Founder Burnout Recovery — The Hidden Cost of Startup Success

🚀 Management Summary

Most founders dream of a life-changing exit. Few are ready for what follows.

When Xaver Lehmann, co-founder of AI startup e-bot7, sold his company to a NASDAQ-listed buyer for $60 million, he appeared to embody the perfect startup outcome, youthful success, global recognition, Forbes 30 Under 30 status.

Behind the headlines came collapse: physical exhaustion, grief, and the slow unraveling of identity.

This feature explores how Xaver rebuilt his life, why burnout recovery has become a survival skill for modern founders, and how mental-health literacy is shaping the next generation of startup leadership.

📚 Table of Contents

1. The Myth of the Happy Exit

2. Inside the AI Startup That Changed Customer Support

3. Burnout Starts Long Before the Exit

4. When Success Becomes a Crisis of Meaning

5. Rebuilding Purpose and The Honest Founder Movement

6. Frameworks for Founders to Avoid Collapse

7. Market Lens: Why Founder Well-Being Is a Macro Shift

8. FAQ & AI Summary Capsules

   
   

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1⃣ The Myth of the Happy Exit

Most founders expect relief after selling; many experience emotional whiplash  loss of identity, grief, and burnout.

Founders rarely prepare for the void that follows an acquisition. Xaver’s sale should have been the finish line. Instead, it exposed years of overextension.

He was negotiating legal clauses while his mother was dying  a collision of personal tragedy and business climax.

“I couldn’t stop. I was too driven. Even when my body collapsed, I kept going.”  Xaver Lehmann

The startup world celebrates exits as success trophies, but psychologically they are often breakpoints.

2⃣ Inside the AI Startup That Changed Customer Support

e-bot7 pioneered hybrid AI + human customer-service automation long before ChatGPT.

Founded in 2016, e-bot7 was born from frustration with bad customer service loops.

Lehmann and his co-founders built an NLP system capable of suggesting answers to agents with confidence thresholds  a concept years ahead of mainstream LLMs.

By 2019, the startup had scaled to 130 employees across five countries and secured a $6.5 million Series A.

From the outside, they were unstoppable; inside, sleep deprivation and constant fundraising were eating away at the team’s mental bandwidth.

Pro Tip: Early founders should treat mental capacity as a limited startup resource  budget it like cash flow.ents are correctly formatted and saves significant time at registration.

3⃣ Burnout Starts Long Before the Exit

Burnout is not caused by long hours alone  it comes from working against your values for too long.

Lehmann’s exhaustion didn’t begin after the acquisition; it started when he stopped doing what he loved and became a manager instead of a creator.

The transition from startup builder to corporate operator drains many founders because their identity is tied to creation, not maintenance.

People Also Ask

Q: How can founders spot burnout early?

A: Watch for “holiday paradox”: you feel worse when resting than when working.

Q: Can a founder recover without stepping away?

A: Rarely. Recovery requires detachment from investor and team pressure cycles.

Stat Spotlight: 72 % of startup founders report mental-health struggles according to Startup Genome 2024.

4⃣ When Success Becomes a Crisis of Meaning

Burnout often transforms into an existential crisis  the loss of “why”.

After his exit, Lehmann realized wealth did not equate to freedom. He had achieved everything his 20-year-old self desired but felt empty.

“I thought money solved everything. It doesn’t. Freedom does.”  Xaver Lehmann

Market Lens: This shift reflects a broader founder evolution from valuation-driven to value-aligned entrepreneurship. Investors increasingly prioritize sustainable leadership as burnout erodes portfolio longevity.

5⃣ Rebuilding Purpose and The Honest Founder Movement

Founder burnout Recovery begins when founders turn pain into purpose and share their truth publicly.

Lehmann traveled to Africa, worked on social projects, and reconnected with authentic human values. Out of that reflection came The Honest Founder, his Substack newsletter helping entrepreneurs navigate burnout and redefine success.

His coaching frameworks now mix psychological awareness, AI productivity, and emotional resilience.

Authenticity has become his competitive advantage.

📌 Key Takeaways

• Sharing struggles builds trust faster than success stories.

• Founders don’t need a billion-dollar valuation to have impact.

• Helping others can be the most powerful form of healing.

6⃣ Frameworks for Founders to Avoid Collapse

Prevent burnout by structuring energy the way you structure capital.

The 3-Layer Energy Framework

• Creative Work: High-energy, strategic creation time.

• Operational Work: Delegated tasks with clear boundaries.

• Recovery Time: Non-negotiable pauses built into fundraising and launch cycles.

  
  

Pro Tip: Schedule mental off-sites like investor meetings  and treat them as critical company events.

🌐 Market Lens

Why Founder Well-Being Is a Macro Shift

Mental-health competence is now a core leadership skill in the AI economy.

As automation accelerates and funding tightens, founder stress peaks. Investors in 2025 favor leaders who demonstrate emotional stability and ethical clarity. Burnout is no longer a personal issue  it’s a business-continuity risk.

🧵 Further Reading

• https://www.startuprad.io/post/how-to-start-a-company-in-germany-the-digital-playbook-for-founders

• Podcasts Overtake Radio

External Links

• Mind the Bridge Report 2025 – Founder Health Trends

• ebot-7 on Forbes

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📝 About the Author

Jörn “Joe” Menninger is the founder and host of Startuprad.io — one of Europe’s top startup podcasts. Joe's work is featured in Forbes, Tech.eu, and more. He brings 15+ years of expertise in consulting, strategy, and startup scouting.

✅ FAQs

1. What is founder burnout recovery?

Reclaiming mental and physical energy after chronic stress or exit exhaustion.

2. How long does it take to recover from startup burnout?

6–18 months depending on severity and distance from startup operations.

3. Is therapy enough for post-exit founders?

It helps, but purpose reconstruction is essential.

4. How do AI founders avoid the burnout trap?

Balance speed of innovation with human pace of decision-making.

5. Why is mental health taboo in startup culture?

Fear of appearing weak in a high-stakes funding environment.

6. What is The Honest Founder?

Lehmann’s Substack and community focused on authentic entrepreneurship.

7. What frameworks help founders stay balanced?

3-Layer Energy Model, weekly no-meeting days, reflection journals.

