I'm not sure managing mental health while running a start-up is a topic we want VC blogs to be the experts on. VCs are a substantial part of the problem here with their decisions to use a power imbalance to get founders to take little to no salary for as long as possible to extend the runway of the company. A lot of pressure on founders is financial as their personal finances are often a mess even as their company is taking off. Many VCs have a long history of making this problem worse.
Data shows that founders over 50 are the most successful age group yet VCs continue to focus on 20 somethings because few founders over 50 are able to handle the financial terms the VCs want on things like founder salary. I'm convinced we lose a lot of potentially good start-ups by requiring founders to take vows of poverty.
We need a coherent approach to mental health for founders. We need a coherent approach to mental health for early start-up employees. VCs are part of the problem and accepting their recommended solutions will make things worse not better.
There's also a compounding effect. A vow of poverty founder is going to try to get his first ten employees to take a similar vow, just out of principle and (maybe) spite. So the VCs are essentially trying to create a culture of financial stress in hopes that it will motivate.
I've gotten offers from a handful of startups, but turned them all down because they wouldn't meet the salary offers I was getting from other, more stable employers. They said the equity would make up the difference, but I didn't view that as base comp, I viewed it as risk maintenance in case the startup failed.
> VCs are a substantial part of the problem here with their decisions to use a power imbalance to get founders to take little to no salary for as long as possible to extend the runway of the company.
This might be true with some Accelerators or Angel Investors not VCs. When A16z or other VC's write a 10mm dollar check they don't pressure their founders to have poverty line wages... if anything they try to get the founders to go buy a Ferrari they can't afford.
I would say both, well not buy a Ferrari get a lease for a Ferrari, with a killer monthly payment, he's on the hook with twenty signatures, debt, then...ramen. Live in the Ferrari. So everyone sees him and says wow VC money he got funding but when he visits Sand Hill Road he's eyeing the sugar packets in the coffee thing.
Ramen profitability is a stage in the startup lifecycle, but it's associated with very early stage (tens or hundreds of thousands in investment) & specifically with the accelerator that runs this website... it is not associated venture capital funded businesses, they have different problems
I don't know I knew one startup that had a full fridge of redbulls no energy drinks missing and they were killing me with interviews, I aced all of them but it was exhausting. So I see the fridge and a little sign that said "these snacks are the VC money we're burning through!" but later I see the red bulls and I just take one and tell them I had to, they were grilling me and it was a full fridge. So from the faces thinking back they saw that as an attitude problem because those energy drinks were decorative. That's why it was absolutely full, because otherwise there'd be some missing from people taking them before restocking.
I was supposed to look at them and think I could have them if and when I got a job after their day of interviews, not actually drink an energy drink to drink actual energy (literally glucose for blood sugar strictly for the brain function they were demanding a lot of).
Happened another time in Chile, there was a really nice foreign beer in the fridge, there was the rule printed on the fridge take whatever you want, but I ask anyway to be polite. The debtor founder does two menacing deflections, but I was incapable of fearing him, then is like "Drink it! Drink it! It's all yours, happy you have it!" making a huge deal of his graciousness but like doing the menacing tone and thoroughly resentful.
Decorative beer, make the fridge not look empty, and therefore the poor startup not look poor. It's just hard to see a workplace as a source of sustenance when the fridge is empty. And in fact that was to impoverish the employees without them catching on, drain them without getting drained back. Like the first place I mentioned, even on strictly caloric terms, thinking uses a lot of energy, chess players burn calories like swimmers, interviews are like chess matches. So literally the red bull was a literally a sugar packet. I said it meaning to exaggerate, I now realize I turned out saying the literal truth instead. I wasn't attuned to the fact I had to eye it and not consume it.
And depends on the startup. I would say YCombinator may want founders to eat ramen, they say this publicly, but actually eat it not starve refusing to eat decorative ramen. That I'm fine with. Frugal food is defensible, it's good, and further at the dinners they actually have dinner, rice and beans which is perfectly good frugal food and they make sure founders don't end up in the emergency room from malnutrition, far from it.
I didn't see many companies in Silicon Valley but at one of them, funded by Elon Musk who is allegedly a tyrant, evidently not, the calories weren't there just for decoration. They actually were there for the employees to turn them into labor. Pretty good, pistachios coffee pumpkin pie, I even brought bags of glucose to store in the kitchen to make glucose water, no other way of sustaining the amount of work I was doing. But it wasn't just bring your own sugar packets. There was table sugar I'd use sometimes, it's just not as good as glucose.
And there what was happening is at Halcyon, the company Musk was funding, they were developing a monopoly on a new technology, so the expectation was they'd have actual profits, and wouldn't have to squeeze every penny out of every person they could (like the other two) while maintaining an appearance of wealth so people expected the sustenance would go the other way and let their guards down.
Like I said, live in the Ferrari. Eye the sugar packets.
These things sound like quirks (door desks) or early stage un-funded/little funding company issues. There are lots of people playing "entrepreneur" and there are businesses that puffer-fish to pretend they are bigger than they are.
If you actually raise VC you receive millions of dollars. What do you think happens to all that money? It gets spent on salaries.
