It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the mental health crisis among European startup founders is severe, with 94% showing signs of strain. Sifted’s 2025 survey found that 83% are experiencing high stress, 75% are suffering from anxiety, and more than half (54%) are dealing with burnout symptoms.

Despite the difficulties they are facing, the majority of founders (56%) reported receiving absolutely no help from investors when it came to their mental health, compared to just 3.6% who reported they were.

The early days of generative A.I. have revealed two clear business truths: (1) A.I. tools are powerful and cannot be ignored in any company's strategic planning; and yet (2) organisations across all fields simply don't know where to start in best evaluate, select, and eventually adopt the tools they need.

From conversations with dozens of operators across various industries, the key to successful A.I. adoption is to set the company on a discovery path and allow each department to explore where A.I. can meaningfully help them automate, streamline, accelerate, or boost their work and productivity. Ultimately, teams must be equipped with the tools, mindset, and cultural permission to experiment.

But for experimentation to be successful, the company’s leadership and staff have to be operating from a fully engaged and functional prefrontal cortex: open, creative, collaborative. Unfortunately, stress, anxiety and depression shut down the brain’s prefrontal cortex.

In order to be most effective, Christopher will join the leadership team of the company as an interim CFO/Head of Finance or Chief of Staff and will go to work from Day 1 to lift the CEO’s mental load by acting as an “air-traffic controller” and triaging cross-team requests. This usually cuts Slack and email noise by roughly half to three-quarters each week. Additionally, by guarding the calendar, adding agendas and pre-reads while eliminating unnecessary meetings, Christopher will support the CEO in freeing up 2–3 deep-work blocks every week.

Once these quick wins have been made, Christopher will go about turning any ad-hoc chaos into repeatable operating systems together with the rest of the leadership team. In the past, we have successfully implemented the EOS™ and other OKR/KPI frameworks. This usually removes nearly 40% of the decision bottlenecks that so often drive founder burnout. Additionally, Christopher may own OKR-linked side-projects end-to-end. This can range from managing a project, to building sophisticated financial models, builing slides or leading negotiations. If necessary, CTKC also has additional associated and resources we can bring to support as well.

We find that these measures combined often have the added benefit of compressing decision cycles by as much as 30%, and cutting hiring burn by delaying 3–9 planned head-count additions.

Our strategy to integrate all A.I. initiatives is always an integral part of creating the repeatable operating system mentioned above, and has two essential components: bottom-up experimentation and top-down signaling of intent. This is best achieved by (a) removing as many internal barriers as possible to testing and using A.I. tools, and (b) emphasising throughout the organisation that A.I. adoption is a top strategic priority.

To remove barriers, we try to establish a simple rule: the default answer to A.I. exploration is “yes.” Budgets shouldn't block initial pilots. Where necessary, legal, IT, and security departments should be empowered to ensure compliance by “resolving rather than restricting.” Once tools have proven valuable, the leadership team will scaled them across teams where applicable.

In these processes, it is important for leadership to make clear that A.I. is everyone's business: from the CEO to every member of staff, A.I. adoption must be a key strategic theme. At our weekly, monthly, and quarterly management meetings, we ask C-level executives to share how their departments are (or aren’t) leveraging A.I. These examples may include how Sales is using LLMs to evaluate marketing materials, or the tech team’s new best ways to use A.I. for coding. Slack or Teams channels discussing A.I. tools and tips for coding, marketing and design are also often popular in this context.

When barriers are removed and intent is made clear, organisations can build a culture where A.I. adoption spreads organically, quickly, and with purpose. That – not by dictating the use of a specific tool – is how you stay relevant in the age of A.I.

Often also referred to as a “Chemistry Check”, we will usually start with an initial call to discuss what the CEO’s most pressing challenges are, i.e. what is keeping him/her up at night. The objective is to understand whether CTKC is a good fit to fix the “problem,” as well as to see if we can work well together on a personal level.

Once we’ve established that there is a good fit skill-wise and on a personal level, Christopher will meet with the rest of the leadership team, ideally by joining a regular leadership team meeting and by speaking to each executive individually.

Following the input from the CEO and leadership team, we will draft the outline of an action plan to alleviate the pressures on the CEO and start building an organisation fit for tomorrow. This plan be will be completely tailored to the company’s needs, but may include things like (re-)assessing where the company currently stands on its Go-To-Market journey, completing a Belbin Assessment in order to see where the executive team may have gaps, or implementing a management framework like the EOS™ to start shaping the repeatable operating system that will eliminate ad-hoc chaos and decision bottlenecks.