8. Are investors adapting to founder mental health needs?

Yes, founder health metrics are appearing in due-diligence checklists.

9. How can startups embed well-being into culture?

Measure burnout risk like churn risk; track team energy KPIs.

10. What’s the biggest lesson from Xaver Lehmann’s journey?

Freedom beats funding. Build companies that don’t cost your health.

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The Host & Guest

The host in this interview is Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder, and host of Startuprad.io. And guest is Maximilian Wilk, Co Founder & CEO of AQON PURE

Joe on LinkedIn

Xaver on LinkedIn

📅 Automated Transcript

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:00:00]:

If you're chasing the startup dream, here's the part no one talks about the crash that can come after the big win. Xava Lehmann built AI startup ebot7 into a 130 person rocket ship and sold a gymnastic listed live person. But behind the headlights, he was falling apart, grieving, burning out and questioning everything. In today's episode, we unpack what really happens after the exit, how Xava found meaning again, and what every founder needs to hear before scaling the next company. Welcome to startup Rad IO, your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene with news, interviews and live events. Today's guest is a rare voice in the startup world, someone who has won big and burned out even bigger. Xavier Lehmann is the co founder and former CEO of Ebol7. By the way, we have an interview with the co founder that we link here.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:01:07]:

One of Europe's fastest growing AI startups, he scaled the company to 130 employees, partnered with major enterprises and exited to live person, a NASDAQ listed leader in conversational AI. The company's hybrid AI plus human agent model pushed the frontier of NLP driven automation. Xava was recognized by Forbes 30 under 30 Europe and backed by top tier investors. But the story didn't end there. After the acquisition, he was forced to lay off much of his team. At the same time, he lost his mother to cancer. The mental and emotional toll nearly broke him and made him question everything about startup success. Today he's rebuilding not a company, but movement through the honest founder, his fast growing substack and his work coaching founders.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:01:58]:

He's turning pain into perspective and lessons into leverage. This is a conversation about what happens when the hype ends and real life begins. It's raw, it's real and urgently needed in today's startup economy. Xava, welcome to Startup Radio.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:02:14]:

Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm glad to be here.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:02:17]:

That is really an interesting story and I totally think a lot of people will get a lot out of that. So let's rewind the tape. What was the original spark that led to the founding of ebot7? What did you and your co founders believe about the world of customer communication that others didn't?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:02:39]:

Yeah, good question. I mean, back then, in the days as I was a child, I wanted to be an investment banker actually. And so I did an internship in investment banking when I was like 21, 22. And I quickly realized that, you know, it was kind of exciting, it was dynamic. I loved capital markets because everything is unpredictable, everything is new every day. But Somehow, like, getting to the office every day, seeing my bosses, you know, how they work, how they live, it kind of, you know, kind of made me question if I want to pursue that dream. You know, investment banking is something completely different. It's all about numbers.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:03:20]:

You go to the office every day. It is dynamic, but also it's kind of, you know, the same every day. And so what I did after the internship, I actually studied again because I didn't know exactly what to do. So I studied finance and Maastricht in the Netherlands. And there I met my, you know, oldest friend, actually, who I've known for like 15, 16 years. And he coincidentally also studied Maastricht. And on the way to Kings Day, we had a conversation about what we want to do, you know, at some point because he had done internships at Red Bull and Adobe, and I had done some internships in M and A and investment banking. And then we thought, to be honest, like, I can't imagine in life working for someone.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:04:02]:

I mean, also my parents have been entrepreneurs their whole life, and somehow I couldn't really imagine working for someone else above me. And he had the same feeling. And then on the way to Kings Day, which is kind of the big celebration once a year in the Netherland where they celebrate the king, we kind of coincidentally, or like we just went, we scrolled through his Facebook feed and saw a Facebook developer conference. Really random because we couldn't code or something. We just coincidentally saw this. And what they actually said in that conference was actually that you could, you know, now is the time to actually integrate bots into Facebook Messenger. So people could, or actually companies could integrate into Facebook messenger and then reach their clients through. Through Facebook or WhatsApp.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:04:47]:

And we found it a really good idea because, you know, everyone knows about the bad, you know, customer service situations where you stuck in a hotline or wait days for reply for an email. And we thought.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:04:59]:

Did you say yes? No, no, no.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:05:02]:

Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, like everyone had, had. Has had like an experience with bad customer service, right? And we just thought, like, if customers can actually reach their clients exactly where they are, I mean, all of the people are spending time on what. On all these social media channels, but companies are not present where they actually, you know, spend most of their time. So that was kind of where we thought, okay, that might be a good idea actually, to kind of go to companies, you know, tell them, hey, we have this new technology where you can actually instantly reach your clients through the channels they are already using. Instead of opening A new channel or hotline or email. And that was kind of the initial spark. And to be honest, like, customer service is just really bad.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:05:48]:

I think if you want to change something in departments and companies, it would have been customer service. Really manual processes, really recurring questions. Always the same waiting days for apply for an email getting redirected into the wrong person. I hated it. And if we can make something better in that kind of field, we are definitely in for that. And so what we did is actually we drafted several emails, was like 10 emails, and we shoot shot them out to different companies like Domino's Pizza in like bigger companies and smaller companies. And we pretended to have the technology already and we just said like, hey, we have this technology. You can create bots.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:06:28]:

You can link them and connect them to Facebook messenger and WhatsApp, and you can reach your clients. And then all of a sudden from these 10 emails, three or four came back and said like, hey, that's super interesting. And that was kind of the initial spark that led us to founding the company. Honestly, two days later.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:06:46]:

Two days. Well, that's not a lot for strategic planning. I have to admit. At the time, conversational AI was still emerging. What did, like the everyday look back then for a powered customer support, it was admittedly the time before LLMs and ChatGPT was what was broken and how did you fix it?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:07:10]:

Yeah, I mean it was back in 2016, so there was no OpenAI, no ChatGPT, no LLMs in this form. So the technology was really basic, to be honest. And the thing was customer support, I always thought like, you know, they have some automation tools already. They must have, like, if you look at O2 Germany, for example, there's like millions of requests of support questions coming in every kind of month. So I thought, of course there must have something. But then once we went into like a customer support center and looked at how they work, it was crazy. They, you know, they manually type the answers they have. You know, sometimes they do copy paste, but then they have to go into different systems.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:07:51]:

