't know quite honest, quite honestly, what the answer to this question is. think having, if I have had the awareness of these things earlier on, I probably would have reacted earlier. Maybe I could have avoided the lowest lows that I experienced, which is what I can now today, right? Because I know these things, I have almost developed the toolbox for myself how to deal with these kinds of situations. I don't need to go to these lows anymore and not the lowest lows. Yeah, there's the lows, but I know how to avoid the lowest lows. And I think that's why I don't really know what it takes to make someone aware without really experiencing these kinds of situations. What I can say for sure is, is now in, I think about the founder interactions I'm having these days and when I help people spotting these signs much earlier, when you then react, you can really change the trajectory which you're on. And maybe just one thing here, what I find very important is that, like you said, like you wouldn't be where you are today. Maybe, we don't know because we only have one life. But, and this is why I appreciate it so much that you actually speak about it because what I think is very important for people listening, you don't need to go through this on your own, like to the lowest low because others like you speak about it and can also build the awareness. And I think everyone needs to do their own experience, that I find makes a difference to people around. So not everyone needs to go through that on their own. And that I find is a very important learning also. This is also why we do follow the gradients to help people out there.

So it's a No, totally. I think this is also why I spend so much time talking about these kinds of things to my founders, besides all the other super important things around creating growth and hiring financing companies and pushing ahead. I really take quite some time. do, we do founders retreats every year with all the portfolio founders where mental health always plays a vital role, creating the awareness for it. I do a lot of mentoring and coaching also on the student side of things with Start, where I'm very much engaged. And yeah, the biggest driver for me is really, or the biggest motivation really is being able to stop people from going to the lowest lows and being very truthful and especially also making clear that it's okay to seek help, to ask for help. One last question to close things off before we go Adrian is we talked earlier about the question, is it possible to found a successful company without sacrifices? And my personal intuitive answer to that would be it depends on your definition of success. So how has knowing what you know now, how has your definition of success evolved now? It changed quite a bit. Success for me still is, you know, being wealthy create financial success. Obviously, I'm very clear about that because it creates freedom. It gives you more resources to do cool things. So for me, having money is not about buying fancy stuff, but building great things and important things and change the world.

At the same time, what changed is I understand that it's also a very dangerous KPI. It's a very simple KPI, right? Money is a very simple KPI because it's either there or not. And then it can grow and it can tremendously grow. However, it's also a very toxic KPI because as we are driven people, we always compare. And we always compare ourselves to others, right? And if you take this as a sole KPI, you will never really be happy because there's always people more successful on this KPI than you are. So to me, success today is primarily being happy in what I do and enjoying the journey on which I am. realizing that if I'm not happy, I need to change the journey. I need to change what I'm doing. And success also is having the freedom to do so and not feeling constraints that, you know, might be there, you know, socially, and we just take it for granted. And therefore we don't think we can change that. Having this mindset of being the change yourself. I think that's what today is the key definition for success for me. Being there for my kids, enjoying the time with my family, with my friends, but also enjoying my own time off with myself, the retreats with myself is what I think is a successful life. That is very inspiring closing words. Adrian, thank you very much for being here. That was, think, very insightful and inspiring and helpful for a lot of people out there. We've talked for almost 45 minutes and I think now it's our time to recover. If people want to know more about you, where can they find you and learn about what you do?

They can reach out to me directly. It's Adrian at Morantix.com Thank you so much Adrian for sharing the story. It's so important and I don't take it for granted. Thank you, much appreciated. And this was another episode of our Follow the Gradient Podcast. And now we would love to hear from you. How did you like it? What should we improve? Do you have any suggestions, ideas or dream podcast guests? Please let us know.

Thank you and see you again next week!