More people need to understand this. Most businesses are not designed for VC pace and scale. But they can be excellent cash-flow and profitable businesses
Agreed that it requires a coherent approach and trained individuals to handle the nuances of mental health for founders. There was just a good piece on this published in the latest issue of In the Works (publication from Help Scout). https://intheworks.helpscout.com/co-founder-relationships/
A lot of people advocate for self help through diet, exercise, meditation, taking time off, etc. While these all have their place, at a certain point and a certain level of stress you stop being able to do it. You end up cutting short during a workout because your brain won't switch off. The lack of sleep starts to affect all your cognitive function and then the diet starts to slip and before you know it you're eating like crap again.
At the best of times these routines of habit are just an escape from the stress or covering the actual problems related to not just running companies as a founder but actual all roles in life that require your ultimate sacrifice of mind, body and soul.
The diet, exercise, holidays and whatever else only go so far. Talking to other founders only goes so far. They're also struggling but it's hard to make time for each other. We're all busy just staying afloat. What we don't really talk about is the fact that you are more than your startup, that your life and identity is more. Part of that means other experiences or trauma earlier in your life could be magnified by the stresses of running a startup. The people starting companies already have to be a bit delusional.
The reality is it's excruciatingly hard and yet also still a first world problem because you have to be ultra privileged to be in a place that you're even thinking of starting a startup.
My last point here. Routines and habits don't always help. There has to be more. To ensure the stress and sacrifice are manageable at that level it can often also help to seek external council from a CEO coach, a therapist, etc. Your investors are not going to be helpful here, neither are your friends, family or other founders. You have obligations to all of them and you can't use them as a dumping ground. So seeking external guidance at a certain point is a must.
> While [diet, exercise, meditation, taking time off, etc] all have their place, at a certain point and a certain level of stress you stop being able to do it.
It certainly can feel like that, but it is not true. You are able to do it. The key is to recognize that you are overwhelmed, you no longer have control over your attention, and your first priority is to stop and recover that control.
If you operate without control over your attention, you will start making mistakes at higher frequency, and mistakes cause more mistakes, which cause more stress, in a cascade of mistakes. The brain is caught in a cycle of helpless reaction. It requires discipline to step away and regain your focus because every fiber of your being tells you "everything is important right now". This false belief is the root of much suffering.
The feeling of being overwhelmed is characterized by two things: a lack of clarity (a big picture where specific steps are unclear and who's relative importance is unclear), and a lack of focus (constantly thinking of the other steps when you're executing one). You are like a chef trying to do their job with a dull knife because they don't feel they have the time to sharpen it. This forces the chef to improvise ad hoc techniques to succeed with what is effectively a new, worse tool with which they have no practice. Improvisation is laudable and useful, but it's also stressful, high-risk.
Never accept that you are too stressed to deal with your stress - that's just the stress talking. :)
> Never accept that you are too stressed to deal with your stress
What are you supposed to do then?
How do you "not accept"?
> stop and recover that control.
Let's say there's a severe security issue in the software you've shipped. The production servers are down, at the same time, bad luck. And you've promised to ... something, on Monday. And dinner with your girl/boyfriend in the evening, or you've promised the kids [...].
(Or replace the above, with something more applicable in your case?)
What would you do?
One thing could be to power off all you servers and software (to temporarily stop the security problem), and take a few days off, email auto responder.
> It certainly can feel like that, but it is not true. You are able to do it.
Maybe the phrase "able to do it" is muddling things here...
People can exit a situation because it is no longer serving them well. Maybe the realized they now care less about that goal relative to other things, compared to before. Maybe their needs aren't being met.
Life is dynamic and complex. In general, there is nothing wrong with deciding to not do something anymore
Obviously, specific situations will have many specific factors. People might be disappointed. There may be significant impacts. Perhaps you made a serious commitment. These factors can all be considered. And still, sometimes the right decision is to move on and do something different.
I think you've muddled things with a poor quote. I wasn't speaking in general, I was speaking of particular behaviors that reduce stress. The point of my comment was to encourage those who feel that they can't pause to gather themselves. I wasn't talking about quitting or changing careers.
Good post but there are a couple of points I don't completely agree with:
> The people starting companies already have to be a bit delusional.
I do agree with this point!
> you have to be ultra privileged to be in a place that you're even thinking of starting a startup.
Not necessarily. I started my businesses in a shed in my parent's garden and got in to £20k of credit card debt. That's not really privilege, I put everything I (didn't have) on the line!
> Your investors are not going to be helpful here, neither are your friends, family or other founders.
I actually think other founders who are level or ahead of you in their startup are fantastically useful
Edit: Listening to the comments below about how I don't recognise my privilege - I totally get it - of course I do understand that relative to somebody who did not have a garden shed or a credit card to get in to debt with I was privileged. I'm not a total idiot nor am I ignorant that this is a form of privilege. It's just not Mum and Dad gave me a trust fund with £500k in it to go set something up - it's all relative and I appreciate my version of privilege was sufficient that I could take the first steps. Something that others won't enjoy, hence I am objectively privileged.