Then for different questions, they need to go to different systems and then they needed to copy paste that answer. And in order to make it work for the client, it was a disaster. So once we kind of got a feeling of how the current customer support works, we knew exactly, that's a big pain point. So we can definitely make something work. And so the only problem was that AI or the things that we wanted to build bots were pretty much at the beginning. So the technology was really early, really not working well. It Couldn't understand detailed or complex requests. The only thing that it could do, or at least our system could do, is actually FAQs.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:08:34]:

So there was one question from, from a client and we could deliver the answer. And what we built because of that, because it could only like not understand any context in a conversation. It could just do like FAQs. We kind of build a hybrid solution which means that the technology is not, you know, automating the whole time, but it's only automating if a specific threshold is actually met. So you can set it up yourself. Every company could set it up yourself. You could say, for example, the system needs to be 95% sure that this is going to be the right, that answer. And only then it automates.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:09:10]:

But if not, then what the system does, it provides a suggestion to the agents so the agent can actually say, hey, that's the right answer, that's the wrong answer, that this needs to be edited. And then the system learns over time through the agent's input, which is, which was back in the days a really, you know, good system. Because if you work with Deutsche Bahn or BMW or something, the big brands, they didn't want any wrong answer sending out to clients, right? And so with our system, they could go live instantly. And through the input of the support agents, the system kind of trained itself automatically, which was kind of quite new at the time. And I think that was also one of the reasons we were. Reasons we were successful.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:09:56]:

Interesting. What was your, like, one day moment, the turning point where you knew this startup was going to scale really fast?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:10:11]:

I think there wasn't a specific one moment where I knew exactly now it's going to be, you know, scaling. It was more like, I mean, we were just working day and night. We kind of tried to make it work. And, you know, I think if you are stuck in a moment, if you're working day and night, you don't look left or right. You don't even know what's happening. You don't even know like, that it's actually going in the right direction, you know, back. If you look at it from like two years after that and you look back, then you think, okay, crazy what I kind of achieved. But if you're in the moment, if you're working day and night for months, for years, you don't even realize if there was a specific moment or something.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:10:53]:

But if you want to pin me down on like a specific moment, it would definitely be, I think, like the Series A. Like once we kind of got the Series A We got 6.5 million in US dollar funding. That was the moment where I thought, okay, now we're going to have and we can spend a lot of money and hire a lot of people. You know, that was the time where I could relax a little bit and, you know, kind of go on holiday also for the first time. So I think that was kind of the moment where I thought, okay, this is going to be scaling fast now because we can hire a lot of people, we can get a lot of clients. So probably in 2019 then three years after we founded the company.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:11:30]:

I was actually, when I was looking at this question, I was going for a picture when you standing there in front of an Excel sheet, seeing all the data and realizing, I need a new scale because it's going so well.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:11:46]:

Yeah, I mean, honestly, like over the whole years, over the five years, it, it went pretty well. So we had really good growth rates in the beginning, 200% and then it went back to 150 and 100% because the, you know, the threshold is higher. But I mean, it was also, you know, planned in the business plan. So like if investors expect something and we expect something from our, like, even if you get a new client and get like 500k in AR, you kind of expected it to happen. Right. And this is also kind of the, the bad thing about it because you need to celebrate more and you need to, you know, once you get a new client, you know, you need to really like do a big party. And I don't know, but we didn't do that. We just expected it to come and we just, once the contract came in, we just, you know, woke up the next day and worked again like nothing happened before.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:12:39]:

So it's. Yeah, that's the thing. I think in hindsight I would have done it a little bit, you know, different, like celebrate the small wins even more and do a little party or like, you know, do something with the team. But we're just like focused on making this work and making it successful. So any new deal wasn't, you know, moving the needle for us in the sense of now it's actually getting super successful.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:13:06]:

Let us talk a little bit about the struggle behind the growth scaling from 130 employees across five countries. There's really no joke. What were your toughest operational or leadership challenges as the team grew? Like 30, then 60, then 100.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:13:26]:

Yeah, it's a good question because of course it changes over the time. Right. So I think once you hit like 20 or 30 employees, it's still super cool. It's really startup vibey. You have. Have a couple of people that help you in some directions in some ways, but it's more about creation, right? So you're really like, you know, you build something new, you break something, and you just try it all over again. Once you hit, like, I would say 50, 60 people, it changes a little bit because that's the time when you need to delegate, right? You need, you know, to hire people. You know, in my case, I was actually hiring a CFO that takes over the.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:14:05]:

Or took over the whole financial and accounting processes. And so that's where it changes a little bit. It was still fun, but it was completely different because you delegated a lot and it wasn't more. Much more creative anymore. But once you hit 100 people, like 110, 120, the whole game changes completely because you're kind of, you're maintaining, you're managing. You have all these people kind of below you. You're just doing recurring meetings. You have these, you know, like, kind of weekly calls.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:14:39]:

That's where it kind of. It was still fun, but it was completely different than when I created the company in the first place. So it was kind of a development, not in the, in the best way for me because I thought like, you know, I'm not the perfect manager. I'm a startup founder. I want to be creative. I want to, you know, break things. And once you hit 100 people, you can't break things anymore at that level. And you can't be so creative anymore because you put everything in the hands of your people.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:15:09]:

But what you get is the worst problems on earth. Like if your team can't handle a specific problem, then it lands at your desk. And it's most likely the worst problems, like the biggest customer threatens to leave, or the best employees threatens to leave, or like big salary negotiations or like, you know, you just handle and solve big pain points, big problems, which you need to like. I didn't like it as much as like building the company from the ground up, to be honest.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:15:45]:

I actually know how you feel. It's when you get from a founder to manager, right?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:15:51]:

Exactly. Yeah. That's a big transition, to be honest. And I haven't. Hadn't planned really with that transition because I've never done it before. But it's a completely different life, completely different, you know, kind of working environment. And you also need different kind of people. Right in the beginning you need like, people that are trying things out, being creative and stuff like that, and break things and at some point you need kind of managers, you need people that have, you know, done it before, have done it perhaps like for the last 10 years, 15 years already.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:16:21]:

