Successfully starting a business is high-performance sport, says Christoph Klink, general partner at top VC Antler. Although starting a business becomes easier with AI, the path to success is not. Why extreme performance and sacrifice are necessary.
Christoph Klink is a partner at the globally active early-stage VC Antler, one of the largest early-stage investors in the world with more than 1000 startup investments.
At every conference, in every podcast, on every panel I say: health, including mental health, is central. Please don’t wear yourself out. Today, competition is stronger than ever: new products are created faster, initial sales are generated earlier and the bar for growth is higher. And when I look at how founders work successfully in this environment, a few points stand out.
Avoid vacations, social events, sports
Everyone is making major personal cuts: repeatedly foregoing vacations, less time with family, missing weddings and birthdays. The only difference is which ones weigh the heaviest for them. According to an Antler survey, for 43 percent it is giving up vacation. For 25 percent, it’s time with the family or doing sports.
Nevertheless, almost everyone says that they love their job. And almost half don’t say that they grudgingly accept the cuts – but that they are thrilled by the pace and the high demands.
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It’s time to be honest about it: founding at the level and speed required today is high-performance sport. Nobody would think that Olympic pole vaulters don’t train incredibly hard. Building an extremely fast-growing company is not right for everyone. And a place on the podium doesn’t come without a price.
The high-flyers: maximum performance as a basic principle
We surveyed more than 120 European portfolio companies in the first quarter of 2026 (Editor’s note: Antler’s portfolio companies). The vast majority consistently stand out in life: 72 percent of founders were already in the top 1 percent of their age group before starting their first company – for example in sports, academics or e-gaming.
The founder of SkoneLabs, Marc Zwiebler, was a national badminton player. Daria Stepanova, founder of Airmo, has completed three top master’s degrees in space management, mathematics and engineering. The founder of Peec AI, Marius Meiners, was in the Global Top 100 in League of Legends.
And they are more internationally experienced than ever before. 96 percent have lived in a different country or city than the one in which they grew up.
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Motivation number 1: Convince doubters
What stands out even more is the mindset. 71 percent of founders are driven every day by the thought of disproving their doubters. 55 percent cite wanting to get the best out of themselves as their primary motivation.
These are not people who chose entrepreneurship as a career path. These are people for whom high performance is a fundamental principle. Those who are burning to win a medal. As we know from our other studies, winning an Olympic medal is statistically more likely than building a unicorn.
The story that people like to tell today is: AI democratizes founding. Anyone can build now. The barriers to entry have fallen. That’s true – and it’s not true.
Yes, 93 percent of founders use AI for tasks for which they would previously have needed specialists. The full-stack founder, a person who works at a cutting-edge level across domains without hiring specialists for each function, is becoming the norm. Today, one in ten brings product ideas to the first live test within hours.
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But AI has simultaneously radicalized the competitive environment. When everyone has the same tools, the key variable for success is who uses those tools most effectively and consistently. Technology equalizes access. It does not equalize the drive and the implementation.
52 percent of our founders name Claude or Claude Code as the tool they can no longer do without – compared to 16 percent for ChatGPT. But the important thing is not which tools they use. What is much more important is how and with what focus and intensity they do it.
Hustle Culture: Resilience is rewarded
79 percent respond to key stakeholders within an hour. More than two-thirds monitor growth metrics daily. 14 percent say the pace no longer feels sustainable. 2 percent report that it actively impairs their performance.
Here’s the inconvenient truth that I rarely say out loud as an investor: This system rewards a very specific type of person. People who not only function under extreme pressure, but thrive. Don’t experience peak performance as a burden.
For everyone else, and that is the majority, this is not a sustainable model. And the romanticization of hustle culture is partly responsible for the fact that this is not always said clearly enough.
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Why the decisive factor is renunciation
Capital is no longer the key bottleneck. Neither does technology. Today, speed is the only chance to dig a moat around a company. Behind this speed there is always a person who is ready to put other things aside.
Our job as investors is to recognize and support these people – and not to pretend that what they achieve is attainable, desirable or reasonable for each of us.
