Escaping Hustle Culture | Aggelos Mouzakitis

Everyone on LinkedIn is crushing it.
They’re raising millions, scaling at lightspeed, building “the next unicorn.”

But here’s the inconvenient truth: behind the shiny posts, founders are burning out, pivoting endlessly, or straight-up murdering their own startups.

This is where Aggelos Mouzakitis (Growth Product Manager, @IBM & speaker at How to Web Conference 2025) comes in. In a conversation with LaunchPod, he dropped the kind of brutal honesty you won’t find on LinkedIn.

From Hustle to Burnout

Aggelos admits he once lived inside hustle culture. Flexing, pushing, grinding — until burnout hit him “delivered straight to his ass,” as he puts it. That wake-up call forced him to rethink not only his career, but also what fuels founders in the first place.

“Big success often comes from low self-esteem,” he says. Founders aren’t always driven by passion. They’re driven by obsession, by the need to prove something — to themselves, to their parents, to an old boss they hated. It’s not healthy, but it’s real.

Why Startups Fail (and it’s not the market)

Forget the cliché that startups fail because of bad ideas.
According to Aggelos, founders kill their own startups. By skipping validation. By listening to LinkedIn advice about fancy pricing models instead of talking to real customers. By falling in love with their own bullshit.

“I literally murdered my own startup,” Aggelos admits. That failure taught him more than any growth hack could: talk to people, validate urgency, keep it simple.

The Therapy Session Every Founder Needs

Here’s the twist: the conversation felt less like a podcast and more like therapy. We talked about:
– why crowded markets aren’t the enemy
– why validation is more about psychology than frameworks
– how to spot red flags early in a founder’s journey
– the sacrifices behind every “success story”

And most importantly: why founders need to drop the mask, be vulnerable, and stop comparing themselves to LinkedIn superstars.

Because behind the highlight reels, nobody’s actually “crushing it.”

The Bottom Line

Startups are not built on hustle alone. They’re built on messy truths, failed experiments, and the founder’s ability to keep going when the hype fades. And sometimes, the best growth hack is sitting down for some startup therapy.

👉 Catch the full conversation with Aggelos Mouzakitis on LaunchPod and meet him live at How to Web Conference 2025.

🎟️ Grab your ticket: https://howtoweb.co

🎧 Listen to the full podcast episode here: 

An initiative of Launch Romania powered by BCR with the support of Google and its founding partner How to Web and media partners start-up.ro.