Forget ‘Crushing It,’ Startup Founders Open Up About Mental Health Problems | Tech bros like Bryan Johnson are spending millions to shoot for immortality. These women are besting them in the longevity game—but don’t call them ‘biohackers’ | Meet the ultra-commuters who start their day at 5 a.m. | Are Private Credit’s Double-Digit Yields Too Good To Be True?

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Forget ‘Crushing It,’ Startup Founders Open Up About Mental Health Problems - Forbes

Jason Gardner, the founder and CEO of payment processing startup Marqeta, was going through another bout of depression. It was early 2016, and he struggled to sleep and eat in his Oakland home. Sometimes he just laid on the floor and stared at the ceiling. "I could barely get out of bed and couldn't smile. I felt like things were crumbling around me, but I had to find the wherewithal to continue to raise money and build the company," he says. Marqeta was weeks away from running out of cash.

He and his wife Jocelyne had maxed out their credit cards and were even putting their mortgage payments on credit card checks while raising their 15-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. "Sometimes I don't know how I survived. Not because of something I would do to myself, but due to my body breaking down, or my mind," says Gardner. He went on to turn the company around, eventually taking it public and stepping down as CEO in January 2023.

Founders are often afraid to show a shred of weakness in themselves or their companies, largely for fear of how it might affect their startup's reputation and employees' morale. Ryan Caldbeck, the founder and former CEO of fintech startup CircleUp, remembers being asked by venture capitalists several years ago to meet with other CEOs whose companies were floundering, to give them some advice. "I go to coffee with the CEO-and I remember this on two or three occasions-and the CEO would just talk about how their company was crushing it, even though the VC just told me they were in a lot of trouble," he says. "That is Silicon Valley in a nutshell, putting up this facade."

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Tech bros like Bryan Johnson are spending millions to shoot for immortality. These women are besting them in the longevity game—but don’t call them ‘biohackers’ - Fortune Well

Julie Gibson Clark doesn’t use expensive medical treatments, gadgets, or a team of scientists to “biohack” her age. She sticks to a vegetable-rich diet, exercises and meditates. Her biggest health expenditures are a $27-a-month gym membership and an $79-a-month supplement subscription.

So the 55-year-old single mom in Phoenix, Arizona was surprised to learn she ranks at No.2 on the worldwide leaderboard of an online competitive longevity game, the Rejuvenation Olympics, which tracks and ranks about 4,000 participants’ pace of what’s sometimes called “biological” aging. It’s based on epigenetic DNA tests—which give an insight into how environment and lifestyle can influence how people’s genes work. Clark ages at 0.665 of a year for every additional chronological year, according to her most recent test, which takes into account the average of participants’ pace of aging scores after six months or more.

Clark is ahead of one of the country’s most famous biohackers on the leaderboard examining these averages: Bryan Johnson, the multi-millionaire biotech entrepreneur who spends a reported $2 million a year on a reverse-aging regimen that includes dozens of pills a day and a team of 30 doctors, co-created the leaderboard. He is currently in 6th place.

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Meet the ultra-commuters who start their day at 5 a.m. - Fortune

To an onlooker, the throngs of people spilling off platforms and out of car parks during rush hour on a weekday may all appear to have a similar story.

But look closer—some wipe sleep from their eyes, others hastily pack away make up bags, and a few may unwind a travel pillow from around their neck.

These are the long-distance commuters—those who wake up in the dark, and view their cars or a train as their second home.

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Are Private Credit’s Double-Digit Yields Too Good To Be True? - Forbes

Blackstone president Jonathan Gray pointed to private credit as the asset class with the most opportunity at the Forbes Iconoclast Summit on June 12.

Alternative investment managers have spent the first half of 2023 trumpeting a similar refrain to investors wary of this year's stock market bounce: look at private credit.

The industry has ballooned to $1.5 trillion in assets, more than tripling in the last decade, with every major alternative asset manager competing to lend to private businesses as an alternative to typical banks. Private credit loans generally come with a floating rate pegged to a base rate like the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor). With one year LIBOR rates nearly 6% and private lenders tacking on spreads of 5-7 percentage points on top of that, many funds are offering double-digit yields to investors.

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