High Growth, Low Burnout: Blueprint for Sustainable Startup Scale

Scaling a startup quickly usually comes with a cost: exhausted teams, weakened culture, and founder burnout. It doesn't have to be a tradeoff between growth and the health of the people who make the company run.

Scaling Longevity in Your Startup is a moderated panel for founders, CTOs, and team leads on how to grow from 0 to 75+ employees while keeping the stamina to reach 200. Michael Hess (CTO, Outset AI, YC S23) and Quentin Rousseau (CTO, Rootly AI, YC S21) share what it took to scale their teams, joined by Dr. Rachit Chawla, a Bay Area pediatrician, for a clinical perspective on sustained performance. Moderated by Spencer Tate, founder and CEO of Shifu Health and former Division 1 cross-country athlete.

Key Takeaways

• Engineering practices that protect people: designing on call, incident load, and meeting culture to maintain velocity without wearing down the team.

• Burnout early warning systems: clinical and operational indicators to spot overload before it becomes attrition.

• The 75 to 200 playbook: what leaders need to change about how they operate to get through the next stage of growth.

Who Should Attend

Early-stage founders, co-founders, COOs, VPs of Engineering, and People Ops leaders looking to engineer high performance while preserving company health and retention.

Secure your spot to walk away with a ready-to-implement operational toolkit designed to protect your team’s stamina while hitting your next milestone.

About Rootly AI

Rootly AI is the AI-native on-call and incident response platform that provides proactive support to help Site Reliability Engineers resolve incidents faster, improve system resilience, and streamline on-call operations. It’s your always-on SRE copilot that automates root cause analysis and identifies patterns that drive continuous improvement—trusted by hundreds of companies like LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Replit, Elastic, Canva, Clay, Tripadvisor, and Shell.