‘It’s not you, it’s my startup’

Among the more unexpected effects of the AI race is the rise of a breakup line: It’s not you, it’s my startup.

Lee Beckman, the 30-year-old founder of an ed-tech startup, had been dating his girlfriend long-distance for about five months when he realized he was so drained from building his company that he had little energy left to build his relationship. When he called her each night, he says, “my mind was so jam-packed with information and trying to do so much at once,” that “I didn’t feel like there was any room left in my brain.”

“I found myself relying on her for my mental health and I didn’t find it to be fair,” Beckman says.

Archish Arun, 21, had been dating his girlfriend for about six months when he decided to drop out of Stanford and work on his Y Combinator-backed video production-tech startup full-time. He became so enmeshed in the breakneck pace of an early-stage company that he grew impatient when she needed time to process a disagreement — he wanted a resolution as quick as a bug fix. Living on startup time, he says, “brought out a lot of the issues” between them “in a much quicker way.”

This also happened to me. Like many young founders, my ex-boyfriend believes that in the next few years, the spoils of the AI boom will go to the people who capitalize on it now, while the rest of us will be trapped in a permanent underclass. We’d been dating for nine months when he told me he was moving to San Francisco to become a new media fellow at Andreessen Horowitz and to scale his media startup, and that he needed to leave our relationship in New York.

“I feel like I owe it to myself to chase this dream that I’ve had since I was a kid,” he told me. “And if we stay together, I’ll just spend every free minute trying to get back to New York to see you.”

Woof. I was blindsided by the complete lack of control I felt. I developed a parasocial one-sided beef with Marc Andreessen, who I felt stole my boyfriend without even trying. I also realized I was far from alone.

Dating, always chaotic for career-minded 20-somethings, is in disarray. Diagnoses abound: swipe culture, ghosting culture, the loneliness crisis, the growing gulf between men and women’s political views, economic uncertainty pushing people to prolong marriage. And, for a certain class of aspirant today, add one more particularly fraught factor: the pressure to build.

Lured by the promises of artificial intelligence, a generation of young founders is locking in at all costs to their social lives. Last year, a general partner at Y Combinator told The New York Times that the median age of its participants was 24, down from 30 in 2022. The young founders I spoke to for this story expressed desire to be good partners. But between the evergreen demands of getting an early-stage startup off the ground and the now-or-never strain they feel the AI boom has put on them, many of them have shed their established relationships in pursuit of the grind. Their exes declined to be interviewed.

If a young founder “wants a relationship, they need to treat it exactly with the same intentionality as their business, and chances are that they’re unable to do that, right?” says Amy Andersen, a Silicon Valley-based matchmaker and dating coach. She says that among her founder clients, those who are ready for a serious relationship are in their mid- to late 30s. “Mid-20s, not so much,” she says.

I ask Andersen what she would say to a 26-year-old founder who was thinking of leaving a healthy relationship to focus on building. I don’t tell her the hypothetical was my reality.

“That’s a great idea because I think he’s listening to himself and being incredibly honest about his capacity for what he can handle,” Andersen tells me. “If he were to go down that relationship route, he would ultimately have regrets and at some point, those frustrations and the reality of being able to make something work is going to start to kind of bubble to the surface.” Brutal.

Part of what makes dating a young founder so difficult is how closely their startups are tied to their identities, says Yariv Ganor, a startup psychologist who often works with founders in relationships. “There needs to be some acceptance from the partner’s side that the startup will be prioritized. The startup is often an extension of the founder, and founders often see their startup as a kind of an incarnation of themselves,” Ganor says.

Max Marchione, the 25-year-old founder of longevity startup Superpower, says he’d give a woman a weeklong trial period and assess whether he could envision forever with her.

For many young founders, dating takes a backseat to building because it feels irresponsible to invest — financially and emotionally — in anything other than their startup.

“I’m investing so much, burning so much every month in my business. It’s like it’s not economically sensible to go invest in dating,” Beckman tells me. He says he’s been on two dates since breaking up with his girlfriend in 2024. My ex told me something similar: that he intended to live a life of monklike celibacy in San Francisco for quite some time.

Some young founders who are dating can hold implausibly high standards about how easy it will be to find their perfect match. Max Marchione, the 25-year-old founder of longevity startup and peptide purveyor Superpower, told me he’d give a woman a weeklong trial period and assess whether he could envision forever with her.

“There was a time when I was like, hardcore, ‘I’m not getting in any relationship,’ and now I’m kind of like, if I think I might marry someone, I’ll explore for a week, and after that week I’ll make a decision,” Marchione says.

Andersen says she’s seen this hackathon-style approach to dating in several founders. “They’re used to going all-in, full throttle on it to really see if something sticks,” she says. “It’s that exact same kind of mentality that has allowed them to most likely be really successful in their careers.” She thinks that seven days is too short a time period to get to know someone, but she has worked with founders who have found love in two or four weeks.

Founders often lack the emotional intelligence that women who are open to dating them are looking for, Andersen says. “They’re really looking for somebody who strikes that balance of the IQ and the EQ. And that EQ in Silicon Valley is something that’s a little bit harder to find,” she says. For many founders, he says, “Communication is probably the most undervalued skill.”

It takes a specific type of person to be successful in a relationship with an early-stage founder. Dmitri Mirakyan, 31, says his ex was incompatible with him because she needed “like two to three hours of attention per day,” he says. That “was extremely hard to pull that off,” since he was working a 9 to 5 and also building his startup, Creed, which touts itself as “the first AI rooted in Christian values.”

Ganor says the people who work best with founders are “givers, those who give what they can in relationships almost without expecting anything in return.”

Mirakyan’s current girlfriend sounds like a giver. She can intuit his needs. He tells me that, several months ago, he was panicking during her friend’s wedding ceremony in India because something had gone wrong with his app.

“I think a very valid reaction to that was like, ‘You’re at my friend’s wedding, you’re embarrassing me, what are you doing?’ This is the second wedding this year that I’ve needed to have my laptop out,” Mirakyan says. “I was visibly stressed out and on my phone, and instead of being annoyed at me, she found the WiFi, found a place for me to sit, and gave me some snacks.”

“It wasn’t that big of a deal for me that he had a work emergency,” his girlfriend says. “For me, it’s kind of like, it’s stressful for him, and it’s stressful to see him like that. Obviously, like, I just wanted to help.”

I’m not sure I would’ve had the same patience. I used to get annoyed when my ex would forget to make a dinner reservation and we had to wait in line somewhere, or when he’d cancel plans to come to my friends’ parties and spend the night coding instead.

I’ve branched out from dating early-stage startup founders. My new boyfriend is reliable, relaxed, and leaves work at 6 p.m. He’s a Big Tech engineer. Maybe AI will automate him out of a job one day and he’ll be stuck in the permanent underclass, but at least we’ll have time to spend together.

Amanda Yen is on Business Insider’s Newsletters team and writes about Gen Z trends and culture.