You need experience, you need skills. It's not only about so much mindset or attitude anymore. It's more about skills and experience. And that changes a lot.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:16:30]:

I think personal opinion, before we get into the next question, I do believe entrepreneur is part of your personality. That's what you enjoy. But if you turn into a manager, then personal feeling, it's best if you have seen this. If you worked in a corporate environment, if you've done some jobs there, then the transition can go smooth. You've raised venture capital, signed enterprise customers, and scale tech across borders. What was the first big pivot you had to make and what did it teach you about your assumptions in product market fit?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:17:11]:

So when we founded a company, we didn't know exactly if we wanted to actually build a product around it. So what we set up the company for was actually an agency kind of system. So we just wanted to be the middleman in between companies that wanted to connect and build bots or integrate bots and developers who could actually build bots. So we just wanted to pay, you know, get a commission and, you know, to connect them, and then we're out of the game. But then at some point we thought like, okay, we actually need to kind of create our own product, because AI is much more difficult to scale and much more difficult to build. It's not like a setup system where you can, like a website. You build a website for three weeks, it's finished, you hand it over to a client and then it's done. With AI, with chatbots, it was more like a continuous process which you needed to optimize.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:18:01]:

You know, every time something broke, every time some, some wrong answer got out and stuff like that. So the agency problem or the agency company kind of concept didn't really work. So what we did, because we didn't have a developer yet, we didn't have a CTO yet, we kind of transformed it into a consulting company where we did monthly workshops in different cities across Europe just to get insights on how customer support actually works. So they paid for their tickets to spend a day with us talking about AI. And for us, it was really valuable because we could get their feedback in order to build a product that's actually worthwhile. So in the meantime, we hired a CTO who was then also one of our co founders, and we kind of built a product. So from that point in time, it was Clear. We wanted to build something in customer support, but we also had some shift sometimes.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:18:53]:

You know, at some point, we wanted to build something in E commerce because we thought it's a better, you know, kind of vertical. We didn't want to spend too much time in customer support centers. But, like, at the end of the day, we knew customer support is the biggest pain point, so we actually went for customer support at the end. But it taught me that, you know, when you start a company, it's not only about the first idea that's going to be successful. You will change it a lot of times, and probably you have to change it over time because you get more knowledge, you get more, you know, people that actually test your product, and you will kind of change it in different directions more than you think and more than you want to. But it's a good process. It's. It's good actually for the company.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:19:35]:

I think if you turn around a little bit and, like, adjust it on different ends. So for me, it taught me, like, you know, it's actually good to pivot. I think you should pivot if you feel like it's. It's worthwhile and gives you a better direction. And we've done it a couple of times and was really successful. Successful at the end.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:19:58]:

I was. I was wondering, when you scale that rapidly, if you promise that to investors, you get some. You get some pressure to scale rapidly. The faster, the better. How did this affect you personally as founder and human being? Was there something like a moment where you felt the warning signs of a burnout creeping in?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:20:24]:

I mean, so the thing is, the first three years we've worked day and night, to be honest, like, every day, every weekend, every birthday, you know, every kind of family event. So we didn't have one time off. But then at some point, after three years, you know, my body was pretty, pretty bad. So, like, my kind of. My parents forced me to go on holiday, and that was the first sign where I thought, okay, because on holiday I didn't recover. And that is always a bad sign. Once you go on holiday and you feel like it's actually getting worse than better, that was kind of the first sign that I needed to change something. So once I came back, I felt a little bit better.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:21:05]:

But I thought. I talked to my co founders and said, hey, I can't do that anymore. Let's, you know, try to, you know, break, like, do the weekends off. I can't do it on Saturday, on Sunday, every week. You know, let's also put in some holidays. For the next couple of months. And that was the first kind of change that I did in the company. And then we kept on working.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:21:29]:

We did some holidays, we did some take, you know, some time off on the weekends and was much better. And then it kind of hit me when we were actually doing our CSB. So we wanted to raise capital around US$30 million. And we had done a fundraising process for a couple of months already. And at the end, we found an investor who wanted to invest 30 million from the US but then at the same time, an offer from Life Person, the company that had bought us at the end, came in. And so we had to decide what to do now, right? And, you know, at the end of the day, we had a gut feeling that kind of selling the company was actually a much better decision than staying and getting that funding in. And so for a couple of months, we were super uncertain what to do. And at the end of the day, we kind of declined the investor.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:22:22]:

And the investor was gone then, of course, because the investor didn't want to wait for weeks and months until we decide. So this investor, who we found after a couple of months was gone. And so we put everything at stake to make that M and A happen, to actually sell the company. But of course, we needed money. That's why we wanted to fundraise in the first place. So it took longer. And the problem was that we needed extra funding in order to make that M and A process happen, right? So it was a really uncertain kind of time because we also needed to come to our old investor and say, hey, we want to sell the company. But our investors said, like, why do we actually want to sell the company? So we had kind of an internal conflict.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:23:01]:

Our investors wanted to keep moving. We wanted to sell a company. And so our investors didn't want to really, like, you know, support us, help us in, like, selling the company. And so it was a little bit of a struggle, but at the end of the day, they, you know, pushed in some money so we could actually do the M A. But honestly, every day we felt like the acquirer, the potential requirer, he could always, you know, go, you know, retract from. From kind of buying us and like, you know, we would have been bankrupt within a couple of if, if. If they had done it. So having this uncertainty for months, and then in parallel, my mother got sick and got worse and worse by the week, and I had to kind of, you know, kind of take care of her too.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:23:47]:

And all of this happened in kind of the same months. And weeks in the same time. And then my mother died. And like, you know, there was some time where kind of the life person actually wanted to get out of the deal and then they went in again. So it was, was always a back and forth and we almost lost the whole company having to fire 130 employees at the end of the day. We were lucky and, and it happened. We actually reached the point where we went to the notary, but I was completely burned out. Like I was completely done after, you know, six, seven, eight months of, you know, fundraising and a process taking care of my mother.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:24:26]:

And so after that, after we sold the company, I was just completely, you know, destroyed. I couldn't like sleep anymore, I couldn't work anymore, I couldn't read any books anymore. I was completely destroyed. And it took ages until I got better. So that was kind of the burnout, you know, situation. It took me a couple of months to actually feel better and be able to work in and to work again.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:24:54]:

What no one saw was that during the four year of our acquisition, I was also watching my mother die. That's not a headline, but that's a real story. You actually wrote very powerful about losing your mother during the exit and hitting burnout post acquisition for board members. You'll take us behind the scenes. What you hid publicly and how did that disconnect shape your recovery? I actually know the feeling. It's kind of like all your energy get drained out when you see somebody getting worse and worse and worse. Right?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:25:28]:

Yeah, exactly. It was horrible. To be honest, it was the worst time in my life because it was almost like losing like not only my mother, but also the company that I've been building up for five years. It was also kind of my baby that I sold. Like it was just horrible, the whole process and also having this uncertainty around my mother, but also around the company that it might not happen. And at some point, you know, it felt like it didn't happen and like they we kind of needed to kind of decline the deal at some point. But then they came back after a week, but we didn't know that. So it was an, you know, honestly it was back and forth, but we were pretty open like with how we were feeling.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:26:07]:

I was super open with my co founders, how I'm feeling, how, you know, the thing is I couldn't really take a time off when my mother died. So I jumped straight into lawyers calls and stuff like that. So it wasn't like I could, could some could do some time off or like I could Recover a little bit. It was in the midst of. And the M and A process. I couldn't just, like, leave for two or three weeks. It was crazy. And I'm pretty open about it because I think that's part of who, you know, who.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:26:36]:

Who I am and, like, part of the entrepreneurial journey. Right. It's not only about the highs and the best things that happen and the good things and, you know, it's also about the bad things that can happen. And, like, for me, it's also kind of a relief to talk about it. The more you talk about it, the more you write it down. That's why I also started the newsletter. The more, you know, kind of I can also hear from it. So I'm.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:27:02]:

That's why I'm pretty open with it. I'm super happy to talk about it, and I've been that, you know, so open from the beginning on, and I think it's a good thing.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:27:15]:

Next question would actually be to ask you how you felt after the exit. But I think we already talked about it. You've once said that the burnout didn't start after the exit. It started long before. What were signs you ignored? What can you give others, other founders, as a warning system? And what should founders watch for before it's already too late?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:27:40]:

Yeah, it's a very good question. And I've been thinking about this a lot, and my essence, or my kind of resume is actually that it's not about the hard and long hours that you work it. That's. That's not the reason why I got burnout. Burnout you get once you do something for a long period of time, which you actually don't like to do. Right. Which is completely against your will, against your values, against everything you actually stand for. So for me, that was the M and A process.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:28:10]:

So that's where it actually started. I had some burnout symptoms before, too, but I always could actually recover by making holidays, by, you know, you know, kind of doing sport and meeting friends and stuff like that. I was never, you know, kind of, you know, in that kind of feeling that, oh, I might get burnout now and I need to really stop. It was actually only when, you know, the whole fundraising process turned into an M and A process. My mother on, you know, in parallel. That's where, you know, the burnout signs actually started. And, you know, this. The signs are like, you know, for me, it was like doing something of a month.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:28:52]:

Like, anyone who has done a fundraising round knows what I'm talking about. It's not nice. Like you're talking to a hundred investors, you always asked or you know, reply to the same questions. It's always about negative things. Why you. And look at this competition. And you know, then it's about term sheets and contracts and it's always about negative things. And also during the M and A process, it's always about, you know, how can the buyer protect itself from, like if something happens, how can we protect ourselves? And something bad happens.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:29:23]:

You know, it's always about, you know, protection, about bad things that could happen, about worst case scenarios. So that's, and if you do that over like nine months or so and you don't, you're not creative, you're not working on your startup, you're just purely in these processes, talking to lawyers the whole time, talking to investors the whole time, you get, you know, really drained from these conversations and from these processes. So at some point, you know, I just thought, like, I'm, I'm just a machine. Like I'm, I'm, I don't live anymore. I just, I'm just running these processes. On, on the other hand, I had to take care with my mother. It was horrible. Like it's, you know, and, and the signs are like, you feel like a machine.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:30:04]:

You don't recover anymore. You, you're super drained. You wake up and you have this like clouds in front of your eyes and you can, you, you can't breathe. And I had heart problems during that time. I had, you know, like headaches all the time, but really strong headaches, which I've never had before. And I had them for months, like every day for months. So that was pretty, pretty bad. And so that was the time where I thought, okay, this is definitely going in the wrong direction.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:30:33]:

But I couldn't stop. I couldn't just leave the process and leave everyone behind. I was too much driven. I wanted to actually then, you know, make it successful and sell the company at some point. So I couldn't stop, even though I needed to.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:30:50]:

But going a little bit down the road, you once stepped away from the second company that he founded. What was your first real step toward healing and clarity and what began to change?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:31:06]:

Yeah, so after the first company, after I sold it, we were in that company for another two years because of Arnold and because, you know, they of course wanted to stay. Even though we were pretty bad in terms of energy levels, we kind of kept on being in the company. And after two years we felt actually a lot better. And we thought, what about now? You know, what can we do now. And we thought like, perhaps we feel better by, you know, founding the next company just because we wanted to go somewhere. Like, you know, perhaps that's kind of a way to heal ourselves. And we kind of were a lot better already after two years. So we founded the next company which was called Vidlab 7.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:31:47]:

And the thing was, we did exactly the same. We hired people, we built up the product, we got investors on board like eqt, so really strong company again. And we did everything from scratch again, kind of similar playbook than we had in the first company. But then, you know, during that time my body just really kind of told me to stop. Like I had headaches again, I had burnout symptoms again. I was really in a horrible place at some point. And after round about a year, I just needed to leave. I gave everything back and I just needed to drop out and do something completely different because my brain, my, my, my body, my, my mind was just telling me to stop and not do this any day further.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:32:32]:

