Mental Health and Startups

Mental health and startups. For some, this might be a complete first time seeing these two words together in one sentence. For my year and a half of startups, frankly not a single person in the industry really mentioned it to me at all. Not a single investor call asked how I was doing, well beyond the pleasantries and the beginnings of conversation. To be honest, I don't think I could legitimately think of a single conversation where I really dug deep into the daily battles of startups and its toll mentally.

Mental health has grown on me as an important and significant issue that is facing this new generation. And it's becoming ever the more important in a new wave of investment to really discuss the major impacts that having a healthy mental situation and its relation to startup success and founder wellbeing. We live in a day in age where founders spend more time on zoom calls with customers than they do shaking hands in an entire year. There's no more flying out, no more in person meetings, it's just meeting exhaustion in a chair, with two to three monitors.

The Zoomiverse of Startups has taken the world by storm. For better or for worse. The perks is that early-stage investment has flourished for quite a while, more than ever, deals are done with a phone call or a zoom, nothing else. And yet despite the ease of investment, the ease of creating a startup has not changed, and frankly won't ever change. But what has changed is the reality that founders are more often than not fighting at it alone, in some office or home space, around the world.

So I want to touch on mental health. Not to join the crowd or "hop on a trend" as more people openly discuss it. But I want to give a brutal reality and an honest picture into what it's really like being a part of the "current" 98%+ of startups that "haven't made it just yet".

The False Reality That Makes Everything Look Amazing

Everyone falls susceptible of this. Instagram stories, facebook posts, LinkedIn job messages, I mean it's all around us. Some X person has some Y thing that we want. Some A person has some job that we've always wanted. Some X startup has now became a billion dollar company, and here I am with a company in shambles. We consume these stories every day, scrolling through LinkedIn, Google Discovery (which by the way is quite good at recommending new articles), and of course Tech Crunch, MarketPost, and whatever else you put your mind to. As a founder, I'm constantly bombarded by messages from friends and family, google, and gmail about startup X being acquired, startup Y raising a $500M Series A round, some other investor going head over heels about some new crypto startup that's going to somehow change the web3 space (I mean I've heard this way too much). And I'm just like "where am I?", "when is this going to happen to us?".

These stories paint such a false reality of the startup world that I think early founders don't fully understand. For starters, unless you're incredibly lucky, startups are inherently a function of timing (which is part luck), idea "potential", and execution. To be successful, you have to have all three. Yes "ideas are cheap, execution is everything" - but a good idea is rare to be found, "otherwise everyone would be billionaires" as my mentor says. For many who want to make this their full occupation, it comes as a huge life shock when they realize that the baby that they have built for the last 4-12 months has become something scoffed yet, or even worse, completely forgotten. The reality of just "casting" your work out, forgetting about, archiving it takes a huge toll. Even worse, having to do this time and time and time again, until you somehow "find the right gem"....I mean Thomas Edison did say he tried 1000 times to build the lightbulb but still.

The fact of the matter is, you not only put your time and effort into your startup, but you also put your belief into it, you found ways and interviews to justify and prove to yourself that what you were building was "valuable to society", and "worthy of riches many-fold". To slowly realize that this is not the case is agonizing. Like you take your baby to preschool and he comes back bloodied and beaten up (okay sorry for the picture).

To say that startup news paints a true picture of the startup world is like saying that every golfer breaks par the first time. It just simply not the case. It's grueling, it's hard; It's mentally taxing; It's stress-inducing; it's frankly brutal.

Startups are F*cking Brutal

Segment Founder Peter Reinhardt once said that before hitting their big win, the team went through over 7 different ideas in the span of a year and a half. All the while, losing money to salaries, business expenses, rent, and more. I've had the "pleasure" to experience this myself. From starting from one direction in finance, to pivoting to developer tooling, to robotics, and to God knows where. You're just aimless: like a super equipped ship with a team of sailors, with new sails and everything, only a compass that doesn't work and you're in the middle of a hurricane.

The reality of having to wake up every day wondering what the heck you're doing has been daunting. Yes, I'll admit, there are times where I've chosen to sleep in just to avoid the problems of the day, or the reality that wow, I really have no idea what I'm doing. That's why people encourage you to get cofounders. A cofounder will be your best friend and fight for you and what you both are building. I've been so fortunate to have one of the hardest working, modest, and smartest cofounders ever. Don't take the decision of your cofounder lightly. If they can't bear the burdens with you, if they aren't in the fire with the technical team, or looking at the stars as you guys cast your vision, then it may not be the best fit.

