In October 2025, Fortune asked a group of CEOs running some of the biggest companies in the world — Apple, Airbnb, PepsiCo, UPS, Insomnia Cookies — what the job actually feels like at the top. They gave the same answer, more or less. Apple’s Tim Cook told the magazine, “The adage that it’s lonely—the CEO job is lonely—is accurate in a lot of ways.” Insomnia Cookies founder and CEO Seth Berkowitz put it more plainly: “It can be lonely; it’s a solitary life,” adding that “finding camaraderie, mentorship, some sense of community, it’s really important.”
That two of the executives saying this in public are founders, not hired-in operators, matters. Founder loneliness gets treated as a private failing — something you’re supposed to power through and never mention. The data says it’s common enough, and costly enough, that a growing list of well-known founders have started naming it instead.
What the numbers actually say
The most-cited data point traces back to a CEO Snapshot Survey run by RHR International, published via Harvard Business Review by the firm’s chairman, Thomas J. Saporito: half of CEOs report feeling lonely in the role, and 61% of that group say the loneliness directly hinders their performance. Among first-time CEOs specifically, the figure who say it hurts their performance climbs to nearly 70%.
More recent reporting backs up the scale of it. A November 2023 Fortune piece cited Suneel Gupta — a tech entrepreneur and visiting professor at Harvard Medical School — on at least 40% of executives thinking about leaving their jobs, in large part because they lack the energy for it and feel alone handling the day-to-day. The same piece cited a 2022 Deloitte study finding 70% of C-suite leaders are seriously considering quitting for a role that better supports their well-being. Neither figure is founder-specific, but founders sit at the sharpest end of the same structural position: the person the org chart says has no peer inside the building.
It’s not a lack of friends — it’s the decisions
The instinct is to treat this as a social problem: get out more, build a network, join a group. A December 2024 Harvard Business Review study — researchers Alaric Bourgoin, Sarah L. Wright, Jean-François Harvey, and Saouré Kouamé, surveying 165 Canadian CEOs with 107 complete responses and 46 follow-up interviews — found something more specific. The loneliness usually isn’t a lack of social contact. It’s the weight of decisions only the CEO can make, especially during a crisis, when they turn to their board or senior team for backup and find either that the group is divided or that they don’t feel equipped to help. That reframes the fix: it’s less “make more friends” and more “stop being the only person who can see the whole picture.”
Brian Chesky’s version of it
Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky has talked about this specifically and recently. He’s described Airbnb crossing a $100 billion valuation around its IPO as, in his words, “one of the saddest days” of his life — the high fading into “20%, 30% sadness” almost immediately. He’s also credited a piece of advice from Barack Obama, who became a mentor to him, with changing how he handled it: Chesky said he initially thought what he needed was to be in a relationship, and Obama told him that wasn’t it — what he needed were friends, and specifically something closer to a circle of 15 close friends rather than one person carrying the whole load. It’s a strikingly literal version of the HBR finding above: Chesky’s problem wasn’t zero social contact, it was concentrating too much weight on too few relationships.
What founders who’ve named it say actually helped
Fast Company asked a group of founders and CEOs how they specifically combat it, and the answers were concrete rather than generic. Parabol cofounder and CEO Jordan Husney called journaling his “secret weapon.” LinkSquares CEO and founder Vishal Sunak said doing hands-on, tedious work himself — not delegating everything — helped him feel less cut off from what was actually happening in the business. Double CEO and cofounder Alice Default described a small standing group of peer CEOs who check in every few weeks specifically to “exchange war stories” and “ask each other hard questions.” Payrix cofounder Benny Silberstein pointed to something smaller: plain, nonbusiness text messages from people who aren’t asking for anything, as a reminder that someone’s thinking of you outside the role. Engage3 CEO Edris Bemanian named the stigma directly, arguing that treating a therapist or coach as a sign of weakness is “an antiquated concept.”
None of these are dramatic interventions. They’re specific, repeatable habits — a standing call, a journal, a policy of doing some of the unglamorous work yourself — chosen by people who’d already tried the vague version (“network more”) and found it didn’t move the number.
The takeaway
- It’s not a fringe complaint. Half of CEOs report it, per the RHR/HBR survey, and 61% of that group say it costs them performance.
- The cause is structural, not social. The December 2024 HBR study found it’s the concentration of unshareable decisions, not a lack of people around you — which is why “get out more” alone doesn’t fix it.
- Concentration, not isolation, is the specific risk. Chesky’s own account — needing many close relationships instead of one — matches that finding almost exactly.
- The fixes that stuck for real founders were specific. A standing peer-CEO call, journaling, hands-on work, plain check-in texts — not a general instruction to “build a network.”
Related reading
- Founder Burnout: What the Research Actually Shows — the research on entrepreneurship and burnout risk, and why isolation, not workload, kept surfacing as the actual trigger.
- Marc Lou Was Fired in 2021. He Now Runs 15+ Startups Alone and Cleared $1M in a Year.
- Pieter Levels Built a Flight Simulator. $1M ARR in 17 Days.