Having parents who are presumably supportive and can provide you with room and board and space to play around with your ideas makes it difficult to take the rest of the sentence seriously. In particular, lots of folks who support children, disabled spouses, ailing parents, and people with bad credit because they've been poor all their lives wouldn't have been able to do what you did
I don't generally find conversations around privilege to be useful since almost everyone is privileged compared to somebody else, and almost anything can be framed as privilege, so the term is very easily weaponized. At the same time, I think it's important to have awareness about the ways in which one can be privileged to someone else -- at least the large ways -- and parents can often be a very large way.
Not because you should feel guilty, but because it's very easy to lose sight of certain terms in the calculus of one's success, particularly the ones involving luck or help from others because it might feel like they minimize the contribution from your skills and blood/sweat/tears/creativity/appetite for risk/other stuff that you might be proud of. Mainly I think this stuff is important because I think self-awareness is important, and because I've found it helps with understanding and having more compassion for other people. That's all
Yes this was my insight into the comment also. To have parents is to have a safety net. That is often a privileged place to be that most people don't really understand. My parents are gone but I had savings that operated as my safety net and that was my place of privilege because most people do not have savings.
The most successful founders in the world had one of the two above if not more such as real wealth. Starting a company is a huge privilege but one that also requires an understanding that it ultimately becomes self sacrifice. To your employees, to your customers, to your investors. You get to chase your desires but must face the reality that you will only succeed if those are in service to others.
> Having parents who are presumably supportive and can provide
This is huge. I used to be very active in a sport that tends to attract rich people. Having myself grown up very poor, it was my fist window of visibility into that segment of society. I was always surprised by how many kids (in their 20s) were running startups as founders.
On one hand, they were living the full sacrifice. Taking no salary, living in a cramped apartment with cofounders, working so hard. So if any of them made it (I lost track), they did work for it and sacrificed.
But until I got to know them a bit better I always wondered how they're able to take on so much risk? What if it didn't work out? Having grown up poor I've always been hyper-aware of financial risk of every decision so I couldn't understand this.
The answer is that for them there was no risk. It was always a variant of "Dad is paying my apartment and food and gave me four years to give this a go, if it doesn't work out I'll shut down the startup and he'll hire me into his company".
I suspect a key word in the phrase GP was reacting to is "ultra". Is it some level of privilege to have parents lend you an outdoor shed's worth of space for your startup while you go $30K into credit card debt? Sure. Is that "ultra-privileged"? I don't think so.
It's all relative. Compared to many that is "ultra" privileged. I'm almost 30 and I can't even access a line of credit for 30k of debt because of stuff that happened earlier in life without having my parents as a safety net. So everything I have done on my own has been just after work using money that could be going to rent, savings, investments, new technology, etc.
I also have a high level of privilege because my upbringing allowed me to have unmetered access to a computer at 14 landing me a good programming job when I dropped out of college. So from the perspective of someone who didn't even have the opportunities I had, looking into the life of someone who started a company from a shed while living in their parent's house, it would appear "Ultra" Privileged. (I have plenty of friends from where I grew up that didn't even have support from their parents when they were 14-16, working after school to pay rent because their parents either died, or were too deadbeat to consistently make rent)
People who get financial help their parents are ultra ultra privileged then?
Ultra means extremely. You were saying that simonswords82 was extremely privileged. In the US, (edit: Europe) having parents and a garage is somewhat common, though, I think.
Alternatively you could say that you were unprivileged, and he privileged (without ultra).
I've been running a business for 25 years. On the outside it would appear I am self taught, self funded and built it all myself. I don't like to argue privilege in most cases but as I get older I have to say I do recognize things I had access to that gave me the ability to do this, where someone with the same drive simply could not. Back in the 90s as a teenager my parents bought a family computer (which would have been thousands), got access to the internet which at some point was long distance phone calls only, and kept it after I ran up a phone bill in the hundreds of dollars. I also built my business on open source software. We all build up from others work. Not everyone has understanding parents, some perhaps would have internet cancelled, or worse for running up such a large bill. My parents were not at all wealthy at the time. We don't control the cards we are dealt and I think arguing privilege is a lost cause. What we should do is if we get to a point where we can do it, try help give more opportunities to everyone.
Guessing you are in Europe though? Credit is pretty freely handed out in the US. At some point you have to ask for lower limits if anything. Getting .5-1x your yearly salary in credit card limit by 30 isn’t hard in the US, for example.
And 20k GBP will buy a lot more in your EU country than in the UK.
You know that your startup doesn’t need to target the US/UK/English speaking world right? You can launch a service or product in your EU country and, similar to the cost of living difference, your capital requirements will be much smaller.
I suppose that, over simplified, a startup in the US or UK can choose whatever to target in the whole world, whilst a startup in a poorer country might afford to target only poorer countries? (as its first step)
Massive agreement here. All the people talking about meditation and exercise being a great way to manage your mental health have clearly never had problems with their mental health.
I was perfectly fine doing that when I was 21 and had no stresses in my life. But between running a startup and having baby, somehow when other unexpected financial or relationship stresses hit you, you're going to have a rough time mentally.
Anecdotally, there has never been a situation where _some form_ of exercise and mindfulness has made my situation worse, but it hasn't always helped.
My reading of these posts isn't that "exercise and mindfulness will heal you". Anyone expecting that is naive, but like many things it's a tool to help.
