Friends,

I’m writing this from Sydney after a stellar event launching HiBob’s In Good Company community.

It was great to connect with many of you there. Thank you for coming to watch me speak and catchup.

Even though I live and work remotely, IRL will forever be one of the most important things to me — and this event was a great reminder.

I’m enjoying a bit of downtime in the harbour city — doing my best to avoid sharks — and then doing it all over again in Melbourne, where I’ll get to meet even more of you (sign up here if you’re around).

In this week’s edition, we’re hearing from startup CTO Nav Rao on a topic I know is important to many of us — burnout. Not just because our entire profession seems to be succumbing to it ourselves, but because in many ways we’re the guardians of that affliction for people, too.

Enjoy this week’s edition ✌️

Matt

They forget the calendar invite. They skip the check-in. HR chases them, nothing changes, and the new hire's first 90 days fall apart.

Pyn automates the follow-through. It sends Slack messages from real people (not system notifications), nudges managers at the right moments, auto-adds calendar invites, and spots when someone needs extra support.

All without HR lifting a finger.

Arctic Wolf used it to save 700+ hours during hypergrowth. 

Their Director of People Experience, Mary Newville, put it simply: "We mapped all the questions managers kept asking, and Pyn answers them at scale. Without Pyn, we wouldn't have survived."

Onboarding that adapts in real time. No chasing. No cracks.

Interested in sponsoring the FNDN Series?

Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

This edition is based on the latest podcast interview with Nav Rao.

Nav is a software engineer by trade and a startup operator by experience. He’s spent over a decade building inside early-stage companies, as an engineer, founder, and now, as a fractional CTO to startups. His career spans first-hire environments, agency work, and larger tech organisations, which gives him a rare end-to-end view of how systems either enable people to do meaningful work, or quietly grind them down.

Nav also speaks openly from lived experience. He’s dealt with chronic depression and anxiety alongside his career, and as a result, he doesn’t romanticise startup life or hustle culture. His perspective on burnout isn’t theoretical or sanitised. It’s practical, personal, and shaped by the experience of what actually happens when effort, care, and ambition keep getting stuck in the system.

If your high performers are exhausted, your wellness program won't fix it. But fixing your decision-making process, will.

Burnout isn’t simply ‘being tired on a Monday’. It’s the prolonged undercurrent of depletion. Like an old iPhone with too many software updates.

And in a startup, the cause of that depletion is effort that keeps getting blocked.

Here’s what that looks like in reality: work that stalls in review, decisions that drag, clarity that’s missing.

Where progress is ultimately slowed to the point that ambition evaporates before anything ships.

For startup People leaders, that focus matters because it points to a non-wellness root cause: the operating system people work inside every day.

If you want less burnout (and more output) without performative programs, reduce time-to-decision.

If you work in a startup, none of this will sound dramatic.

Startups are friction factories. Ambiguity gets framed as autonomy. Teams scale faster than decision rights do. High-agency people end up in low-clarity systems. None of this looks toxic in isolation — that's why it's dangerous.

Nav describes the pattern as something that should be quick, that instead becomes “to do → in progress → in review… and it’s in review for months and months and months.”

That's sustained friction: when care, ambition, and effort are repeatedly blocked, invalidated, or slowed by the system of work.

It’s a place where decisions lose momentum, context expires, and the dopamine of progress never arrives.

And the erosion is predictable.

Energy drops first — people feel constantly depleted, even after rest. Then meaning erodes — the work stops feeling worth the push. Honesty follows — suggestions dry up, feedback gets edited, silence feels safer. 

Finally, agency disappears, and then people stop initiating altogether.

This is how burnout forms, cumulatively, not just through one bad week.

Crucially, burnout isn’t disengagement. Disengagement is when people stop trying. Burnout is when they don't stop trying — and poor systems grind them down anyway.

Sustained friction is hard to spot until you know what to look for. Once you do, it shows up in consistent, observable ways. 

As a team leader, these are the signals to keep an eye on.

Watch for irritation, flatness, or avoidance where there used to be energy. 

Nav describes burnout for him starting with a sigh — everyday interruptions suddenly feel costly. When normal requests trigger frustration, it’s often a sign capacity is already leaking.

Track where work slows down. Repeatedly stalled approvals, unclear ownership, and tasks stuck “in review” are friction points. 

Listen for forced optimism. Failure being reframed. Delays being normalised. 

Nav describes burnout environments where nothing is allowed to fail — everything must be reframed as learning. But the result isn’t resilience. It’s silence. Feedback either disappears completely, or comes out as unfiltered word vomit once someone hits their limit.

These are the signals to watch for before they become irreversible.

If burnout is a systems problem, the fix isn’t resilience training. It’s structural.

Nav is clear that burnout isn't about people not caring. It's often the opposite. He talks about recognising when he's taking on too much because of curiosity and drive — and the absence of anyone stepping in to slow him down.

As a leader, this means actively removing work, not admiring effort. If someone keeps compensating for gaps, the system is borrowing energy it can't repay.

As a comp person, this was insightful to hear: clarity beats compensation. Decision rights, priorities, and expectations do more for energy than another wellbeing initiative ever will.

Fix the friction, and most people don’t need fixing at all.

If you detect forced optimism in your culture, it’s time to intervene. Nav is explicit about the damage caused by this, because when failure can’t be named, honesty disappears.

Explore mechanisms for giving leaders permission to say, “this didn’t work,” without immediately polishing it into a lesson.

Burnout prevention isn’t another People program, it's an operating system fix.

Reduce time-to-decision, and you'll reduce burnout. Everything else is theatre.

A note: This isn't medical advice or burnout science. It's two startup operators talking about what we've seen in the systems we've worked in. Take it as perspective, not prescription.

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

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4. How to Become a HR Consultant
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