Rahul Vohra was 27 years old and on the verge of selling his startup to LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform—a deal set to add millions to his net worth. On paper, everything appeared flawless: a fast-growing company, a coveted spot in Y Combinator, the famed startup accelerator, and an imminent acquisition by one of Silicon Valley's biggest businesses. Yet just months before closing the first deal of his entrepreneurial career, Vohra was hospitalized after months of letting the pressure of running a startup pile up.

It was 2011, less than two years after Vohra had cofounded Rapportive, a browser plug-in and email service. Viewed from the outside, the entrepreneur described it as the "perfect success story." A rag-tag team of five had gone from writing its first line of code to joining Y Combinator's summer 2010 cohort within the same year, quickly building a company valuable enough to sell to LinkedIn. Behind the scenes, however, the startup was running out of money, and Vohra was stretching himself thin. Rapportive was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn in February 2012, in a deal reportedly valued at $15 million.

"I didn't think I was stressed, but I think that's just because when you're stressed all the time, you don't even notice it anymore," Vohra tells Fortune.

Then it all boiled over. Vohra woke at 3 a.m. one morning with intense nausea and discomfort, but pressed on with his day. By lunchtime, the pain was impossible to ignore. On a brief four-block walk to a pharmacy near his San Francisco office, he collapsed outside a McDonald's. One of his cofounders came to the rescue and got him painkillers—and, "like an idiot," Vohra says, he went straight back to the grind.

He didn't go to the hospital until the next day, where he underwent a series of health tests. The verdict: the stress of leading his company to a sale was the main culprit. Two years of eating brownies and pizza as meals, never working out, and carrying entrepreneurial pressure had snowballed into gastrointestinal reflux disease. A nurse told him his insides looked like they belonged to someone 10 to 20 years older, and advised him to "re-examine" his life. During his hospital stay and the weeks spent recovering with family, Vohra began rethinking what it meant to build a company—and how he wanted to live while doing it. That reckoning set him on the path to launching another business, one valued at $825 million when it sold to Grammarly—and this time, with no trips to the hospital.

"I personally find it sad and dismaying when founders in their 20s…[are] running themselves into the ground, often much worse than what I did," Vohra said. "They're doing what I did plus stupid hours, and they're wearing that as a badge of honor. I hope that when people read this, that they see that there is another path."

A health scare that rewired his approach to founder life

Vohra, now 42, was raised in Birmingham, England. After the terrifying episode, he spent a month finding his new "normal." Following a week in the hospital, he devoted the rest of his recovery to being unplugged from work and resting with family. He developed a "spiritual bond" with his aunt and uncle's dog, and reconnected with his love of narrative video games—titles like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.

The most important tool he picked up on the road to recovery, however, was transcendental meditation. Several of his industry friends recommended he connect with Laurent Valosek, a wellness coach and CEO of the executive coaching firm Peak Leadership Institute.

Under Valosek's tutelage, Vohra began learning transcendental meditation in the Raj tradition of India: a one-on-one teaching method in which a teacher personally guides a student through the practice and mantra. They started with several hours-long sessions spread over days, and even after many years of practicing, the two still meet in person once every two or three months.

"When I did finally get back into work, all of the games that the VCs were playing…that were really getting to me, just suddenly didn't faze me at all," Vohra says. "I had this new source of grit and resilience. I just straight-up called VCs who were BS-ing me out on their BS, and refused to engage with them because I had this new found source of strength, which was simply this gratitude for being alive."

Today, he sets aside dedicated pockets of his day to meditate. Every morning begins with a 30-minute session: 20 minutes of repeating his mantra, followed by 10 minutes lying down flat. Vohra credits the ritual with boosting his mental state, creativity, and happiness, and says it allows him to move through the day with a much "calmer" and "clearer" headspace. Around 3:30 p.m. at the office, he steps away from his desk and into the meditation room for another brief session.

"I defend that part of my calendar and I build it into my life, and I find it's absolutely worth it," Vohra says.

Having recovered from a health crisis and reaped millions from Rapportive's sale to LinkedIn, Vohra had every reason to take a breather from business. Instead, the entrepreneur says he wasn't done building—and this time, he had the mindset to do things differently.

Building his next $825 million business in a better headspace

Building and selling Rapportive was a whirlwind experience. Across its entire 20-month history, the company made only 14 cents in revenue. By other metrics, though, it was a breakout success: Vohra says the business's early investors earned 20 times their money, and the founders reached millionaire status upon the sale. Even so, he felt he had more to give, and with a renewed sense of perspective in hand, he was ready to go bigger.

In 2014—just two years after selling his previous company to LinkedIn—Vohra launched Superhuman alongside Conrad Irwin and Vivek Sodera. He returned to building email software, this time an AI productivity suite for email management. Superhuman was valued at $825 million in 2021 and was ultimately acquired by Grammarly, the AI writing-assistant company, in 2025, though the acquisition price was not disclosed. The original email product was renamed Superhuman Mail after the sale, and Vohra remains closely involved with it, publishing product updates that offer a public view of how the tool develops under Grammarly's ownership.

Things looked very different the second time around. Vohra had since revamped his diet, kept up a consistent workout schedule, carved out time for meditation, and found smarter ways of working, consulting dieticians, nutritionists, meditation coaches, and executive trainers along the way. There were also fewer stressors than at Rapportive: he was no longer constantly running out of money, and he had gotten better at fundraising. Superhuman raised more than $100 million from investors before its acquisition, giving Vohra far more financial breathing room than he had at his first company. That better approach to work—and outlook on business—gave him the confidence to sell and walk away on his own terms.

"I think just being older and wiser, having more perspective, having an exercise practice, having a meditation practice, eating way," Vohra says. "There was no existential dread. We weren't running out of money. We were growing faster than ever. I could have raised more money. Selling the company was really more about: Are we going to achieve our mission faster together if we do this?"

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com