> you're going to have a rough time mentally.
A rough time is a spectrum, and there are things you can so that are likely going to make things worse, just as there are things you can do that are likely to help.
Suppose you took a narcotic whenever you felt pain. Once you have taken the narcotic you would not be aware of the pain. In fact you might naturally go to the narcotic whenever you have pain as a means of avoiding the pain. You may even lose the ability to tell when you are feeling pain or where it's coming from because all you have to do is take the drug.
Meditation means different things to different people.
For many people it is a tool of repression, avoidance, and dissociation.
Now before you tell me that this is not a healthy way to practice I want you to acknowledge that everyone is merely using the terms mindfulness or meditation when they can mean different things, and it's important to remember that we don't automatically have a bias towards the correct understanding of things, and perhaps there's even a bias towards the worse practices of meditation, in a similar way that it's easier to fall down a hill than it is to climb up it. Entropy, as well, tells us that things tend to fall apart if they are not constantly maintaining themselves.
It's easy to dismiss what I say. but that'd be very typical of someone who doesn't want to hear it because they'd like to avoid what's really going on with themselves.
> Suppose you took a narcotic whenever you felt pain. Once you have taken the narcotic you would not be aware of the pain <...> You may even lose the ability to tell when you are feeling pain or where it's coming from because all you have to do is take the drug.
It's easy to get lost in anecdotes sometimes.
Sometimes (physically or mentally) the pain is too unbearable to handle to actually face up to what is wrong, and you need an aid. I've struggled with nerve pain for most of my adult life, and it comes and goes in waves, and when it comes, I know it's there, I can feel it, and I konw what I need to do to resolve it, however I'm unable to walk/sleep/<insert other daily activity here>. Using appropriate pain relief to let me be able to deal with the root of the problem is a great approach, and the exact same thing applies with mental health.
> It's easy to dismiss what I say. but that'd be very typical of someone who doesn't want to hear it because they'd like to avoid what's really going on with themselves.
I'm not dismissing what you say because I don't want to hear it, I'm dismissing it because you're not offering any suggestions, simply "it doesn't work for everyone", "it can be a crutch" or "You're doing it wrong". It's helpful to have a meaningful discussion on these topics, but muddying the waters with "actually no, in this case..." doesn't really help anyone.
100% agree. I’ve found it useful to process and actually feel what is going on, so I can do what I need to do.
When it’s bad, it’s hard to do because those things hurt.
Recognizing that, helps. And helps process things too. But it’s the opposite of pain relief. It’s understanding and working on the cause, which is rarely easy.
It doesn’t sell either, and only self reinforces on the long scale, if one can see it.
> When it’s bad, it’s hard to do because those things hurt.
Sometimes you know it hurts, but you need to keep going anyway. OP replied to me with the metaphor of physical pain, which works great in this case. If my trapped nerve hurts, I _know_ the root cause of it by now, I don't need it to keep stabbing me in the back for 2-3 weeks while I work on fixing the root cause.
Similarly for mental health, exercise (in particular) provides you with that capacity to handle things. If a person is under serious stress financially, they _know_ they're struggling. If exercising 2-3 times a week can help them keep that stress under control so it doesn't destroy a relationship in the process, that definitely seems like a worthwhile use of time (rather than "feeling" the stress).
in cases of mental health issues it's not sufficient to just exercise or work or sleep and eat right but to have means of processing things internally ... but exercise is massive because it has giant effects on brain chemistry and inflammation similar to what sleep does and it is what you'd be doing , generally, if you did have those means of processing things in place. (at least get to the point where you sweat.)
That's exactly my point. Using a "crutch" for want of a better word to avoid being in that state is the correct use of a crutch.
If you can't muster the executive function to perform basic tasks, you definitely can't handle the root cause of whatever is pushing you over the edge.
> At the best of times these routines of habit are just an escape from the stress...
No, not an escape. Amongst the many benefits, exercise, meditation, etc are a means (but not the only means) to quiet the mind and give a pause to thought. They force you to focus on the present moment and not to dwell in the past or future. Humans are incredible prediction machines but generally not all too accurate. Too much time spent thinking about the past and future without balance of the present creates needless suffering. None of this is new and has been known for millennia.
> None of this is new and has been known for millennia.
This is a lie. It has not been taught for centuries to quiet or attempt to repress your thoughts. What a terrible thing to propagate. There are different kinds of meditation. The problem is, you already know exactly what you're doing with the style you're practicing. Talk to a good therapist instead and they'll tell you to sit with your feelings, not attempt to quiet them. For a very important reason.
Who ever mentioned anything about repressing thoughts? Quieting the mind does not mean repressing feelings. Observe the thoughts when they arise, but do not judge. This is nothing new.
And just by a vague guess, chances are I have far more experience with meditation and meditators than you do. Now are you going to open your mind, doubt your thoughts, and confirm, or are you content to simply quiet them and move onto the next victim?
> at a certain point and a certain level of stress you stop being able to do it
You're assuming that stress tolerance is at a fixed level in all humans, and that everyone who still "maintains sanity" must have lower absolute stress.
I would argue that if you're putting yourself under so much long-term stress that you can't maintain healthy habits at all, you're basically guaranteed to go insane and fail.
