There’s a version of the story that gets told a lot.
You build something. You take the risk. You carry the responsibility. And because you chose this path, you convince yourself you should be able to handle it all quietly and without slowing down.
But over time, that pressure accumulates.
Ina Syvänen built Entalio after experiencing this herself. Not as an abstract idea, but through her own experience of prolonged stress and overwork.
“I thought I was being productive,” she says. “But looking back, I wasn’t sleeping properly, I wasn’t recovering, and I was constantly running on stress.”
Eventually, the stress also began manifesting physically. After a long period of operating under constant pressure, she ended up in the hospital with a stress-related stomach ulcer.
“That was probably the moment that really forced me to stop and think,” she says. “You realise that if you don’t have your health, you don’t really have anything.”
What struck her most afterward was how gradually it had happened — and how easy it is to normalize that state when everyone around you is also constantly pushing forward.
“You can get so used to functioning under pressure that you stop noticing what it’s doing to you,” she says.
The problem is structural, not personal
The problem is not that founders are weak. The problem is that the role makes honesty almost structurally impossible.
You can’t tell your board you’re falling apart. You can’t tell your team you’re not sure you can keep going. You can’t tell your co-founder, because there are competing interests in that conversation. And you can’t tell your family, because they already worry and you don’t want to add to it.
So you don’t tell anyone. You keep performing. The pressure accumulates, day after day, until the body or the mind makes the decision for you.
“The loneliness at the top is real,” Ina says. “Not talked-about, not admitted. Just real. There’s a constant weight of decisions and responsibility, and no one even asks how you’re doing.”
The research confirms what founders already know from experience. A 2025 survey of 156 founders found that 73% conceal mental health struggles while maintaining high performance. Entrepreneurs are 50% more likely to report mental health conditions than the general population. And only 23% seek professional support.
The gap between those numbers is not a coincidence. It’s the cost of a role that requires the performance of strength even when the reserves are empty.
The sisu trap
Finland has a particular version of this problem.
The cultural framework is built around pushing through. Grit. Endurance. The idea that hardship is something you absorb, not something you address. And in many situations, that’s a genuine strength. But applied to mental load in high-pressure leadership, it becomes a liability.
Kristo Ovaska, founder of Taito.ai and one of the more recognised names in Finnish tech, wrote publicly about his own severe burnout in early 2022. Two years to recover. The symptoms had been building for years before it broke: sleep problems, resting heart rate climbing above 70, getting sick every weekend as the stress hormones dropped during rest, memory failing, short fuse over nothing.
He compared it to overtraining in professional sports. The parasympathetic nervous system stops functioning under sustained cortisol load. The body can no longer recover. The harder you push, the less you get back.
What’s notable is not just that it happened. It’s that it took years of visible signals before anything changed.
“In the US, they’re maybe three or four years ahead of Finland on this,” Ina observes. “They’ve understood that replacing a burned-out CEO is extraordinarily expensive. Prevention is cheaper than recovery. Finland hasn’t quite got there yet.”
The Finnish model still runs close to: grind until you hit the wall, then rehabilitate. Go back in, repeat. What Ina is building is the version that comes before the wall.
This is now a serious market
While Finland is still early, the rest of the world has already moved.
We wrote earlier this year about Finland’s mental health distribution problem: world-class expertise, a population in crisis, and a delivery model that hasn’t caught up. Companies like Auntie are building the employee wellness layer. Entalio is building for the floor above it: the people everyone else expects to be fine.
The global context explains why this moment matters. In 2018, Silicon Valley VC firm Felicis Ventures made a quiet announcement: they would commit 1% on top of every check they wrote, in non-dilutive capital, earmarked specifically for founder coaching and mental health. No strings attached. Available for years after the investment.
The reasoning was direct. “We ask founders to build companies that will change the world, and yet we are not really providing support on this front,” said Felicis founder Aydin Senkut. “We’re putting all of it in a box for founders to deal with alone. And that didn’t make sense to us.”
That was 2018. Since then, the market has grown into something more structured.
By 2026, executive mental health has segmented into distinct offerings aimed at different parts of the leadership pyramid. At the enterprise level, platforms like BetterUp and Lyra Health sell per-employee-seat models to large organisations, positioning mental health support as a data-backed ROI story for boards. At the concierge end, firms like Cerevity charge $25,000 to $50,000 per year for total privacy and therapists who understand business culture specifically. For neuro-performance, players like Doro Mind use biometric data and early warning systems to flag burnout before it becomes visible, at $5,000 to $15,000 per year. For intensive intervention, programmes like the Hoffman Institute offer week-long resets for senior leaders at around $5,000 per week.
The common thread across all of them: the framing has shifted from wellness as a benefit to mental performance as a business input. This is not about being kind to founders. It is about protecting the decision-making capacity of the person the entire operation depends on.
