Hello lovey humans,

Scott Barker got everything he ever wanted. And it nearly destroyed him. this is his story.

Coming Up

By his mid-thirties, Scott had co-founded one of the most talked-about venture capital firms in tech. GTMfund raised over $100 million across two funds. He had the corner office, the nice watch, the view. He’d been written up in TechCrunch and Forbes. He was building a media company on top of a VC firm, hosting a podcast watched by 50,000 people, advising high-growth startups, and flying somewhere new almost every week.

This was a far cry from his middle-class roots in Vancouver, BC. He had dropped out of college, left home at eighteen to live in Australia, and fell into door-to-door sales. He bounced through odd jobs, founded a laundry subscription company, sold it for almost nothing, and eventually clawed his way into tech as an entry-level sales rep. From there, he outworked everyone. Team lead to manager to the youngest director in the history of a $5 billion software company. He helped grow Outreach from $20 million to $250 million in annual revenue. He was built for the game of acceleration.

But the game was eating him alive.

The Sprint That Wouldn’t End

In 2021, Scott and his partner Max Altschuler launched GTMfund off the side of their desks while still employed at Outreach. The thesis was sharp: raise capital exclusively from seasoned go-to-market operators, then deploy that knowledge as a competitive advantage for founders. It worked. The first fund oversubscribed. They went full-time. They grew the team, doubled the fund size, and built a media arm on top of it. Four and a half years of full sprint.

The second fund was a $54 million raise during the hardest fundraising environment in a decade. Scott used to sign off every internal email with #50MOD — fifty million or die. He told everyone around him that he’d be a real person again once the raise closed.

They hit the target, but the relief lasted only hours. Then the numbness set in. His brain, trained for fight-or-flight, skipped ahead to the next fundraise before the ink was dry. “I had been in fight-or-flight for so long that I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

What It Cost

When Scott finally slowed down enough to look at the wreckage, the inventory was brutal. His engagement had fallen apart. His grandfather had died. He’d had to give away his cat because he was never home. He’d ended up in the ER with a stress-induced ulcer. Three or four hours of sleep a night. Severe anxiety. Panic attacks. A pill to sleep, another to focus, and a drink every night to numb the space between.

He’d swapped every good habit for a bad one and justified each exchange as a short-term coping strategy. The lie he’d told himself and everyone he loved for fifteen years — I’ll be okay, this is just an intense time period — was finally collapsing under the weight of the evidence.

There’s a particular kind of crisis that only arrives after you’ve won. The goal you chased for a decade and a half is sitting in your lap, and it feels like holding a stranger’s luggage. Whose life is this? That’s the question that woke Scott up. Not failure. Not a market crash. Just the unnerving recognition that the life he’d built was no longer recognizable as his own.

Backpack and a One-Way Ticket

Scott stepped down from GTMfund. He sold his house and everything in it. He tossed what was left into a backpack and left.

Bali. Lombok. Sri Lanka. Nepal. India. No fixed itinerary, no investor meetings, no internal emails signed with hashtags. Just a guy with a backpack reconnecting with himself, with nature, and with the question that fifteen years of acceleration had drowned out: What kind of life do I actually want?

Along the way, he started a project called Wake Up Call, a newsletter exploring the psychology of meaning, acceleration, and modern ambition. It asks the question most people spend their entire lives avoiding: what do you do after more stops working?

“I do not need much these days. I would like to spend the rest of my life trying to make this world a better place. And I’m grateful for every day that I remember to stay in the present moment.”

Why Scott Is a Second Harvester

Scott’s story is the one we hear most often in our work. Not the dramatic fall-from-grace narrative. Something more insidious. A person who did everything right by every external measure, hit every target, earned every accolade — and then looked up to discover that the person who wanted all those things doesn’t exist anymore.

The boy who left Vancouver at eighteen with something to prove did his job. He proved it. But the man standing in the corner office is someone else now. And that someone else needs a different set of questions.

Scott didn’t need fixing. He needed remembering. He needed to recall the version of himself that existed before the scoreboard became the only thing that mattered. That’s the second harvest. Not a rejection of what you built, but a reunion with who you are underneath it.

He’s far from having it all figured out. His words, not ours. But he’s back on the right path. And he’s asking the only question that matters at this stage: not what can I achieve? but what kind of life do I want to live?

Follow Scott’s journey:

The Wake Up Call (Substack): thewakeupcallnewsletter.substack.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ssbarker​

More stories like this soon.

— Richard & Devon