Do they, though? I feel it's more instinct people have that sacrifice leads to reward, when in fact the people who suffer the most for too long drive themselves into a ditch.
Yeah, I dont think this is true either. It's a mix of a belief in the intrinsic effectiveness of the frugal protestant work ethic and credulity of the successful founders who hitch themselves to it when they write their origin story.
As you mentioned, many of the suggested techniques can only take you so far. And it's a problem of the privileged enough to think about a startup.
I find that one thing that can help, and that I would use both as self-help or as an investor judging a possible founder, is the amount of what I would call
"lucid self-awareness".
Is the founder able to phrase to others clearly what he is good on and why, and why the journey is worth taking, in more details than just: We should try or is where is the opportunity. Also is the founder also to detail where are the challenges and how can we overcame these.
At the personal level or at the corporate level. Warning signs would be explanations at the corporate level of the type: We have a certain runaway and we will work really hard. That is a plan running on statistical luck.
A positive explanation would be: We think we will not run out of runway because we have 10 paying customers and at the rate we are acquiring customers, we cover
expenses in 6 months.
At the personal level a warning sign would a behavioral pattern of overtime, overconfidence, depression, anxiety or irritability. Believe on the existence of an opportunity, relying on other founders deliverable without being able to articulate what they will be able to achieve, or for example not being able to clearly articulate what is your plan for failure.
As stress is mostly a symptom of lack of control, the founder able to articulate what parameters he can control, and what not under their control and what can be done to manage that, would engage in more appropriate stress management.
At the personal founder level, one example would be being able to articulate that: We don't have enough funds right now, and my other co-founder was just arrested and one of my VCs is really working for one of my competitors.
So I know where in 3 to 6 months I can get additional funds, even the objective is not guaranteed. I analyzed my co-founder legal problems and are likely to only affect his personal life. I have a plan not to share any more internal data with this VC or I will feed just standard info.
It's maybe not about the stress level, but about the existence or not of a plan to manage that stress level.
Although there might be a lot to criticize about Amazon, I always found, that this interview from 1997, is a good example of the lucid self-awareness, we should look for in a founder, and what might help manage stress:
Of course Jeff Bezos worked at an investment fund, so I am sure in case this Amazon thing had gone nowhere he had already a well fought failure plan.
So in shorter words, you are crossing a shark infested ocean, in a small raft, so make sure you prepare well. From your satellite phone, to your life raft, to provision, to navigation aids. If you are sail out and can still see the cost but you are already under stress, it's normal, but maybe reexamine the preparation you did before the journey, get back to port while you can.
Try later.
By far the most important advice here is exercise.
Years ago I had a friend who suffered from severe anxiety, to the point where she later took a job working for an anxiety charity to help others.
I had some anxiety and followed all her advice for coping with it, got some counselling (really helped), read all the leaflets. Took up swimming. Meditated every day.
Recently, after some reading, I tried a different exercise routine for a few weeks, where I worked out every day before work.
Compared to all the other stuff I’d done, hitting the gym every day was _dramatically_ more effective for coping with stress and anxiety. I can’t really emphasise this enough. Like, not 2x or 3x as effective, but just off the charts. It felt physically impossible to get severely stressed if I hit the gym every morning.
Another great thing about exercise is it tends to improve sleep a lot, which also has a major effect on stress levels and happiness.
I started realizing that when I feel down and discouraged, often the cause is simply being tired and not sleeping enough. I’d drink more coffee/caffeine to compensate, making me sleep even worse. It’s a bad cycle. But a sufficiently tough workout cancels out the over-caffeination and makes it easy to fall asleep at night.
> Another great thing about exercise is it tends to improve sleep a lot
Depends. For example, picking up a new sport (new type of movement/activity) can disrupt your sleep for weeks or months and it represents lots of extra stress. I've been doing quite lot of running for around two years (never had more than two days rest between runs), and then picked up BJJ. Then I got injured and had to stop exercising for a few weeks. I have not slept that well for years -- finally I had nights without muscle pain and tiredness :)
So be careful with _too hard_ exercise if you're stressed out; it raises dopamine levels but doesn't negate stress.
It sounds like it wasn't the exercise itself that was sabotaging you, your comment about muscle pain makes it sound like you weren't allowing for proper recovery time between workouts. That's just as important as the actual workout.
>finally I had nights without muscle pain and tiredness
This is well-researched problem. All it means you don't have diet balanced enough to provide everything necessary for proper recovery. For me it was magnesium deficiency, now I take magnesium every night and sleep just fine even after muscle-intense exercise. Before this "miracle" (<= joke) OTC supplement I had tense muscles and crumps and wasn't getting good sleep.
(Magnesium comes in many forms, it takes time to find one which is not disturbing for the stomach, I use magnesium glycenate in capsules).
> By far the most important advice here is exercise.
It's definitely a major part, I always paid for my 24 hour fitness membership during my days as a founder for this reason, I suffered immensely when things shutdown during COVID--even as a non-founder by that point because most of my coping mechanisms required a massive workout when I'm stressed out. I started to grind my teeth badly and had constant headaches, and was always irritable during this time.