What people are actually buying
Entalio matches C-level executives, founders, and senior leaders with therapists who understand high-performance environments. The service is confidential and built specifically for people who cannot afford to be seen struggling.
The buying trigger is not acute crisis. It is accumulated pressure that has been sitting there for years.
“It’s rarely ‘I had a bad week,'” Ina explains. “It’s more like: I’ve been feeling this weight for three, four years. It’s been compressing. And if someone offers a release, the reaction is: actually, yes. Maybe.”
The second entry point is loneliness. Pure, structural loneliness. The kind that comes from being the person who decides everything, bears everything, and is expected to have answers for everything, with no one in your corner who doesn’t have some stake in the outcome.
Research puts a number on it: 61% of founders find it hard to find support from people who actually understand their challenges. The more successful they become, the fewer people they can speak to honestly.
Therapy, in this context, is not about fixing something broken. It is about having one conversation where nothing is at stake. Where the point is not a decision or a deal or a performance review. Just: getting it out.
“Sometimes having one space where you can speak openly — without needing to perform, decide, or hold everything together — can change more than people expect,” Ina says.
The performance argument
Mid-Day Squares, the Canadian snack brand built by siblings and a brother-in-law, made therapy a line item on their P&L from day one. Not because something was wrong. Because they understood that strong partnerships with different personalities generate friction by design, and unmanaged friction compounds into damage.
Sessions every seven to ten days. Not when things go bad. Always.
That is the professional framing for what Entalio is building in Finland. Not wellness as a concept. Not wellbeing as a value statement. Therapy as a performance input. The same logic you apply to hiring, to strategy, to operations.
The returns are measurable: faster resolution of conflict, clearer decision-making under pressure, maintained trust during periods of stress. The cost of not investing is also measurable, just usually realised later and attributed to something else.
Research from Octopus Ventures puts 65% of startup failures down to founder burnout or internal conflict. Studies show 72% of startup founders report stress impacts their decision-making, and 26% have faced legal or financial issues from burnout-related errors. The CEO who runs into the wall takes three to six months to recover. The company doesn’t pause during those months.
What the first signs look like
Ina is precise about this, because she has watched it closely. So was Kristo Ovaska, who documented his own symptoms in detail after recovering.
The pattern is consistent across both accounts.
Sleep degrades first. Trouble falling asleep. Then reduced deep sleep. Then waking at 4am with a brain already running at full speed, trying to solve problems that can wait. Resting heart rate climbs. Kristo tracked his: it peaked above 70 at his worst, against a recovered baseline of 55.
Then the immune system starts to fail in patterned ways. Getting sick over weekends. Getting sick on vacation. Because the stress hormones holding everything together drop when the body finally rests, and it takes the opening to fall apart.
Memory goes next. Appointments are missed. Objects are misplaced. Things that used to be automatic now require effort.
The emotional volatility is usually the most visible signal to people around you, and the last one you notice yourself. Disproportionate reactions. Snapping at things that don’t warrant it. The nervous system is permanently on alert. The threshold for normal tolerance has dropped to almost nothing.
Ina’s test is simple: can you sit still, without your phone, without headphones, without anything, for five minutes?
Most people in this state cannot.
“If you’re that deep in it, you’re usually the last person to notice,” she says. “The people around you see it first. But by the time it’s that visible, you’re already pretty far in.”
The intervention does not need to be dramatic. One of Entalio’s clients, after just a few sessions, came back and said they finally understood what was happening in their own body when the pressure spiked. They learned to notice it. To stop, breathe, walk around the block. Come back.
That is not a surrender. That is a skill.
The counterintuitive thing about showing it
There is a fear that runs through every leader who considers admitting difficulty. If my team sees me struggling, I lose credibility. I lose authority. They lose confidence.
The evidence runs the other way.
When a CEO stands in front of their team and says: this is hard for me too. I am not managing it perfectly. I know it is heavy on you because it is heavy on me too. The response is almost always the opposite of what they feared.
People do not withdraw. They step forward. They feel the gap close between themselves and the person they were starting to resent.
“People are actually very good,” Ina says. “We just get in our own way with the image we think we have to maintain.”
The leader who can acknowledge the weight, without losing their direction, is more trusted than the one who performs invulnerability. Showing it does not mean losing the thread. It means being honest about what it costs to carry it.
The choice
You chose the role. That is true.
It does not follow that you have to carry every part of it alone. It does not mean the weight is just yours to absorb until the absorption fails.
The founders and leaders who perform at the highest level over the longest time are not the ones who feel nothing. They are the ones who built systems for what they feel. Structures that let them process, not accumulate.
The rest of the world’s most demanding organisations already know this. Finland is catching up.
That is not softness. That is how you stay in the game.
Entalio offers confidential therapy matching for executives, founders, and senior leaders in Finland.
