Ask HN: I don't want to be a founder anymore

+1 for vacations. I used to vacation only when I burned out. Now I plan in advance several months ahead. It helps me pace myself so I don't burn myself out before the vacation shows up. Personally I try to schedule two week vacations, leaving the work laptop behind when I go. Letting people know you'll be traveling, so they can plan around it, also helps decouple you from the work. If everything catches on fire when you are gone, they will realize it's necessary to reduce their reliance on you.

Hey there, are you exercising every morning? That is how I be happy.

If you can find a psych/counselor that works for you, that's almost certainly a good idea - but when I hit a point of stress/burnout where I probably should have done that, I was also at the point where I was completely unable to actually make the call to set it up.

After six months of waffling back and forth stressing myself out even worse over the fact that I wasn't doing the obvious thing about it, I concluded that if I was going to manage to do it I'd've done it by now, looked for other options, and suddenly realised that Tianeptine is (a) entirely unscheduled and hence not actively illegal to posess in both the UK and US (b) easily mail orderable from Hong Kong.

Also Tianeptine is acute so if it works for you, you'll be able to tell by a few days in (three in my case). I've been deeply fond of it and far more productive since.

Note to anybody about to reply telling me that's a terrible idea for any of the obvious reasons it could be a terrible idea: Yes, I know, but I was incapable of doing any of the things I should have done to fix it and I had a company and team I was letting down and this worked for me. I am now slowly getting back to a point where I don't feel like I'm letting everybody down, and that's more important to me than pretty much anything else.

Jason lemkin has a great post on this that might be helpful: https://www.saastr.com/is-burnout-especially-intensepervasiv...

and https://www.saastr.com/the-holidays-part-1-im-tired-of-runni...

Essentially it is about hiring managers to share the burden with you. It doesn't have to be expensive either cause you can find hungry guys with lots of brains that are fast learners and hard workers to take over the worst parts of your role relatively quickly.

I would recommend trying to remove yourself from the critical path and release control as different people make different mistakes.

Acquisitions sure look attractive at this point but they are outside your zone of control so they could wind up being major disappointments too.

This is very solid advice