On Depression and Founders

There is a mental health aspect to this for sure, but there is also a practical one. From a mental health perspective people who are bipolar are very over represented in the founder pool because mania is rewarded in many startup situations. Even if one is not clinically bipolar the experience of running a startup is like imposing this condition on yourself in many ways. There is also a practical aspect to this problem, if you don't want founders to kill themselves give them a job board. I'm 43 years old with no degree, I've taken two startups including the one I'm running now from zero to $50K in MRR on shoestring budgets. If I fail this time my fall back plan is to work at a tire store or be a police officer. Yeah I've been through the Google hiring process and others but in the end I always come up just short, because I'm a little weird and I'm not a specialist... I'm a generalist. Not enough businesses actively recruit failed founders, this promotes the succeed at all costs mentality which is obviously toxic.

&gt; You’re in the arena. You’re building. You will, at one point in the near future, be miraculously happy and successful<p>It was a little weird reading this because I became suicidal <i>after</i> I became successful and had a big bank account, beautiful wife and status home.<p>I&#x27;m still trying to understand it, but basically I was so focused on success that I forgot to have a life outside of work. Then when the work was done, I didn&#x27;t have a life. When I looked around I saw that my kids were grown and I was never going to get that time back. Be careful what you wish for is all I can say.

I was raised in Spain. We have the opposite problem. The catholic culture is &quot;nothing is your responsibility&quot;, even things that clearly are.<p>It is Mt 6,24-34 “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.<p>“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.&quot;<p>It just doesn&#x27;t make sense for me to suicide because my business fails. There will always be an excuse and failure is just not that important.<p>In the protestant culture, it is the opposite, &quot;everything is your responsibility&quot;, even things that clearly are not. &quot;success&quot; and &quot;failure&quot; are sacred words, like &quot;winners&quot; or &quot;losers&quot;. And life is about competition and individualism, even in teams.<p>I have helped refugees and drug addicts. I would never have the temptation to call them(or think about them as) &quot;losers&quot;, but I have seen people in the US call them this word.<p>It is a good idea that you expose yourself to different cultures so you could see through and take what is good for each one. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

&gt; A startup isn’t a suicide pact, it’s an adventure.<p>&quot;Hustle Mentality&quot; really ruins a lot of the magic of this statement (hence why this post needed to exist in the first place). That and ad revenue.<p>&gt; You are important, you are intelligent, and you are loving. You’re worth worrying about.<p>Well said.

As a founder with a failed startup, I relate. Talking to people helps. But as one of my friends said, very aptly, &quot;There&#x27;s no one else who can fix it but you&quot;.<p>Even though it sounds very abrupt and unhelpful, it&#x27;s true. Finding inner peace, on your own, is what can actually help.<p>I still haven&#x27;t.

A la Paul Graham&#x27;s &quot;keep your identity small&quot;, maybe &quot;founder&quot; doesn&#x27;t need to be an identity association for everything.

I&#x27;ve been dealing with depression off and on for a good 10 years now. My company was almost completely destroyed by nepotism and corruption and bad investors, beyond my control. This was back in Europe. I&#x27;ve tried to get traditional help (talking) and although I thought it was working I realized later on I was convincing myself it was working, while it was not, and that the person helping me would never understand me as a founder or understand what it is to start a business and then see it being destroyed at the point it is about to become really successful. They would never understand the endless hours someone spends on writing every single line of code, spending all savings, and the endless anxiety that comes with all that. I&#x27;ve looked around for specialized help but it doesn&#x27;t seem to exist. Most founders are too busy to really talk about it, and the one psychologist&#x2F;therapist I did find who is familiar with the tech world was going to be too expensive for me to afford, and was not in my health care network. What we really need IMHO is a specialized non profit that deals with mental health issues of founders, perhaps run by a variety of ex-founders, both those who were succesful and those who were not.

As someone who is depressed, founding a company is very low on the list of things I would like to do.<p>Reasons:<p>- it&#x27;s practically impossible for me to be excited about any business&#x2F;software idea&#x2F;project&#x2F;opportunity<p>- depression diminishes my productivity which is extremely important for a founder<p>- the instability from building a company creates a negative feedback loop with one&#x27;s depression<p>I need stability and routine; I need to put in a lot of effort just to have a normal life and keep a job. Running a company becomes almost impossible in those circumstances.