Nothing really beats a hard work out and a long sauna and steam with occasional exposure to the snow outside and some CBD and a massage (even with just a gun) for your body into resetting itself for the next day. Especially if you were all alone at the gym like I was at 2am and had the place to yourself and the 1 guy on staff.
The only problem was I hardly slept back then and only power napped, which resulted in occasionally falling asleep in the spa area embarrassingly, which I'm now finding impossible to do without massive set backs.
I'd argue diet is perhaps just as, if nor moreso, important, though. And sleep rounding the last of the top 3.
On the other hand, my gym habit is so regular that going in the morning for an hour is ingrained into my day. I am still very stressed, sometimes even at the gym while working out, thinking about all the things i have to do later
This is precisely the reason I cycle 1000KMs each year - a combination of time alone, fresh air and exercise (either high or low impact) really helps offset life's worries.
The single best productivity tool I’ve bought in years was an old Fuji road bike last summer. I’ve been a runner for many years but something about the bike makes it easier to get into a meditative, creative space that’s less available to me when jogging.
I bought a hybrid bike last year and became a weekend warrior. I do around 50-100k every Saturday. I am thinking of buying a carbon road bike, but they can get quite expensive.
Like any hobby it can be as expensive or cheap as you like. My road bike (Cannondale CAAD8 from 2010) is probably worth €200-250, yet gets ridden 10x more than other bikes in the house costing upwards of €7k.
not sure exactly which "hybrid", but my personal recommendation would be to look for gravel bikes.
These days there's quite a choice of frames / materials / groupset options and they're as close to a jack-of-all-trades as it gets.
Depending on some basic components / extras (tyres, racks, aerobars, bags) they can do almost any reasonable terrain. They're always "slightly worse" than the dedicated road/MTBs, but excel when You'd like to mix things up (e.g. your hilly tracks need some 20km of road to get to from where you live and putting a bike in a car simply feels silly).
I've started doing Yoga ~ 3 years ago, and along with switching to a plant-based diet, it's one of the best habits I picked up. I've tried all kinds of sports before, but could never make it stick because I didn't enjoy doing it (e.g., for me running, going to the gym or doing weight lifting at home is extremely boring).
I keep on being seriously relieved that I've not developed fatigue. I have MS, and fatigue is a really common symptom. People don't get how much it can upset life, nor how little sleep helps with it. Heck, I don't really understand, but nevertheless, I tried to come up with a plan to deal with it. Realistically, that means being happy I don't deal with it right now and deciding there wasn't much I could do now to make it easier later.
Burnout seems to be the most common mental health issue at startups. The gradual presentation makes it difficult to prevent. You feel like you are pushing the limit, but that you can handle it. Then you have a couple weeks of crunch where you start to fall behind, and this snowballs the deterioration of your mental health and productivity at the same time. It is much cheaper to treat by taking a weeks long vacation when the pressure is reaching the limit than dealing with the months long fallout of pushing the engine until it breaks.
I exercise, meditate, eat mostly healthy during the week, sleep 8 hrs, and no caffeine in afternoons on most days.
My mental health is still not great. I couldn't imagine where it would be if I didn't do these things.
I've recently started therapy and I can definitely say it's starting to help. As a founder, I'm simply burnt out of having to make so many important decisions.
One of the most helpful things about therapy for me is being able to vent unfiltered and letting go of the responsibility to decide what is going on with me and what to do next about it. Very freeing to be vulnerable and not have to be the one on top making the final decisions for a moment.
I'll add something that as a founder is actionable and I haven't seen recommended: work with as few people as possible and if possible with people over 30.
A large amount of stress is amplified by mini-dramas that could have been avoided entirely by people with more life experience and fewer human cogs in your processes usually means less mess to cleanup, allowing you to focus more on what's important.
I agree with the team-size aspect, but the age argument won't always hold.
Junior folks bring their own energy, flexibility, hunger for learning and the resilience to unclear future. As folks get more mature, growing egos, stability expectations, tendency to settle down can get in the way.
Overall, this boils down to the fact that teams and people are not just head counts and there's a factor of chemistry need to be considered depending on the culture, founders, geography and the business itself.
... arrogance, hunger for prestige and one-upmanship which leads to fixation on irrelevant outcomes, laziness in learning "old things", and rejection of instructions.
Solid advice that; especially in a crazy startup situation, having many people will probably drive you insane. I had all kinds of startups over the decades; from 100s of people to me alone; the best ones were 2 people setups until significant seed (>$1m). Those were the most successful and the least stressful (during the first phase); of course once it grows it is different but at least you are prepared.
And yeah, the older I get, the more I appreciate older people; I prefer no-nonsense 35+.
Strongly agree with this. A lot of founders make the mistake of prematurely scaling, and I've done that in the past.
Scaling from a handful of people, to more than a dozen creates a significant jump in stress, and dilutes focus, for a non-commensurate jump in productivity. Any pre-PMF startup should be as small as humanly possible.
I remember after I got older I eventually had some cubes next to mine that were perpetual "new college student hires" cubes.
