so we need to talk about burnout
⊹ A spark of Genius ⊹ Circe's spell book of ideas, people, and opportunities, curated to enchant your week
⊹ THE CIRCE BRIEF ⊹
SF is SO back and the energy is palpable. Founders are heading to SF in droves and moving in with their cofounders to build their dream AI startups, operators are building apps on the side after their day jobs, and investors are leaving VC to join early-stage AI teams and get a piece of the action.
With the hustle and grind inevitably comes burnout. A lot of us are holding both: feeling deeply inspired and motivated, and also feeling the constant pressure to keep up.
May is mental health awareness month, and we want to talk about burnout. A 2025 Sifted survey found 54% of founders experienced burnout in the past year and 83% reported high stress. And the load isn't distributed evenly. The Mind Share Partners 2025 Mental Health at Work Report found women, younger workers, and frontline employees report the highest rates of burnout.
And early-stage operators feel it too. The 996 schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) has officially reached SF. Ramp's lead economist analyzed corporate card data and found Saturday spending in SF has surged in 2025, with no equivalent pattern in New York, Austin, or Miami. An AI startup called Rilla tells prospective hires in its job listings not to bother applying unless they're excited about working 70+ hours a week, in person, six days a week. A 2025 Startup Snapshot report found 52% of startup employees have struggled with anxiety since joining their company, and 50% report burnout, both higher than founders themselves. And then layer on AI pressure. The EY 2025 Work Reimagined Survey found 88% of employees now use AI at work and 64% say their workload has increased because of pressure to perform on it.
Let’s be real though, nobody builds a company on a 40-hour week. The question is what kind of grind actually gets you there.
Ladies, this is a marathon not a sprint. So what do we do?
The tactical layer
Enter the Full Engagement framework. When the iconic Vicky Tsai keynoted our Berkeley Female Founders + Funders Summit last year, she introduced us to this concept, originally from a book called The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. The argument: manage your energy, not your time. There are four kinds (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual) and most people try to optimize all four by grinding harder. The book says the opposite: you restore the four, and the output takes care of itself.
Here's what it actually looks like. Audit every task on your plate by what gives you energy and what drains it. Protect the energy-giving ones like they're meetings, block your calendar if you have to. Balance the draining ones you can't avoid with restorative ones, instead of stacking them back to back. And the draining tasks you do over and over? Delegate. Suddenly a walk, a pilates class, an hour at the gym stops being "a waste of time" and starts being the strategy. The thing that lets you get more out of the next four hours than you would have gotten out of six.
The foundation
Jane Chen gets at the foundation underneath in Like a Wave We Break. She co-founded Embrace Global and worked 100-hour weeks for years until she broke. She says, "resilience is not about pushing harder. It is about slowing down, feeling our feelings, and developing self-compassion." For a lot of high-achievers, the drive itself is a survival response - a way to outrun something. It works until your body decides it doesn't.
You can audit your tasks, protect the gym, delegate the drainers, and still find yourself running on fumes six months later if you don't know what's actually driving you.
Protecting your brain is the prerequisite for everything else you came here to do. There's no exit, no company, no change you're trying to make without it. We see how hard you’re working, and we know it's not easy. So we're building more space into the Circe calendar for you to take care of yourselves. You don't have to do this alone.
— Isa & Anna⊹
⊹ CIRCE DEALFLOW
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Raising: Pre-Seed
AIM Colours is reimagining how luxury accessories express identity, without ever needing a charge. Their battery-free, colour-changing film (just 1mm thin) integrates directly into eyewear, watch bands, jewellery, and nail accessories, letting users swap colours instantly through an app. No hardware replacements. No charging. Just seamless, on-demand personalization. For brands, the value runs deeper than aesthetics. Aim Colours helps luxury houses collapse SKU counts, streamline inventory, and layer in recurring revenue through digital colour drops, while capturing real-time colour preference data that traditional product lines can't touch.
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Raising: Pre-Seed
Strinkl is the operational layer for UCG marketing, helping high-growth startups manage creators, track performance, and automate payments. Founded my Ayoung Jeon (ex-Twitter and Spotify) and Ben Reilly (YCS22), strinkl replaces spreadsheets and screenshots with a unified infrastructure for the next era of creator marketing. They are currently raising a pre seed round, if interested reach out to [email protected]!
⊹ TALENT MOVES
Pendulum | Influencer and Podcast Marketing Manager | Remote
BigHat Biosciences | Associate Director/ Principle, Machine Learning Scientist
⊹ More Female Founded Companies That Are Hiring See the Full List
⊹ CIRCE MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
Cal Volleyball Student Athlete
Ashley is a student-athlete studying media studies at UC Berkeley, where she also plays Division I volleyball. We are lucky enough to have her also manage social media content for Circe, creating content around founders, community, and the events that bring us all together!
Outside of Circe, she also is a TA for brand identity and graphic design course at Berkeley. She loves matcha and music, and she is set to graduate in December of 2026!
⟡ EVENTS
Yoga and Meditation | May 19th
Circe and Slash are taking over MNTSTUDIO's Marina studio for a private Pilates class, followed by wine, charcuterie, and easy conversation upstairs
Dinner Party for Women in AI + DeepTech | May 26th
Join 20 of the most compelling women building in AI and deep tech: space is limited!
Al Dente: Founder-Investor pasta-making | June 24th
Investors: Come make pasta from the creators of Flour+Water, and bring your favorite female founder with you.
See our entire Calendar of events here.
.⊹ Grab A Coffee With Us! ⊹
Anna Gurney
Circe, Berkeley MBA/MPH, Chief of Staff @ Aura Finance
Topics: Early stage investing, Women’s Health, HealthTech, VC ecosystem, and building founder networks.
⊹ BOOK TIME
Isa D’Elia
Circe, Berkeley MBA, Bizdev and GTM @ Kenley (YC ‘24)
Topics: Applied AI, HR Tech, 0→1 product strategy, and building systems that help teams move faster.
⊹ BOOK TIME
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We know you’re juggling a million things and life moves far too fast. But in the middle of it all, we want to take a moment and recognize how awesome you are and make sure you’re always in the loop!
We are so excited about allll the things we’ve got going on and coming up. We hope you’ll be the biggest part of it!
Thank you for joining us in this journey of creation and empowerment.