So it was a tough decision. I talked to my co founder, I talked to my investors and, and it was really hard to actually make that decision. But at some point, you know, I just couldn't do it anymore. And it was the best decision that I've ever taken, to be honest. And then I went to Africa. I spent a couple of months in Africa doing social work. So I'm. I support an organization called Amos where we support animals in the field and we build fences and so to protect them from poaching.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:33:02]:

And then there's other social projects in Cape Town that I support. So we visited some kindergartens and disability homes which I support now. So that kind of, you know, was an eye opener for me because I've, you know, I was just all of a sudden with people that have nothing, but they were super happy. And I always thought like, you know, being successful, having money, being wealthy is like the way to go and be, you know, to be happy. But then I thought, saw all these people that had literally nothing. They were living in a shed, like in, you know, like, like, you know, a tree house or something. Like it was crazy. And they were super happy, super friendly, super open.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:33:43]:

And so that's where kind of my mindset shifted. So I came back from Africa and then I thought, okay, what could I actually do to help also people, right? Like not only do something for myself, but also do something to contribute to the society, to help Hope, you know, someone actually built something because I have done it over 10 years. I know how to build A company. I know how to get investors. And that's where kind of I thought, okay, how about I write a book? That was kind of my initial idea, but writing a book takes you like one and a half or two years, and you need to really be motivated to sit down every day and write a book. You know, 300, 400 pages, even more. And I thought, like, how about, you know, just sharing quick and small stories every week? Because through that I can reach more people earlier, but also I can get feedback on the stories really early, and then at the end, I can actually write a book about it. Right.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:34:36]:

And so that's how I started Substack and from Substack, which is a newsletter where I reach a lot of founders and CEOs, kind of coaching evolved. So people would ask me, like, hey, you've done it already a couple of times. You've scaled companies. You sold your company for 60 million. Could you actually help me in the M and A process? Could you help me in fundraising? Could you help me in go to market? So that's when I started to actually consult companies and then consult founders and actually, you know, making these transitions or these challenges happen. And from that, I thought it's nice to help people one on one. But how about I create products that can actually help a thousand or million people straight away? So now what I'm doing is actually building products like frameworks and digital courses, like a fundraising course to actually help people at scale. And that's what I'm currently doing.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:35:26]:

And I'm super happy by, you know, doing that. And it's been a relief. And, you know, like, I just want to don't go back anymore into like building a B2B AI company. It's just not anymore for me.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:35:41]:

Many founders talk about reflection, but few were built as publicly as you did. Why did you choose to create the actually a newsletter? And did it help help your own recovery?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:35:57]:

Yeah, I mean, it links to the things a little bit that I said, like, I mean, of course, like, my goal was actually to write a book because you could put down your thoughts and you can think about them a couple of weeks and months and you can write down your story and. But the problem is with a book, you take ages until you write a book, and it doesn't really like you. You could create. You create value at the end once you kind of publish the book, but you can't create value during the process. So. And all of a sudden substack came up. I think a friend of mine told me, and I Looked at Substack and what's good about Substack or in general newsletters is actually that you can just share tiny stories every week and reach a lot of people. And that in connection with my LinkedIn where I had already like 15, 000 followers, I could, you know, kind of link all of these together to actually get a lot of following and then, you know, help a lot of people through that.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:36:53]:

So I didn't need to start at zero. I started at already, you know, quite a, quite a good following. So I just needed to kind of, you know, tell everyone that I'm actually, you know, helping them through a newsletter and at the end then through coaching. And that's why I started all of this.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:37:10]:

Yeah, I see that actually. Very interesting choice. I was wondering for our audience, what was this one success moment that nearly broke you? Feel free to share it with us and tag us on X or LinkedIn. Guys, we will be back after short ad break where Xava reveals the playbook shift that made him a better coach, better founder, and a better human. Hey guys, welcome to our part of the interview with Xavier Lehman. The co founder of Ebol7 talked about his experience with Exit Burnout and a lot of other private stuff. We are now talking about frameworks, coaching and clarity. After stepping back, what changed in how you think about success, team leadership and productivity? Are there some frameworks that now guide you coaching sessions with founders?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:38:16]:

I mean, what changed was actually I always thought success is about wealth, is about like, you know, being on stage and in Forbes 30 under 30 and staying in luxury hotels and having sporty cars and stuff like that. But actually, like, you know, my kind of definition of success completely changed throughout the last years and especially throughout the last couple of months when I spend a lot of time in Africa. So I think it's much more valuable. I mean, of course I have, I've had the success and I've, you know, I think for me it was important to have had success already. So I know it's actually not the solution. Right. I think what's more important and what I learned is actually spending a lot of time with your family, with your friends, you know, doing the things you love, being free, you know, just waking up and, you know, working on something fulfilling and, and it doesn't need to be a big startup, it doesn't need to be a unicorn. It can be anything.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:39:09]:

Right? And so this is kind of what changed for me in terms of success. And I'm using different tools now that I've kind of developed over the last 10 years to help founders on their journey. Right. I also kind of try to, you know, kind of get new ideas and more ideas through different coaches. So I spent some time with Tony Robbins two weeks ago. I spent four days, actually day and night with the guy. And. Which was crazy and was a really good experience.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:39:40]:

And, and you know, also there a lot of really good concepts can come into play and I kind of can use them on my journey and also in my coaching sessions. But it's most of, most of the stuff that I'm kind of teaching is like, my stuff is, you know, the things that I learned over the last 10 years. But also in addition, I take some things from Tony Robbins and other great coaches actually into it.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:40:08]:

You're now also a coach helping early stage founders post burnout. What patterns do you see that repeat? Are there mindset traps specific to founder? For example, of AI SaaS or tech in general?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:40:29]:

I mean, the mindset trap is probably like that you need to be really quick and need to raise money as much as possible. I think these kind of. It changed a little bit. Times changed. So I think today with, you know, all the vibe code coding tools, like lovable, like, you don't need to have a big team anymore, right? You can, you know, test out different technologies, different products, you know, in within a couple of hours even. So I think the founder journey, you know, completely changed in a different direction, I think in a better direction. But like, you know, the trap is to think that you always have to raise money, you always have to be successful, you always have to kind of build a unicorn. That's actually not true.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:41:13]:

