# Burnout came from lost belief and conflict, not just long hours Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/burnout-came-from-lost-belief-and-conflict-not-just-long/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. - Speaker: [Peter Steinberger](https://realalpha.app/builders/peter-steinberger/) · Peter Steinberger is creator of OpenClaw and founder of PSPDFKit. · Created viral open-source personal agent OpenClaw and joined OpenAI to drive next-generation personal agents. - Host: [Gergely Orosz](https://realalpha.app/people/gergely-orosz/) · Host, The Pragmatic Engineer · Spent four years at Uber heading mobile, web and backend teams; shipped part of its payments system. - Show: The Pragmatic Engineer - Episode: [The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read"](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/), Jan 28, 2026 - Moment: 29:29 to 33:18 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/burnout-came-from-lost-belief-and-conflict-not-just-long/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1769 ## Quote > “burnout doesn't necessarily come from working too much. It comes more from, or at least for me, when you work on something, but you **don't believe in it anymore**” > — [Peter Steinberger](https://realalpha.app/builders/peter-steinberger/) at [30:52](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1852) · The Pragmatic Engineer ## Takeaways 1. He says losing belief in the work contributed to burnout. 2. CEO isolation and management conflict added to the strain. 3. He took more than three years away before building again. ## About this segment He links burnout to losing belief in the work, team conflict and CEO isolation—not simply long hours. After selling, he spent years decompressing before returning to building. From “The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read"”, Jan 28, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/) ## Transcript Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [29:35](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1775) didn't enjoy it that much and i was really really burned out what burnt you out do you think i was just burning too hard i was working most weekends i i i tried to shuffle all my material needs and you know as a ceo you're basically the waste bin because everything everything that other people don't manage or or can do or or mess up you have to fix and it's also quite lonely because you you can't openly talk about a lot of things i mean i i i structured the company to be quite open but still like you cannot you cannot be negative you have to even if even if like even if like really bad stuff happens i know that was like there was like one weekend where my my co-founder called me at at 5 a.m and told me like yeah there's this big airplane company and their planes are down because our software is crashing that was a very interesting weekend until i could [30:30](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1830) like i disassembled their their app and did prove that they messed around with our source code to triggering a license key fallback that eventually, like, caused the shit they had. But that was like a if the Suez company's gone and more moment. And that's just on top to all the additional stress. And there were quite a few of those things. You can do that for a while. And I also believe, like, burnout doesn't necessarily come from working too much. [31:01](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1861) It comes more from, or at least for me, when you work on something, but you don't believe in it anymore, or you have, like, too many conflicts. And we also had a, we did fight a lot in the team, with, like, management team. And by the time I made this mistake and I thought you have to, like, lead a company more democratically, so that was also something that burned me out. I wouldn't want to miss it for the world, though. [31:27](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1887) Yeah. So, you know, from the outside, it seems you sold your shares, you made enough money to not have to work again, And should you not choose? And for a lot of people, like, you know, people who are starting out their business or one day want to start a business, this sounds like the absolute dream. Like, this is, I guess, what we know realistically that most people will not make it. But if you make it, I mean, you've kind of like, I guess, you know, checkbox done. [31:50](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1910) You're kind of, it's a little bit, if you're like climbing on a wall and you ring the bell, you're done. And then what I noticed is from the outside, again, on your blog, the blog post completely for several years what what did you do uh in in this time uh and and what what did you learn in this time you know before you came back to where we are now i needed a lot of time to decompress i i catched up a lot on the things i thought i missed i i partied a lot um there were months where i didn't even turn on my computer and for a while i was i just didn't have this feeling of like what should i do now like like i would definitely was like why border you know you're not you're not supposed to to retire so early or like have so much have such a good exit that you never have to work again that messes my mind quite a bit that that was some that was some hard [32:46](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1966) years and then in in april i was like i there was this idea that i had years ago and even a side project that I started, I was like, yeah, I want to continue on that. And then after more than three years, I just sat back to my computer and started hacking again. But the thing was, this was like a Twitter analytics thing, and it was written in Swift and SwiftUI.