What worked for me was joining a unicorn. It's high paced enough to have fun. But lots of people have been hustling for years and know what it's like to be burn

What worked for me was joining a unicorn. It's high paced enough to have fun. But lots of people have been hustling for years and know what it's like to be burned out. We have some training on burnout. We have managers who were burnt out. There's a reason some places have unlimited PTO - the kind of people who end up joining have to be forced to rest hard. We don't talk work on weekends, only go carts, gym, and gaming sessions. Work overflowed? Well, the sprint ends on Friday, commit to less next time and get plenty of rest this weekend. You still get to do your 7% week on week growth, and many unicorns have a kind of startup branch that handles this, which isn't tied down by the usual restrictions. But they also have the resources to let you take time off and not push you too hard. But if you get tired of the high paced work, you can often request a transfer to the slower stuff. They've already invested resources in training and filtering you. Stock options are already worth a decent amount by the Series C. Some have things like secondaries which let you cash in before the exit. Another path that worked for me was teaching bootcamps or polytechnics. Probably don't go full academia; you end up trapped in university politics. Just a lower level where you can write content, iterate on it, and just teach. It can get frustrating too but it's a different kind of frustration.