I think it's one thing to also know about statistics like 95% of startups fail and only 5% survive, and of those 5%, only about 40% survive more than 2 years. It's very much one thing to know about those statistics, it's a complete other thing to actually be the statistic, or beat the odds really. Startups are brutal, no matter the way or direction you look at them. If you don't have an idea, you have nothing to steer your ship towards, if you have no funding, you have no ship no team, if you have no team, you're just a sailor alone battling a hurricane. And if you got no cofounder, you have no co-captain that can be fighting the storm while you sleep.

Sampling Bias

Now going back to that statistic, 5% of startups survive, and only about 40% survive for more than two years. Ironically, those 40% get 100% of the media attention. And this is given of course. I mean who would want to hear about the failures of X company, Y company, Z company (though I'd love to). The 100% of startups that raise a series A, a seed, a series B at a $5B valuation. The "cream of the crop". Seriously, huge congratulations to them. I think it's amazing the achievement, and truly speaking they have found such a potent problem and built a solution that far exceeded those customer's problem.

Yet when those pressures and those accomplishments get pushed on as expectations to the rest of the startup founders who are still trying to figure out what to build, you can begin to see where huge issues around mental health, anxiety, weight on your shoulders get added. For every startup that gets sent to me that raises a round, I have to remind myself that it's okay to be where I am. And I encourage all founders to do so as well. As a founder, the worst thing that you can do is compare yourself to another company. It's demoralizing and discouraging. You want to know a secret? No one knows what they're truly doing. We're all figuring it out as we go too.

The sampling bias that we see adds up, it forces founders to preemptively raise when they don't need to, or take on additional investors for "clout" or just for "praise". Founders, I encourage you to really think thoroughly about who you're taking funding from. Is it worth owning 10-20% more of your company than have that TechCrunch article?

Also, choose your investors wisely. Your investors will make or break your work. They should support you as you discover and struggle. Keep in touch with them: biweekly, monthly, whatever the cadence is.

My Journey with Startups Thus Far

I'll be honest, my journey has been not as glorious as I thought it would be (at least not yet). I have been humbled, beaten, scarred, scared, and really lonely through the process. Despite those feelings, I've realized that I've grown far more than I could have in school or in any other situation. To live and breathe a startup, is to jump into the deepend without knowing how to swim.

My journey started working on a finance company. We built out an amazing open source package that enabled users to rapidly bulid and deploy trading algorithms. It was quite a beautiful engineered system. Better yet, we had users. We just hit 1K+ stars a few months ago and we're close to 1.5K. We had over 500 people in a discord from all across the globe. The problem? When we built out a paid premium package, no one bit. The customers who we thought would buy, backed out and left. We were completely distraught and confused. Oh yeah, btw, we raised a round before this as well on the hopes that things would go well. We had 4 pilots going for us with hedge funds, all of them backed out.

So we were left with a beautiful open source package, and a premium product that no one wanted. We needed to pivot.

And so that's exactly we did. We spent the next 3-4 months grueling and struggling through different ideas. Building initial prototypes, talking to different customers, quickly jotting down different problems and ideas. Going out and testing them. Building out Figma prototypes, launching some. Being disappointed. We did this a total of 4 times in the span of 3 months. We fully shipped 2-3 projects, and one we completely scrapped.

Now this might sound great. Indeed it is. We found different ideas; we discovered problems and we went and solved them. The problem: team burnout. As a leader, I could feel it every day going into work. There was true burn out. People didn't want to work, people were beginning to lose faith in what we wanted to achieve.

That reality really sunk into my heart: whiplash is real, and I was the culprit, I was the guilty. I had led the team into a disaster, and it was time to own up to the situation and reality that I really had no idea what I was doing.

Those few months were the biggest struggle of my life. I had to fight to want to work every day. I had to fight for discussions, for visions, for future. I truly fought to fake it till I made it.

Unfortunately. I can't say that our story has ended completely happy just yet. But I can say that our team is now on the upslope. We've found an incredibly strong direction and are looking towards building something truly amazing: revolutionary if you call it. How did we get to where we were? Well for one: talking to customers, looking at the problems they faced. But more importantly. I did realize that the ideas that we built through the summer actually really impacted our thought process and ultimately helped us create the idea we're working on now.

Yep, so there's really no conclusion yet to this story. Maybe I'll join the 5% that succeed or I'll be a part of the 95%, only time will tell. But founders out there. Don't take mental health lightly: find community, find friends, find time to make breaks. But also don't stress: it's okay to not know what you're doing, you're at a point where you can truly build something amazing. Know that each thing that you build will lead to something amazing. Build fast, fall short (albeit hard), and just keep running.

If you ever want to talk though! Reach out to me! I'd love to chat.

Until next time.