Friends,

I love it when I see full circle moments between the conversations I get to have with incredible people I speak to, and my own experiences in People teams. None more so than in the conversation I’m sharing today.

It takes me back to one of the best jobs I ever had. Best not because of the perks or the pay (although those were solid), but because of the team I had and the incredible things we delivered together. It truly was a job that made me realise what was possible when everything was rowing together, and it is to this day my benchmark for what high performance looks like.

What enabled this was a great boss, and it reminded me of a prominent point they made to myself and my peers at the time. We were a new team, in a new company, at the peak of the post-Covid froth (i.e. well funded) and excited to build a world class People function.

The words were this: “It’s a marathon, not a sprint”.

In essence, don’t let the circumstances drive you into an unsustainable work culture that won’t survive the long term. Take your breaks. Take care of yourself (and probably most importantly, don’t set the wrong impression with your own teams).

Startups tend not to be successful. When they are, it takes 10+ years (and that time is only growing). So the advice was sage.

It was the moment that made me realise that rest is an ingredient of high performance, not a killer of it.

Enjoy this week’s edition ✌️

Matt

In case you’re new here (or just missed it) here’s the past three editions of the FNDN Series:

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This edition is based on the latest episode of the FNDN Series podcast, with Isidora Torres.

Isidora is beehiiv's VP of People, and she's not your average HR leader. With a background that zigzags from advertising to startup HR to actual clinical therapy, she brings a rare mix of creative instinct and deep human understanding to everything she does. Basically, your career, culture, and feelings are all in very good hands.

In news that will surprise absolutely no one, we’re increasingly asking our people to do more.

Jobs are getting harder and performance expectations are climbing, and I don't need to tell you that AI has poured petrol on the fire. We are expecting more and more from our teams and, far too often, giving precious little back.

If you have read this newsletter for more than a minute, you will have seen this theme pop up before. 

Wellbeing is increasingly a workplace problem. Gallup has global engagement stuck near record lows, with around four in ten workers experiencing significant stress on any given day. 

And grind culture refuses to die. 

AI startups across Silicon Valley are openly reviving China's "996" model, 9am to 9pm, six days a week, a schedule China itself outlawed, on the flawed logic that intensity is the only way to win.

Case in point…

So it’s refreshing to find a company going the other way on what high performance actually requires. I sat down with Isidora Torres, VP of People at beehiiv, to understand how they pull it off.

Here is who we are talking about. 

beehiiv is a newsletter platform launched in 2021. In under five years it has grown to more than 30,000 active newsletters, in 2025 alone sent over 28 billion emails (a number I happily contributed to), and has achieved a handsome $30 million in annual recurring revenue. 

It is fully remote, globally distributed, and has around 135 people. It is truly the kind of place where Slack never sleeps. This is not a company that confused going slow with looking after its people, and sustainable high performance is something their CEO, Tyler, takes seriously.

Despite what popular opinion would have you believe, rest and high performance is not a zero sum game. The data has said so for years. 

Stanford research has found that output per hour falls off a cliff once you push past 50 hours a week, and that someone working 70 hours produces little more than someone working 55 (CNBC). The extra hours are mostly theatre.

Isidora frames it as a system. Performance is the whole machine, and rest is one of the parts that keeps it running. 

She shared a relatable analogy — going to the gym:

"You need recovery in order for you to get better or get stronger. If you don't have any recovery, you actually stop gaining muscle."

The strength is built during the recovery. The lift is only the stimulus. 

A team that treats rest as the first thing to cut when work piles up is just overtraining, and the bill arrives a quarter or two later, when quality dips and the best people start looking around.

The part of beehiiv's thinking I find most useful is that the rest carries weight because the output is already there. Wellness Days actually predate Isidora. They were built into the company's benefits early, on a simple premise: people work hard here, so recovery has to be part of the deal. What she added was the framing, that rest is part of the performance system and the system cannot run without it.

Isidora was candid about the condition that makes this land. 

In her words, "if we weren't shipping quickly and delivering great results, I don't know if the Wellness Days would have as much impact." The rest reads as legitimate because the team is visibly delivering. It works as the reward for high performance and the fuel for it at the same time, rather than a substitute.

beehiiv's version is almost mundane in how simple it is. The third Friday of every month, the entire company logs off. 

They call them Wellness Days.

The design earns its keep on the guilt. And I can speak from experience on that one.

I have worked for a globally distributed company, and the part that wears on you is that it is always someone's workday somewhere. 

Case in point; when I logged off on a Friday night in Australia, colleagues in the EU were just hitting their stride. My Saturday morning was still Friday afternoon in the US.

There was always a thread moving, always something happening, and the pull to flip the laptop open or check your work apps at any given time was constant. Taking a day off while the rest of the world is online feels like falling behind, so plenty of people never really do.

A fixed, whole-company day removes that. When everyone is off, nobody is behind. There is no inbox filling up and no colleague to feel guilty in front of.

Here are the three design choices that make it work for beehiiv:

The third Friday is known months out, so people plan around it and actually switch off instead of catching up on life admin. A "take a day whenever you need it" policy tends to become a day nobody takes.

One person taking Friday off still comes back to a backlog. When everyone stops together, the work stops with them, so nobody absorbs someone else's.

If the CEO is firing off Slack messages on a Wellness Day, nobody believes it is a real day off. At beehiiv the tone is set from the top, which is what makes it a ritual rather than a memo.

A natural question is how beehiiv knows the policy is doing anything. 

There is no single dashboard metric, and Isidora does not pretend otherwise. The signal is that the practice has survived the company's growth from around 17 people to 135 without being watered down, and that people genuinely take the day. 

A perk that gets dropped the moment things get busy was never load-bearing. One that holds as you scale is doing real work.

The bigger tell is the company around it. beehiiv kept shipping and kept growing while protecting that rest, which is the argument made real: the output and the recovery feed each other. 

As Isidora puts it, rest is an output of good output.

That is what makes beehiiv worth watching. Plenty of companies offer a day off. Far fewer treat it as part of how a fast, high-output company sustains itself, and fewer still have the growth to show that rest and performance were never the enemies we assume.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe.

A roundup of the most interesting stuff from the week:

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help you:

1. Tools & resources
Resources and tools that give you what you need to build your own startup compensation practices.

2. Comp consulting
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3. Startup People Summit
A 1-day annual event for People professionals in scaling companies. Creating the playbook for startup people practices. Grab recordings from past events, or subscribe to join the next summit.