The Corporate Grind
How Building a Brand Inside a Fortune 500 Company Nearly Broke Me
The story begins on the kitchen floor. Two hours trying to stand up, my body caught between panic and paralysis. My lungs and heart couldn’t agree on a rhythm. It felt like I had to retrain them to keep me alive. My cheek on the floor continued to get cold as if my whole body was starting to meet the floor’s temperature. When I called for my wife, I heard her voice nearby – but it sounded like she was in another dimension. The dimension called reality. After mentally re-training every muscle in my body to support life again, I managed to stand up and told my wife to take me to the ER. Minutes felt like days, but we finally made it to the ER. I survived. But that night on the floor wasn’t where the story actually began.
Building a Startup Inside a Corporation
In 2022, I joined the internal venture studio inside a large U.S. food manufacturer (GWorks), tasked with doing what most big companies struggle to do: build something new, fast. By early 2023 we were launching a new brand. It started with an idea and grew into something extraordinary – a purpose-driven brand that consumers loved and senior executives believed in. We were allowed to operate like a startup inside the corporation, with agility, autonomy, and purpose. The timelines of the internal venture studios were impossible to reach without breaking a few corporate rules, for example, the process of vendor onboarding. Normally, it would take between 3-6 months to onboard a new vendor. We had one year to validate the idea, one year to pilot it, and one year to commercialize before scaling; we tried tens of vendors during that time. We built something remarkable. Over three years, I moved seven-figure sums through the business on a corporate card. In a startup, that behavior is normal. Inside a Fortune 500 company, it’s not. We had full visibility, full results, and full accountability. Brand love was flowing (GWorks).
Then the corporate tides shifted.
When Innovation Meets Bureaucracy
In early 2025, the company decided to dissolve the internal venture studio and absorb our brand into the traditional hierarchy (StarTribune). Overnight, our brand went from being a fast, entrepreneurial team to part of a large, risk-averse system. The new structure came with layers of oversight, unfamiliar reporting lines, and a management style that valued process over people. I suddenly reported to a manager whose leadership philosophy clashed with everything that made our team successful. Within weeks, I started receiving strange requests – emails asking me to “confirm” policy violations that didn’t exist, or at least that’s what I thought. I tried to reset the relationship with my manager by apologizing for my frustration and recommitting to collaboration. It did not help.
Then one morning, I was accidentally copied on an email with the subject line: “Santi Strasser Investigation.” My heart sank. The email came from Legal to HR requesting that given the seriousness of the investigation a senior leader in HR needed to be kept informed. I had been a top performer for the previous three years in a row, with multiple internal awards, strong results, extraordinary bonuses and even a retention bonus. The brand was the company’s best performing innovation in years relative to its category. And yet here I was – an internal entrepreneur suddenly under scrutiny by the system that once celebrated our ways of working.
The Weight of Uncertainty
I met with a senior leader of the company who hadn’t heard of any investigation involving me or the brand. She offered two pieces of advice that have stayed with me ever since:
Don’t stop being the leader you’ve been for this organization all these years.
Intentions matter. Even if you made a mistake, your intention matters.
Those words anchored me. But as the days unfolded, it became clear that something larger was moving behind the scenes.
The week after that conversation, the people in charge of the investigation reached out to review every transaction on my corporate card going back to 2022. The tone was formal and professional, but the implication was clear: they were investigating potential fraud. After two calls, I realized this had been going on for weeks – possibly months. I was being evaluated not as a leader but as a liability. Ironically, the very practices that made Our brand successful – speed, autonomy, experimentation – were now being reinterpreted as policy violations. What had once been a trusted team leading innovation was now being labeled as risk.
During a board meeting, a senior leader explained to me that she was appointing someone to evaluate the operations of the marketing team. She emphasized that this was not a cost-cutting exercise. Yet, one day, she called me on my cellphone to inform me that my role, along with most of my marketing team, had been eliminated. The decision seemed to bypass the brand’s governance process, specifically board approval.
