For Investors

2x your fund returns by focusing on your portfolios most crucial asset: The Founders

“Even if investors do not personally care about the mental health of the founders, they should pay close attention to it if they care about portfolio returns.”

– Kavedon Capital

Founder Success

At a high level, it’s simple. Any VC firm has two key drivers: performance and reputation. In other words: generating returns and ensuring entrepreneurs want to work with you.

Founder Success strives to understand each founder’s unique expectations and figure out how to at least meet, but ideally, exceed them. It requires asking thoughtful questions, giving and receiving difficult feedback, and maintaining a tight communication loop internally and with founders. With an average ROI of 5:1 for Founder Health and Development investments, investors neglecting the human side of their founders are wasting capital.

On the basis of long-term partnerships, Accelerate Health enables investors to become truly founder-centric by addressing health and performance related areas from strategy to execution.

    • Strategy Workshops

    • Executive Sparring

    • Portfolio Assessment

    • Portfolio Reports

    • Market Trends

    • Positioning

    • Communication

    • Program Design

    • Project Coordination

    • Partner Scouting

    • Matchmaking

    • Implementation

    • Evaluation

    • Peer-to-Peer Events

    • Masterclasses

    • Workshops

    • Founder & Team Coaching

    • Office Hours Offsites & Retreats

Founder Success Partnership

1 VC Development

As the first step of the journey, Accelerate Health encourages investor teams to start with an introspection by reflecting on their internal team setup, goals and mission. Potential focus areas include working culture and mindset, as well as diversity and skill set within the team. Moreover, a closer look is taken at role model functions and potential role conflicts linked to expectation management towards the founder teams.

2 Portfolio Development

The second step focuses on evaluating founder-centric resources for portfolio teams to successfully manage the challenging demands while growing their startups into successful businesses. A personal assessment of the current mental health, strength and weaknesses and founder-investor relationship sets the basis for selecting suitable development measures. Being a key predictor for founders mental well-being and success, Accelerate Health further focuses on developing healthy investor-founder relationships as well as driving community building and peer-to-peer support.   

3 Next Generation VC

In close collaboration, a roadmap is developed, new standards are defined, tested and established to actively drive the next generation VC transformation. 

Last but not least, all activities of Accelerate Health are embedded in a strong network of trusted partners and supporters.

Investors are wasting capital

  • 2/3 out of all startups fail due to avoidable people problems

    – Harvard Business School

  • 30% of startups fail only due to the emotional state of the founders

    – Fortune Magazine

  • The average ROI for proactive workplace mental health interventions is 5:1

    – Deloitte

  • Companies investing early into culture and mental health double their growth compared to their counterparts

    – Heidrick & Struggles

Take action

“Founder burnout is the biggest risk to early stage investments. Wouldn’t it be amazing if VC’s offered their portfolio company founders the training and support they needed to avoid burnout? We’ll get there.”

– Avoiding Burnout: A play for Founders and Funders

Founders are different

Why do two-thirds of portfolio companies fail due to people problems? Entrepreneur neurodiversity has something to do with it. It is associated with both superpowers and vulnerabilities. The same character traits that motivate and drive founders to have brilliant ideas and start a company can be a challenge in the long haul. You need to understand how to build a supportive ecosystem giving your portfolio the skills and confidence necessary to succeed where others are forced to give up.

Michael Seibel

– CEO of Y Combinator

“Most people don’t realize how the founders who they are impressed with actually take advantage of therapy.”

Brad Feld

– Co-Founder of Techstars

“We were very successful as a business, financially very successful. Anybody on the outside looking in would say “what’s wrong with you?”. I didn’t feel sadness or sorrow. But it was almost like there was something missing. It was almost the absence of joy.”

Famous Voices on Founder Mental Health, Coaching and Therapy

Meet the Team

We are a team of founders and professional psychologists who have experienced the chronic stress, anxiety and life-impacts of entrepreneurship first hand. Our mission is to make your journey easier.

  • Natascha started promoting health in multiple settings and levels from the very first moment in her career. Being trained in business and health psychology (M.Sc.), she supported healthy school environments, coached future executives, and worked as an advisor to improve working conditions for corporate businesses. As an active member of the Berlin based startup ecosystem with specific focus on digital health innovation, Natascha closely works together with visionary founders and ambitious change makers to drive next generation healthcare. Having struggled with challenging health conditions herself, to date Natascha continuously combines and applies the latest scientific knowledge, practical tools and interdisciplinary treatment methods. She personally experiences the huge positive impact of health promoting thoughts and behaviors on a daily level.


  • After a masters degree in corporate management and economics, Gerjet worked for NGOs, a development bank and for 5 years as a product manager and UX Designer in various health and sports tech startups in Berlin. In 2018 Gerjet founded his own startup Skill Yoga with the mission to make yoga more accessible to a masculine identifying audience. After growing it to 15 employees, more than 1mn€ revenue and raising 1.8mn€ in a seed round, he experienced firsthand the loneliness, isolation, stress, financial hardship, and burnout associated with building a startup. His empathy for the founder journey and his training in yoga, meditation, mindfulness coaching and breath work led him to create support systems around the thesis that healthy founders equal successful founders and healthy returns.

“30% of startups fail completely due to the emotional state of their founders.”

– Fortune Magazine

“Just like you would spend a lot of effort trying to retain a great programmer or sales person who’s doing really well for the company, you should invest in making yourself happy and effective at work. It’s easy to burn out.”

– Justin Kan, Co-Founder of Twitch

accelerate health, enjoy life

book a call with our managing directors, Natascha and Gerjet, to find out how we can transform your work so it’s good for yourself, good for others, and good for the environment.