Rahul Vohra was 27 when he was preparing to sell his company to LinkedIn and add millions to his net worth. The startup, Rapportive, had gone from first line of code to Y Combinator in the same year, and the deal was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn in February 2012, reportedly valued at $15 million.
But the deal came with a price. Vohra said the company was running out of money and that he was stretching himself thin. He later ended up in the hospital after months of stress piled up, and a nurse told him his insides looked like they belonged to someone 10 to 20 years older than he was.
The health scare followed a routine of long hours, poor food and no exercise. Vohra said two years of eating brownies and pizza as meals, never working out, and the pressure of entrepreneurship led to gastrointestinal reflux disease. He collapsed outside a McDonald’s near his San Francisco office, went back to work after taking painkillers, and did not go to the hospital until the next day.
That episode changed how he approached building companies. During his recovery, he rethought what it meant to build and what kind of life he wanted while doing it. He later launched another business that sold to Grammarly and was valued at $825 million.
Vohra said transcendental meditation became part of that shift. He worked with Laurent Valosek, CEO of Peak Leadership Institute, and said the practice gave him more grit and resilience. He described getting back to work with a new source of strength and said he could call out venture capital games that used to get under his skin.
He now sets aside time each day to meditate, including a 30-minute session every morning. Vohra said the ritual boosts his mental state, creativity and happiness.
The market has already voted on the value of focus, discipline and execution. What Vohra’s story adds is a reminder that capital does not reward burnout forever. Even in Silicon Valley, a balance sheet can look impressive right up until the body forces a reckoning.
There is also a free-enterprise lesson here: scale matters, but so do incentives. Founders who treat exhaustion like a badge of honor may impress the crowd for a while, but productivity suffers when the taxpayer is not the one paying the bill and the human cost lands on the entrepreneur instead. The strongest companies are usually built by people who can stay in the game long enough to finish the race.