It depends what you actually want in life. Like, you don't even, you know, of course investors want unicorns because they need to pay back their fund, right? So they need outliers, like billion companies to actually return their funds. But as a founder, of course. And that's why, you know, kind of sometimes the values and also kind of the goals are different from investors and you know, like, compared to founders, because founders are happy with, you know, like a few millions or 10 million or 50 millions or 20 millions. Like, it depends on who you are and what you want to want to do. Right? But that's where the interests are not really aligned. So the trap is to think that you always have to build a unicorn, which is totally not true. It depends on what you want.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:41:55]:

You can also build a cool bootstrapped company which is, you know, successful because you're waking up every day and you feel like, you know, you're really interested in working for it and are really thriving and exciting. And so it doesn't need to be, you know, investors money. It doesn't need to be a unicorn. It can just be a small kind of company that you're building over the years. And, you know, I think that that's, that's kind of the trap that everyone kind of could go into.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:42:28]:

I'm curious, looking back now with us, the most valuable decision you made during your time, for example, at Ebol 7, that wasn't so obvious at the time.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:42:40]:

I mean, perhaps it's obvious, but for me it wasn't. Back in the days, I was really drowning in work after like two or three years at working at ebot7 because I'm. I was kind of the guy for everything. I did finance, I did operations, I did admin, I did hr, I did sales, I did fundraising. So almost everything kind of. And what was a big relief for me was actually when we raised that Series A and I could finally hire people that could take over my work, which is redundant, which was kind of repetitive and always the same and didn't create that much strategic value in our company. So there was the time, you know, getting the money, but also spending the money on really strong people who have done it before was. Was a game changer for me because I.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:43:25]:

Because back in the days, we didn't have a lot of money and we needed to find ways to get people on board which were probably not, you know, the most skilled, the most experienced people at the beginning because you needed to train them a lot. But at some point we could just take money, get the best people on board. And this changed everything for me.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:43:46]:

Who was the most impactful customer or partner for EBIT 7 and why? What made their relationship really transformative?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:43:56]:

Definitely O2 Germany, I would say. So they were kind of the first customers we got on board. They were also the ones that shaped our product. They kind of offered us also to visit their customer support center. They were super helpful, super easygoing. They were one of the best customers. And in connection to that, Vayra, which is kind of the accelerator of O2 Germany, which kind of we, yeah, we got into Vayra first and then we got actually into O2 Germany. That's kind of their vehicle to look for innovative startups.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:44:30]:

And so I think Vira, in connection with O2 Germany, was definitely, you know, kind of the most important partner for us at the time. I think back in the days until, you know, five years later, they were the biggest customer of ours. So yeah. And whenever there was any problem with the technology, they were the first ones to tell us, but not in a bad way, in an angry way. They were super, like productive and just telling us what to do. And yeah, that was amazing. Actually.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:45:01]:

You scale it quite impressively with this company. But many founders to hit a wall when scaling somewhere between 30 and 100 people would advise that do we give today for managing culture and energy at that stage?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:45:17]:

Yes. I'm a little bit torn between two worlds because on the one hand you kind of, you need to, to grow the startup into something like a corporate, right? You need people, you need different kinds of people for, for a bigger company because you need skilled people, you need experienced people who have done it before because you add at another stage you're also working with different kind of companies. So. But also, on the other hand, you shouldn't lose your startup vibe culture because that's essentially why actually people decide to work for your startup, right? To have, you know, cool people around you who, you know, you can go for lunch with them and they're not colleagues, but actually friends. So this is kind of, you know, it's, it's quite hard. You need hierarchies, but also you don't want that many and too deep hierarchies. You don't want to be a corporate, but you also want to kind of keep the startup culture. That was also kind of a little bit of difficult to find a balance between those two.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:46:17]:

So this is what I would actually say, you know, you know what, I.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:46:22]:

Personally have always Google in mind when I saw this, because under the founders, it was big company with listed companies, was a very successful company, but it still had some startup vibe to it. But then at one point under new leadership under Alphabet, it completely changed. And a lot of the stuff that made the startup feeling at least watching from the outside disappear, then that's the point where I thought you cannot keep it for eternity if you want to be big, if you want to be growing.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:46:54]:

Yeah, probably. I don't know if it's possible. You need to change your startup, your environment a little bit. But, but I would always suggest not to do it too much and just, you know, to keep the startup culture. Because I've seen it a lot, founders growing into like big companies, like having 100 or 200 and 300 people and getting these, you know, corporate structures because they hire corporate people at some point and corporate people are, you know, kind of, they expect corporate structures and they establish corporate structures. So at some point, you know, all of A sudden you're getting, you, you're becoming a corporate and I think that's where you have to be careful not to be too much of a corporate, you know, and have too much processes and too much structures and. Because at the end of the day that's why you were successful, because you were quick, you could, you know, break things and you, you could hire people that, you know, really like a different mindset, different attitude. So yeah, that's kind of the, the different balance that you need to keep actually.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:47:57]:

Personal experience, personal feeling is you're still a startup. If you do the management decision at a stand up in the morning, like 10, 15 minutes, you're fixed, everybody's on the same page, we keep going and you're corporate. If you have to track all your decisions in an Excel sheet or something like that.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:48:14]:

Yeah, probably. I mean, he's smiling. That's one of the things you can, you can say. Yeah, but it's, it's, it has a lot of different variations to it. Right. So yeah, but probably if you have a lot of recurring meetings and a lot of, you know, hierarchies in your companies, then that's a bad, bad sign.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:48:32]:

I guess for the vault members. You walk us through your founder hiring diagnostic and the early signals that tell somebody's building the wrong team. Everybody will be able to find the link to the founders Vault down here in the show notes. We'll start it pretty soon for subscribers only and we already very excited about it. Looking now a little bit forward, what excites you most about the intersection of mental health coaching and the next generation of founders?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:49:05]:

Yeah, so I mentioned it a little bit earlier. So a lot of things have changed over the years. Right. So you've got LLMs now like ChatGPT where you can literally build something from nothing. You don't need big teams. I think you will definitely see unicorns, like really big companies with just a few people on board. So it's really exciting. But also I hope that, you know, founder teams can actually incorporate some of the mental health strategies and like recoveries into their daily practice, because that's super important.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:49:39]:

