The case ‘Entrepreneurial Stress and Burnout: The Buffer Story’ focuses on the relationship between the start-up founder’s personality traits and entrepreneurial success. The case describes the various situations and events that founders navigate and the tough decisions they take to balance the bottom line as well as the happiness of employees and customers.

In 2010, Joel Gascoigne (Joel) founded Buffer, a software firm that built a social media tool to automatically schedule or queue up Tweets throughout the day. The company followed a Lean Startup approach and focused on regular upgrade of product features. This played a crucial role in attracting investors and led to a series A funding in 2014. Following the funding, Joel expanded his team and decided to turn Buffer into a remote working company in 2015. However, things did not go as planned and by 2016 the company had to undertake various cost-cutting measures like retrenching employees and drastically reducing the pay of the top management and founders. Though these initiatives helped Buffer become profitable, the company’s growth was very slow. Due to differences in operating strategy between Joel on the one side and co-founder Leo Widrich (Leo) and Sunil Sadasivan (Sunil), Chief Technical Officer, on the other, Leo and Sunil left Buffer in early 2017.

The stress of the previous decisions to bring in investors, leading to lower organizational control, retrenchment of employees, and the departure of key team members had a severe impact on Joel’s mental health. He decided to take a sabbatical in 2017 to avoid burnout, and delegated his tasks to his team members, a risky decision since the founders were the face of the start-up as clients regularly interacted only with them. Buffer operated without the founder for six months. Post his sabbatical, Joel introduced many policies that gave importance to the physical and mental well-being of Buffer’s employees, including free access to Joyable, a mobile mental health application, and reimbursements for employees who preferred to work from co-working spaces or coffee shops. In 2019, Joel also introduced a sabbatical policy whereby employees could take a fully paid 6-12 week break once every five years. Buffer moved on to become a provider of a full suite of brand-building products for businesses with annual recurring revenue of US$21.2 million in 2019.

Human Resource and Organization Behavior Case Studies | Case Study in Management, Operations, Strategies, Business Environment, Case Studies

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Issues

The case is structured to achieve the following teaching objectives:

	Understand the importance of the personality traits of a start-up founder.
	Learn about managing start-ups in terms of ideation, funding, product development, growth challenges, and employee welfare.
	Understand the decision-making dilemmas that a founder faces to grow or build a sustainable business.
	Learn about the pitfalls encountered by entrepreneurs in their entrepreneurial journey.
	Understand why start-up founders should be sensitive to employee health and well-being.

Contents

WORK CULTURE CHANGES AT BUFFER

BUFFER’s GROWTH PLANS

EXHIBITS

Keywords

Leadership; Personal Values; Individual Decision Making; Entrepreneurial Decision-making; Entrepreneurship Traits; Managing Start-up; Stressors; Burn-out, Learning; Lean Start-up; Sabbatical"

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