Exhausted Founder Finally Achieves Work-Life Balance by Quietly Going Out of Business
DENVER, CO — “I’m sleeping eight hours a night,” said the founder, technically correct and technically unemployed.
By Crash Windward
DENVER, CO — After four years of 90-hour weeks, founder Marissa Cole confirmed this week that she has at last attained the elusive work-life balance she long sought, a breakthrough she credits entirely to her company quietly and completely going out of business.
“People always told me balance was possible, and I never believed them,” said Cole, 33, who now wakes without an alarm, eats lunch sitting down, and has not opened Slack in 19 days on account of there no longer being a Slack. “Turns out the secret was insolvency. I feel amazing.”
Cole, who once described sleep as “a competitive disadvantage,” reported that she is now getting a full eight hours a night, a metric she attributes to a newly calm nervous system and the fact that there is nothing left to stay up worrying about.
“My therapist is thrilled,” said Cole. “My cortisol is down. My screen time is down. My revenue is also down, technically to zero, but I’m trying to stay present and not frame everything in terms of metrics anymore.”
Friends confirmed that Cole appears genuinely happier, more rested, and more emotionally available than at any point during the company’s operation, when she was reportedly “a ghost” who once took a board call from inside a wedding.
“She’s glowing,” said one friend. “She’s doing pottery. She made a frittata. I haven’t seen her like this since before the seed round, which in hindsight was the beginning of the end of her as a person.”
Cole acknowledged that the path to balance was unconventional but said she would recommend it without hesitation. “Would I have preferred to find harmony while the company was still alive? Sure,” she said. “But you can’t argue with results. And I literally cannot, because we shut down the analytics.”
At press time, Cole had begun feeling slightly restless and had started sketching out an idea for a new company, a development her therapist described as “the part we were worried about.”