Startup Success Led to a Health Crisis, and a Founder Walked Away
Yoav Dagani, an experienced entrepreneur, says he reached the kind of startup success many founders chase, but the pace nearly cost him his life. In 2021, during a routine mentoring meeting, he spotted early potential in a young startup, connected the founders with investors, and later joined the company himself. What began as a small fundraising round grew into a multimillion-dollar raise.
As the founders moved to the United States, Dagani stayed in Israel to run local operations and manage an American sales team across time zones. With the birth of his second daughter, his life became, in his words, “24/7.” He stopped sleeping well, exercising, writing and meditating, while experiencing chest pressure, tingling, weakness and fear that he would not wake up in the morning. “Everyone thought I had lost it,” he said, but for him leaving was “the most rational decision” he had ever made.
The crisis escalated during a Zoom management meeting, when he felt heat throughout his body, burning in his heart and difficulty breathing. He finished the meeting, closed his laptop and decided he had to quit before causing “an accident.” The next day he announced his departure. “If you had asked me a day earlier whether I planned to leave, it was not even an option,” he said. “But at that moment I understood that if I did not stop now, my children might be left without a father.”
After leaving, Dagani did not rush into a new role. He spent nearly a year reflecting, writing and asking hard questions, even though he had many tempting offers. He returned to sleep, exercise, meditation and meeting people without a business agenda, and began writing on LinkedIn about what had happened. He says many successful people are living “next to their lives,” ignoring physical warning signs such as pain, tremors, heat, tingling, anxiety and sleep problems. Today he works on what he calls “synergistic entrepreneurship,” helps founders and managers deal with loneliness, pressure and burnout, and has created a six-day WhatsApp challenge for entrepreneurs to better understand themselves.
