Look at the founders who started companies in the 2010s and what they’re doing now. A pattern emerges. A meaningful number of women founders left their companies somewhere around the eight-to-twelve-year mark. Not at IPO. Not at acquisition. Often during the slow grind of post-product-market-fit growth.
This pattern is not just about burnout, though burnout is part of it. It’s about a structural feature of how venture-backed companies grow.
The first three to five years of a company are creative work. You’re inventing the product, finding the customers, defining the culture. This phase rewards the personality traits that often draw founders, especially women founders, into starting companies in the first place: creativity, vision, conviction, resilience.
Years five through eight are operational scaling. The work shifts. Now you’re managing people, building processes, navigating board politics, raising rounds. The skills required are different. Some founders love this transition. Many find it draining.
Years eight through twelve are where the pattern often breaks. By this point, the founder has been working on the same problem for nearly a decade. The company is no longer fragile, but it’s not at the finish line either. The work is mostly maintenance and incremental optimization. Big creative decisions are rare. Daily life is meetings and reviews and quarterly planning.
For many founders, this is the phase where the math stops working. They’re not as energized by the company as they were at year three. The next several years promise more of the same. A founder asks themselves: do I want to spend my late thirties or forties continuing to grind on this, or do I want to do something else?
For women, this question often coincides with other major life questions — children, aging parents, geographic moves, marriages, divorces. The decision to leave isn’t only about the company. It’s about what shape the next phase of life takes.
This is why you see Payal Kadakia leaving ClassPass. Why Jenny Fleiss left Rent the Runway. Why countless other women founders, less famous, exit companies they built but don’t quite finish.
The conventional reading is that this is a problem — that women aren’t sticking around to build the long-term wealth that comes from years 12 through 20. There’s truth to this. But there’s also another reading: these founders are making rational choices about how to spend the most productive years of their lives, and they’re choosing not to spend all of them on a single company.
The startup ecosystem is built around the idea that you should give everything to one company for 15 years. For some founders that’s right. For many, especially many women, it isn’t.
The takeaway
If you’re a founder, plan for this question in advance. Knowing whether you want to be a build-and-exit founder or a build-and-stay founder shapes everything else: how you raise, who you hire, what you negotiate in your shareholder agreements. Don’t wait until year nine to figure out what you want.