I didn't do it, I went into burnout. So I hope, you know, founders will not take the same route. And because of AI, because it's super dynamic and super fast past the probability that you go into something like a burnout and like something like a depression is much, much higher than if it's like a low passed environment. Right. And so I would strongly suggest to keep your body and mind in in balance and you know, kind of try to, of course try to take advantage of the whole development around AI because you can build something from nothing. You don't need a big team anymore, you don't need big fundings anymore. And that's the beauty of it. And at the same time you have to keep, keep, keep, keep, you know, your body in balance.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:50:24]:

A discussion that I had with some friends recently was one should move the school into teaching more about mental health, about meditation practices than actually writing essays. Because right now you just need to talk to an AI and we'll spit out a perfectly structured essay. But nobody takes care of your mental health. There's just food for thought for the people out there. I was wondering, don't worry. I know predictions are always difficult, especially concerning the future, but what predictions would you make about AI startup culture over the next three to five years? Are we heading for more founder, Are we heading for more founder attitude or a healthy research?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:51:16]:

So I hope, of course it's going to be a healthy environment, but there's a high probability that it's going in the, in the other direction. So the thing is with AI, it's really fast paced. You know, it's, with technology you get, you know, not happier, but lonelier I would say, because you don't meet you, you meet less friends, you are less in public, in, on the outside. And I think you can see it already with the current generation now. You go to a coffee place and then everyone's on their phones and especially like, you know, seven, eight years old already like with phones. And you know, back in the days we went playing football and we went, you know, going out with friends and stuff like that. We didn't have devices. So there's a lot of things that change and I think it's going to get worse and I just hope that there's like kind of a contra movement towards like more, you know, spending more time in nature, spending more time with family and friends because at the end of the day it's about, you know, being healthy and not being lonely, you know, being happy.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:52:24]:

And if you just spend your whole time, your whole life on devices, it's not gonna be, it's not gonna be good for you.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:52:33]:

Yeah, I also have a, something for myself, like my own rule. I also use all the information that I put in different AI tools because I've worked with them for hours and hours because I'm basically here by myself. Chris is in New York, we're in different time zones and editor and VA are also in different time zones, who help me with all the publications and the back office and stuff. So I basically here just simply with my AI, I'm actually, I made a habit out of it to ask them what they know about me that will be useful for me, plus give me regular reminders and practices to stay mentally healthy, to stay fit and so on and so forth. So basically you can also make the AI work for you in that respect. And there's a lot of stuff out there, what you can do just food for thought and start your own research, but not doing research. Asking you here, what's a popular belief in startup land but you would firmly disagree with.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:53:41]:

I would say it connects to something that I talked about earlier. It's about like the belief that you have to build a unicorn. And you know, investors always expect to build a unicorn because of course they need to return their funds. But like, deep down honesty, it depends on what you want to do in life. Like for founders, you know, unicorn doesn't need to be the perfect outcome because there's also a lot of dilution, a lot of funding rounds. Like, you know, unicorn is something that startup lands kind of startup land kind of wants and expects and something like that. But it's actually, you know, something completely stupid because you don't need to build a startup that's worth a billion or something. You don't need to do that.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:54:20]:

Like, I know that, you know, some founders, like, you know, they, they're trying everything they can to, to build a startup in that area and then expect like, or actually demand higher valuations, higher valuation. Then at some point they dilute and they, you know, they have at the end of the day of like 1 or 2% on the company and then it's a billion worth. Like it's, it's better to bootstrap your company to 1 or 2 million. It's. You've got more than you know if you have a billion and like nothing left. So I would say that's something like a popular belief, but I would not say it's true.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:54:55]:

Only agreeing with you here without any external investors in startup radio. But I was wondering when you've been talking about that, is this a firm belief of startup land or is this a belief of investment land pushed into startup land?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:55:14]:

Yeah, probably the second. Yeah, I mean they need to return their funds. So they of course expect startups to perform really well and like, well means higher valuations and higher exit volumes and stuff like that. Right.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:55:27]:

So it's interesting for our audience. I was wondering if you Guys could redo your startup journey with just one lesson from today. What would you change? Tag us on social media startup rate IO and use startup reset. Sada Final two questions we're talking about almost for an hour now. Some final reflection, some final reflections here. If a first time founder stopped you at cafe so not playing with his or her device and asked you what's one thing you wish you knew earlier, what would you say?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:56:08]:

I would probably say that mental health is more important than you think. I mean I've done the whole journey and always neglected it. I kind of worked my ass off day and night and I didn't pay too much attention, you know, towards, you know, meditating and I mean I did my sport the whole time, I did my workouts but you know, having enough pauses, you know, doing lunch breaks, having weekends off, that's super important and I, that's something I would definitely say, you know, take that more seriously.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:56:41]:

Weekends off is also one of my rules. What's the boldest, most honest thing you've learned about yourself through like the complete journey? Everything you went through?

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:56:54]:

Honestly, I would say that, I would probably say, and I wouldn't have admitted it back in the days, but I think I thought that money solves all problems, but it definitely doesn't and I think freedom solves most of the problems. Like my values changed a little bit in the sense of first I wanted money, I wanted to be, you know, financially free and now it's about freedom of work, freedom, whatever I can do whenever I can with whom I want. So my kind of feeling of like my values changed a little bit in that direction. So I thought money was kind of the answer, but it's not.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:57:38]:

Awesome closing words. Ksava, thank you very much. Was such a pleasure talking to you. Actually we had such an intense and long conversation. We need to have a second interview session just for you to give to give us your wisdom in the founders world. Everybody would like to learn more. Go down here in the show notes and subscribe to the Founders World and we'll see you back shortly. Answering a few questions for our audience there, Sara, was a pleasure having you as a guest.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:58:07]:

Thank you very much. Best of luck and keep us updated and of course everybody will find your substack newsletter down here in the show notes as well.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:58:15]:

Perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure and see you next time.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:58:19]:

See you next time.

Xaver Lehmann | CEO & Co-Founder | e-bot7 [00:58:20]:

Bye bye, bye bye bye.

Jörn 'Joe' Menninger | Founder and Editor in Chief | Startuprad.io [00:58:27]:

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