This founder made millions when LinkedIn bought his start-up—but the stress landed him in the hospital. Now he’s built another $825 million brand

Rahul Vohra looked like he’d hit the startup jackpot at 27. He had a company in Y Combinator, a LinkedIn deal coming together, and a story that sounded clean from the outside. Inside, he was coming apart. By the time LinkedIn bought Rapportive in February 2012 for a reported $15 million, Vohra had already ended up in the hospital from the strain of running the business.

Rapportive was only about 20 months old, had made just 14 cents in revenue, and was staffed by a rag-tag team of five. But it had enough momentum to feel like a Silicon Valley fairy tale. Vohra says the company was also running out of money, and he was living on brownies and pizza, not sleep or exercise. The body eventually called his bluff. He woke up at 3 a.m. with nausea, collapsed outside a McDonald’s near his San Francisco office, and didn’t go to the hospital until the next day.

Doctors found that the stress had pushed him into gastrointestinal reflux disease. A nurse told him his insides looked like they belonged to someone 10 to 20 years older. That was the moment he started thinking differently about what success was supposed to cost. During a week in the hospital and the recovery that followed, he unplugged, spent time with family, bonded with his aunt and uncle’s dog, and got back into narrative video games like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. He also started transcendental meditation with Laurent Valosek, and still practices it every day.

That reset mattered. In 2014, Vohra returned to email software and co-founded Superhuman with Conrad Irwin and Vivek Sodera. This time the company grew into an AI productivity suite, was valued at $825 million in 2021, and was bought by Grammarly in 2025. Vohra says the difference wasn’t magic. He had better diet, regular workouts, meditation, and, crucially, more financial breathing room: Superhuman raised more than $100 million before the sale. He stayed involved after the deal, with the product renamed Superhuman Mail.

What changed most was not the cap table. It was the refusal to treat burnout like a bragging right. Vohra’s story is a neat rebuke to the startup cult of martyrdom: the first exit made him rich, but the second one came after he learned not to act like his own body was disposable.