I was / am by no means the best at my job technically, in fact some of those new guys were better out of the gate technically than I was in some ways. But I could get along with the new guys and enjoyed working with them. Over lunches and small talk I would quietly have discussions about "how to pick your battles" / "yeah that's absurd but here's an easy way to get around it rather than fight it" and more generally "amazingly easy things you can do to make your boss happy that cost you nothing at all". These lessons of course weren't me just telling them what to do, just planting ideas that they eventually would discover, hopefully sooner rather than later.
They were basically all the things I learned the hard way ;)
>work with as few people as possible and if possible with people over 30.
Those problems don't get solved by excluding that group; you have to include them or they don't learn. A good amount of maturing comes from being near folks wiser than yourself.
I'm all for mentoring the next generation, I'm just saying thought that it's a much higher burden than people realize, especially for a company that doesn't have product-market fit, and where you can expect a lot of the people you trained to leave for greener pastures.
To put it another way: the higher your ARR, the more responsibility you have for others. The first period of a start-up is the riskiest and working with fewer young people significantly reduces that risk, especially in today business environment.
I wonder if you know about any personality tests or ways to do soft skill interviews, to find out how team work wise mature someone is (instead of only looking at age :-))
My mental health is always tied directly to how well my startup is doing well. I’ve tried, but my mental health cannot be controlled simply by exercise, diet, etc. It’s just 100% tied to how well my startup is performing, and that usually means how much revenue it’s generating relative to where the company should be given burn, number of employees, etc.
I understand that’s not the case for everyone, but my piece of advice would be to do everything in your power to make your company successful. For me, that’s the exact same thing as working on my mental health.
Interesting to see where different peoples values lie. Living life like this sounds absolutely miserable to me, no matter how much money I would bring in. But hey I understand that some people enjoy the hustle.
That's precisely the issue TFA is referring to. Tying your mental health to your work. It's unhealthy, and if you're at the point where you're justifying this link, you might seriously be in a co-dependent relationship with your company.
If you have the mental fortitude to know when to step back, then all the power to you, but I find it much too easy to fall into the trap of "working so hard so my mental health doesn't suffer, but my mental health suffers anyway"
as someone who's run marathons... building a startup is NOT a marathon.
Marathons have a distinct finish line. When you're at mile 20 and your legs are falling off and you take tylenol or whatever they give you to make the pain go away... or when ppl on the sidelines say "almost there!!" and you send them a rude look because those last six miles are the WORST... at least you know you'll cross the finish line at some point and pass out on the grass.
No, startups are like running marathons but in Stephen King's the Long Walk. There's no finish line — you just have to walk farther than those around you, or you die trying.
Perhaps building a start-up is more like finishing the Hardrock 100[1]. Unless you get extremely lucky, it takes years of work just to qualify to get into the lottery. It then takes a lot of persistence and failures in the lottery to get to the starting line. If you're not prepared at the starting line you probably won't finish and even if you are prepared there's room for a lot of luck (both good and bad) to affect your chances.
However, unlike finishing Hardrock, it's certainly possible to successfully launch a start-up without exercising. However, the few times I tried it that way I crashed and burned. I strongly suspect exercise might have pulled me through although to be fair there are tons of other things I did wrong that had I done right might have led to greater success.
Why are startups like this and not 40h/week affairs? I mean if you do 80h/week that is only 2x. Does that 2x make all the difference? If startups are getting millions of dollars in seed
funding these days do you need founders burning themselves out? For bootstrappers can it just be done more slowly over more runway rather than long hours?
They aren't all like this but to stick with the 40h vs. 80h framing, the 2x can make a difference.
1) Compounding. Assuming sustained productivity (this is usually unreasonable), it's not just you outputting 2x, it's a bunch of people cranking out 2x and your next up efforts compound on top of those initial boosted efforts.
2) Timing. Some startups are in positions where launching ~months before a competitor could tip the scales.
3) Hiring. It's very difficult to grow headcount at the exactly correct rate alongside business growth.
4) Fundraising. Growth rate is the top metric for raising additional funding.
Ostensibly an African proverb is “If you want to run fast, run alone. If you want to run far, run together.” I'll add "If you want to run really far, call walking running."
The Cocodona 250[1] starts in less than two weeks, but with the Crooks Fire it's looking like C250 will be 200 < C < 250.
I think the best advice is not to take people's advice!
Everyone's life, stress tolerance, maturity, health, wisdom etc. is very different.
Also, the companies are different: OKTA has a very specific market with a relatively well-known product-market fit. Other businesses don't know their product market fit.
Having a family is a big commitment and changes everything related to priorities so comparing the family "man" with the singleton is not correct.
The most important thing imho is about how you are able to deal with failure and your expectations for mistakes. The experienced founder is not necessarily wiser than you, they have probably just learned that things don't always work out. Once you accept that you will need to work, let's say, 80 hours per week average to make a startup happen but at the same time, it might not work, you might have to fire people, you might let down shareholders, you will need to have hard conversations with your close family; if you can handle that without feeling too much regret then you might be OK.
The rest of us end up having to cope with the fact that we don't deal with failure well and take things too personally ;-)
There is a difference between a side project, a company focusing on serving a corner of the market sustainably and a startup focusing on venture capital and growth.
The later will be mentally taxing, more so if you are inexperienced. A side project on the other hand is a breeze as you aren't putting everything on the line.