I think that founders, by their very nature, expect big things to happen and when they don&#x27;t the fall is greater for them than those who don&#x27;t have big expectations.<p>Personally I&#x27;d rather hang with those who tried and failed than those who&#x27;d never try.

Although I recognize the author&#x27;s best intentions, the narrative of founders being somehow &quot;special&quot; never sits right with me. Yes, the founder&#x2F;CEO has the responsibility of the entire company on their shoulders, but everyone else has their own world on their shoulders, too. It&#x27;s not only the founder who has a dream, who wants to accomplish great things, who will beat themselves up when they fail.<p>Paul Simon, <i>American Tune</i>:<p><pre><code> | And I don&#x27;t know a soul who&#x27;s not been battered | I don&#x27;t have a friend who feels at ease | I don&#x27;t know a dream that&#x27;s not been shattered | Or driven to its knees</code></pre>

Or maybe those founders who claim they can&#x27;t form a group need to get together to talk about how it feels to not be listened to and how they are constantly dealing with people trying to one-up them. Maybe they feel they&#x27;re always solving everyone else&#x27;s hard problems but nobody&#x27;s solving theirs.<p>There is help for that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-healing-crowd&#x2F;201106&#x2F;narcissistic-personality-disorder-does-group-therapy-help" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-healing-crowd&#x2F;20...</a>

My former business partner deals with the stress by smoking a lot of weed, which may or may not have affected the presentations he gives in public. You can judge for yourself:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8znQZ1RUckg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8znQZ1RUckg</a><p>More generally, some combination of fundraising plus Ted Talks (and other venues that look for speakers who have something &quot;visionary&quot; to say) gives everyone an incentive to develop an aesthetic of being &quot;visionary&quot;. It&#x27;s not healthy. This is very much what I tried to parody in my comedy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;How-Build-Really-Terrible-Dating-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B096RDX91M&#x2F;ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&amp;keywords=how+to+build+a+really+terrible+dating+app&amp;qid=1624014448&amp;sr=8-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;How-Build-Really-Terrible-Dating-eboo...</a>

As a sort of failed founder I think the hardest thing is the resilient loneliness. You build this castle in your psyche and have to implement it in real life and no one knows the full picture. Initially super exciting and then reality. I 100% understand why suicide is a very real option without good support.

&gt; First, if you’re suicidal, WhatsApp me at +1[...]<p>I&#x27;m not sure this is something this person should be saying. Not a lawyer but I&#x27;d want to talk to one about liability issues in putting that out on the internet. Even for trained professionals, &quot;if this is an emergency, please call 911&quot; is pretty much SOP for actively suicidal people.<p>Not saying it&#x27;s not a laudable sentiment, either - if anything we need more people willing to talk about this stuff with strangers. But the law may put one in a weird position here - and even beyond that, this is America, where everyone sues everyone else. Suppose this guy talks to someone, that person offs themselves, and then their family comes knocking, wondering what happened on that phone call?

Not sure if the advice from the article is applicable (paraphrasing: &quot;if too much, quit&quot;. By that time you are in too many obligations to too many people). Here is different advice instead.<p>Do not raise VC money if you can. Bootstrap and enjoy the process of building and discovery even if it ends up being a smaller thing. As Shatner says, at the end it all does not matter. Stay independent, stay free, stay focused and stay true to yourself.

As a serial founder&#x2F; employee number 2 or 3, I&#x27;m seriously addicted to early startup. Plus I&#x27;m older than most of y&#x27;all so the hiring thing is even harder.<p>What I did to remain viable in the periods between startups is, I got really good at a couple technical things that are in high demand and I consult, for small startups who just raised money and really need something to work. So far my eccentric history seems intriguing to my clients and not a red flag as it would be for Faang.<p>I suspect this strategy will continue to work as long as start-up capital is flooding the zone. Once there&#x27;s a pullback, I&#x27;m likely to be in trouble.<p>So of course I&#x27;m raising money again for another startup. Wish me luck.

