Startups are hard, but in both the short and long-term there's nothing cutting edge or brave about a founder working themselves and their team into the ground.
A retreat to learn about how to do things at a more measured pace might seem like a luxury, yet many of the principles should be included in the existing accelerator and incubator programs.
Exponential growth, tracking metrics daily, chasing funding and targets, putting in 20-hour workdays… being the founder of a startup is a high-pressure job with no downtime.
But some founders are going in the opposite direction - they're signing up for a stint with a decelerator to learn how to slow, pause, and re-evaluate business goals.
Decelerator programmes are a combination of leadership coaching and mentoring with the aim of getting founders to think of optimising a business for a sense of purpose and personal fulfilment as well as profit.