The entire culture surrounding a16z is a mental health hazard. The soulless obsession with hypergrowth, having to resort to exploitation to make it. The same goes for China and their inhumane hustle culture. Your soul in exchange for opportunities. With a16z the only opportunity though is eventually selling your company to Google or Facebook.
2) You will have super productive days and you will have super unproductive days. That's okay. Don't sweat it, they will even out. Long term progress is what you want
Reminds me of a quote that’s helped me a lot over the years (founded a startup, had several mega stressful periods, company going strong 16 years later):
“It doesn’t matter how slowly you go so long as you don’t stop.”
But humans naturally have variability, especially under conditions of high uncertainty such as founding a startup. So practice the courage to trust yourself today even if yesterday was unproductive.
I'm about 2 years into building a business. The craziest paradigm was definitely going from having a huge salary, winning awards and accolades with regularity and having status in a community to having no salary, nobody pats you on the back and being viewed as "another startup guy".
You've really got to be okay with being alone with yourself and you have to have abnormal levels of self-assurance to make it out alive. When the dark thoughts come for me, I get high and go running / yoga. If I didn't have this outlet, I probably would have spun out into a negative, obsessive abyss and bowed out long ago.
One additional thing I've noticed is that if you build technology, and it takes a while until it's ready enough so you can start making money -- then, your friends and
acquaintances will eventually think that what you're doing is utterly silly and that you don't understand this, but that they do.
> Let me give you an example. I love ice hockey and play late every Tuesday evening and early most Sunday mornings as part of a Bay Area league. It’s something I’ve done the whole time I’ve been building Okta. Getting on the ice is my way of clearing my head and blowing off steam. For a couple of hours, I get to leave my stress and responsibilities behind.
This paragraph made me go look up a picture of Kerrest, because I've probably said pieces of this verbatim to others. I play hockey on Tuesday and Wednesday nights in (two) Bay Area leagues. Sunday morning is, at least the one I'm thinking of, over 40 so I'm not eligible.
When we were going through YC, my co-founders and I all moved to an Airbnb further down the peninsula. At least once a week, with rare exceptions, I packed my equipment into my car and drove back to SF or Oakland to play. That time on the ice, and even in the locker room with my teammates, was such an incredibly important time for me as a mental break/reset. As the company's grown, and my role has increasingly become people-focused vs programming, that time away (COMPLETELY away) from any sort of communication tools has become so deeply precious to me.
Totally unrelated, he doesn't look immediately familiar to me, I wonder what league he plays in!
I don't agree with everything Jeff Bezos says, but the idea of "work-life integration" really hits the mark.
A startup as a "marathon, not a sprint" really means it's a founder's job to keep themselves in top mental, physical, and emotional shape, just like a world-class athlete.
No one told me this when I embarked on the startup journey, so I had to learn it the hard way.
I've discovered later than I should that for me, I need at least a two week break from time to time.
I need actual holiday where I don't answer emails or even do what I used to consider the minimum required. From an outside perspective, that's always been obvious to me and I've always understood that people need it, I just never applied it to myself.
Inadvertently holiday time is often when my best ideas come.
> Inadvertently holiday time is often when my best ideas come.
So you are still thinking about work? My best ideas come during work. During vacation, I don't think of anything work related but mostly philosophizing.
This is a good post, and I'm always glad to see discussions about mental health anywhere in the startup scene. However, I agree with the other commenters who note that healthy routines may not be enough to cope with the stresses of running a startup, particularly given the high rate of failure. Even the strongest and healthiest individuals face a high risk of being strained past a breaking point. I wish we talked more about that.
I learned this the hard way, presiding over the failure of a nonprofit I founded. Nothing prepared me for the sheer level of stress and exhaustion, the aftermath, and the recovery process.
I wrote a book about this to help others, in case anyone is going through something similar: "Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal." [0]
To the founders on here: which item would have helped the most reduce the stress
1. more (or more secure) money. If you got your house paid for and a decent salary guaranteed for two years while you got the thing started, would that have helped?
2. A wingman - someone you trusted utterly with you each step of the way (but harder to provide than the above)
3. Other
I ask because if I was a VC and my stable of startups could improve their hit rate with say, 1) then it seems a no brainer.
I am just wondering if the VC game is rigged to be like a hazing - we cannot find any other decent way to sort the winners
I think having some sort of regular wage hit my bank account over 24 months instead of 2 years of savings would have made a lot of pyschological difference. Not seeing a number go down like a timer takes the pressure off.
> For example, when I travel for sales meetings, I regularly invite prospects, customers, and investors to come to a game with me
Personally, I would hate to receive such an invitation. Of course I could politely turn it down, and if it comes from a vendor, it's easy to do so. But for a partner or such, ugh.
Data shows that founders over 50 are the most successful age group yet VCs continue to focus on 20 somethings because few founders over 50 are able to handle the financial terms the VCs want on things like founder salary. I'm convinced we lose a lot of potentially good start-ups by requiring founders to take vows of poverty.
We need a coherent approach to mental health for founders. We need a coherent approach to mental health for early start-up employees. VCs are part of the problem and accepting their recommended solutions will make things worse not better.