Building Day2 with Parkinson’s: The Founder No One Expects
l wrote a similar post a couple of years ago. Spoiler alert. Nothing's changed
Startups are brutal. Parkinson’s is relentless. I’m doing both.
Some days, I feel like a cliché: a founder with a mission, building a health platform that could truly improve lives, including my own. Other days, I feel like I’m running on empty. I can’t type fast. I crash after two calls. I second-guess how I sound on Zoom. And I wonder, quietly, will they write me off the moment I walk into the room?
This isn’t a pity post. It’s a clear-eyed account of what it means to build a startup while living with a progressive neurological condition and why we need to rethink what strength, stamina, and leadership actually look like in the founder world.
The Myth of the Indestructible Founder
We all know the archetype: the tireless, young, caffeinated founder grinding 100-hour weeks, sleeping under their desk, evangelising at every conference. Silicon Valley turned this into a blueprint, and the ecosystem still rewards it. #hustle
But Parkinson’s doesn’t play by those rules even if it wanted to.
When you live with a chronic neurological condition, the real business killer isn’t lack of vision or PMF. It’s friction:
Fingers that don’t type.
Voices that tremble.
Some mornings lost to brain fog.
Energy that drops off a cliff after lunch.
Founding a company with Parkinson’s means wrestling with the same market pressures as everyone else but without the illusion of infinite stamina. It’s not just harder. It’s different. And that difference is rarely understood, let alone respected.
The Quiet Bias Against Chronically Ill Founders
No one says it out loud, but you can feel it in potential investor meetings, advisory calls, even pitch feedback:
“Will he/she be able to keep up?”
“Do we back a founder who might burn out before the product hits scale?”
There’s a myth that health-challenged founders are too risky, too slow, too compromised. The irony? The very thing that makes us “risky” also makes us deeply attuned to our users. We are our use case. We live the problems we’re trying to solve. All founders feel pressure to ship something that works for their users, but for me this feeling is compounded by the task ahead of me. What most overlook is that our perceived limitation is also our superpower.
What Parkinson’s Teaches Me About Building Better
I don’t approach startup life with bravado anymore. I approach it like a systems designer:
What tasks must be automated?
What hours are sacred?
What kind of startup doesn’t require its founder to be online 16 hours a day?
Here’s what I’ve learned. Parkinson’s teaches faster than any MBA:
Focus: I can’t waste energy chasing shiny objects.
Empathy: I design for usability because I need usability.
Resilience: Every small win matters. Not just for optics but to get by.
And most of all:
Adaptability isn’t a necessary consequence. It’s the business model.
The Fallacy of Stealth Mode
There’s a seductive myth in startup land: “We’re in stealth mode.”
Sometimes it’s true — a strategic decision to stay quiet while solving a technical or regulatory puzzle. But often, stealth mode is just a polite way of saying:
“It’s not working yet, and I don’t have the energy to explain that publicly.”
I’ve used that line. More than once.
Because there are days I can’t work fast enough. Weeks when symptoms knock out my momentum. And instead of saying, “I’m moving slower right now, because I have Parkinson’s and startups are hard,” I’d default to:
“We’re just flying under the radar for now.”
The problem is, stealth becomes a hiding place. Not from competitors — from shame. From the pressure to appear high-velocity. From the fear that transparency equals weakness.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand:
Most early-stage startups are stumbling, iterating, and trying to stay alive.
Pretending to be in control helps no one.
Transparency isn’t a liability, it’s a filter for the right allies.
So now, when people ask what stage we’re at, I say:
“We’re building. It’s messy. It’s slower than I’d like. But it’s real.”
That’s not stealth. That’s honesty. And frankly, it’s more useful.
A New Kind of Founder
This post isn’t a cry for sympathy. It’s a call to widen the lens. To recognise that founders come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they walk slowly. Sometimes they type with one finger. But they still build. Still lead. Still win.
We need to redefine what a “fundable” founder looks like.
We need to design systems that allow for inconsistency without punishing it.
We need to understand that being close to the problem isn’t bias it’s insight.
I’m not building Day2 in spite of Parkinson’s. I’m building it because of it.
And I’m doing it with a truly empathetic cofounder, systems, tools, help (shout out
) and the conviction that sustainable ambition is worth more than unsustainable hustle.If you’ve ever felt too “imperfect” to start something — start anyway. The people who build through constraint often build the most human products of all.