The Culture Clash Beneath It All
The heart of the conflict wasn’t about money or compliance. It was about culture. Our small team ran on purpose and trust. We had a flat org chart, clear ownership, and accountability based on individual commitment. We believed that when people align their personal purpose with the brand’s mission, they don’t need micromanagement – they need space, oxygen, and freedom to operate. We had a motto: Love Over Fear. We wanted to build a brand that inspired people, not just sold products to them. We believed that love – care for teammates, customers, and the actual brand experience – was a stronger motivator than fear of failure. But the corporate immune system doesn’t respond well to purpose. It recognizes differences as danger. Bureaucracy thrives on predictability; purpose thrives on possibility and adaptation. When the venture studio was dismantled, our team’s freedom became its biggest threat to the system. And as the bureaucracy took over, I began to internalize its fear. I went from leading to complying. By the time the investigation reached me, I was exhausted from defending the principles that had once been celebrated. The tension between autonomy and control had become personal – and personally unsustainable.
The Breaking Point
The weekend that followed, I stopped sleeping. My mind raced to connect every detail, every conversation, every motive. My sleep deprivation turned uncertainty into suspicion. At 3 a.m., I began connecting dots that may or may not have existed. On Sunday, I tried to release the anxiety by going to two high-intensity training classes; I could have done a third without even feeling it. My body was exhausted, but my mind wouldn’t stop. By Wednesday, after three nights of little sleep, I collapsed on the kitchen floor. That’s where my wife found me – my body shaking, my thoughts fractured, my willpower gone. It took me two hours to stand up from the floor, but in a way, it took months to truly get up. The recovery process was slow.
Lessons for Leaders
Recovery gave me perspective I didn’t have before. Looking back, the warning signs were clear – not just of the burnout, but of the organizational dysfunction that helped trigger it.
Systems without empathy can break people. When a company treats innovation as a fully controllable process rather than a flexible human endeavor, it crushes the very spirit that drives creativity – the trust-based fabric of psychological safety.
Purpose needs pace. Purpose can be a powerful fuel – but like any fire, it needs balance of ingredients: A spark (chemical chain reaction), Fuel (purpose), Oxygen (our emotional bandwidth), and Heat (environment or momentum). Pouring fuel on a fire could asphyxiate it even despite its quality.
Love over fear isn’t just a slogan. It’s a leadership philosophy. Fear creates compliance; love creates commitment. The best organizations build systems of trust where people can admit mistakes publicly, share real concerns, propose novel solutions, and still feel safe. In a systems that has humanity at the center, self-awareness and trust create the foundation for the flexible network of commitments instead of rigid processes.
Psychological safety is also a leadership issue. I once believed mental health was personal – something to manage quietly, outside of work. I now know it’s also collective. The culture, pace, and power dynamics of an organization directly affect the psychological stability of its people. Leaders must protect the psychological safety of their employees as fiercely as they protect their intellectual property. Today, employees have options that did not exist before. Showing that you care is no longer enough; actually caring is best.
Moving Forward
It’s been months since that night on the kitchen floor. I’ve returned to health, but I’m no longer the same leader I was before. I believe even more in building from purpose and caring for the people who carry it. I’ve learned that innovation and creative problem solving can’t survive in a culture that treats oxygen as unnecessary. The greatest paradox of corporate life is this: the very systems built to minimize risk often end up creating the conditions for human burnout, which in turn leads to risk. If we want to create organizations that thrive in the long term, we must replace fear-based controls with trust-based collaboration. We must honor both the brilliance and the limits of the human psyche. Because when the system forgets that its innovators are human, it doesn’t just lose good ideas – it risks losing life.
Disclaimer: This post was originally posted on Substack on March 20, 2026. Everything shared in this content represents my personal viewpoint. It reflects my perceptions, memories, and interpretation of events, and should not be understood as factual claims about others. Any mention of people, organizations, or situations is intended solely to illustrate my personal experience. I do not assert, imply, or intend to assert any defamatory statements about any individual or entity.