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Here is what happened on my journey so far - will try to keep it short but it might help somebody else in the same boat.<p>I wasn&#x27;t enjoying my job (as an employee) - the biggest problem I had was a nagging feeling that the people in the industry I was working in were setting an agenda that farmers would simply never be able to follow.<p>I was actually suffering from depression but I didn&#x27;t know it at the time. I had a huge argument with my boss and quit. I had been working on the product for a little while but didn&#x27;t really have anything concrete.<p>Within a couple of months of resigning I had an MVP and a co-founder. We managed to get a little VC funding and went on the startup adventure.<p>Turned out the co-founder was a complete fraud. He was supposed to be my hardware guy (I was software) but he didn&#x27;t know anything about hardware that I didn&#x27;t already know. He couldn&#x27;t even read a circuit diagram. I was kind of stuck at that stage, we were overseas developing the product and I thought rather stupidly I could get him to fit in doing something else.<p>He was useless at everything. Couldn&#x27;t write a program to save his life, didn&#x27;t understand the product designers, couldn&#x27;t help with anything. I eventually had to sideline him into doing things like grant applications and whatnot which he did manage to finish although it took a few arguments every time to get him to finish <i>anything</i>.<p>I set a pretty punishing schedule for the field trials. It was a whirlwind really, lots of travel, got everything working despite having to drag that useless turd all over the place. A couple of years ago he quit and became a massive PITA while we tried to get the legal stuff sorted out to cancel his unvested shares - another long story of his stupidity and various own goals.<p>Anyway, shortly after he quit we did have customers and revenue and it looked like it had some momentum but I contracted a little illness over that Christmas and found myself unable to get out of bed and was at divorce level with my long suffering wife. It was bad. I had contemplated steering the car over a few ravines. That undiagnosed depression took a massive hold on me.<p>I went to the doctor who was instantly understanding of the utter despair I was in at the time. He referred me to a psychologist who set me on a path of recovery. It isn&#x27;t always easy and that mood occasionally re-appears (especially after you get knocked back by another investor) but I feel like I have the tools and the understanding to keep it more or less in check.<p>The funny thing about that period of depression was that it was the most focused and creative period of my 50 year life. I wrote some really excellent code, built an entire system from firmware up to server software and it worked the very first time we tried it on animals. The <i>first</i> time. An incredible achievement that I am not sure I would have been able to complete without the focus and creativity that the depression was a part of. So I&#x27;m kind of ambivalent about episodes of depression being entirely destructive, they weren&#x27;t for me.

To add to the depression - as they say it&#x27;s lonely &#x27;up&#x27; there.<p>(even if the organization that you founded is doing well financially and well past it&#x27;s founding stage.)

Hey guys. I wrote this. If you need help ask someone for it and if you’re too cool to get help good luck.

The problem is that most founder think that they need to be miserable to be successful.

There&#x27;s likely a confounding variable. As someone who runs in circles with a lot of founders, what drives people to start companies is general life dissatisfaction and a search for meaning that they aim to find by taking the leap to start their own company which they hope will create meaning in their lives.<p>Given that 80-90% of startups fail, it&#x27;s like the old xkcd. [1] You started with 1 problem (dissatisfied with life), went to solve it, and now you have 2 problems (dissatisfied with life &amp; a failed company).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;</a>

Thanks for posting. Yes, +100 to this.

In bodies with testicles, low T (from a number of possible causes) can be even worse than just depression: inability to concentrate, confusion, alertness, consciousness, memory, anxiety, social, and sleep problems. You don&#x27;t want this.<p>Maslow&#x27;s hierarchy things help: Sleep (where possible), diet, water, exercise (HIIT cardio and weightlifting), get outside, routine, defuse catastrophizing thoughts with reality, and not everything is as hard as it may seem (no mind, grasshoppa).<p>Avoid: alcohol, walnuts, almonds, soy, licorice root (black licorice candy), mint, certain oils (canola, corn, cottonseed, soybean, flaxseed, sunflower, safflower, palm kernel, &quot;vegetable&quot;), sugar&#x2F;HFCS, carbs, trans-fats, and <i>excessive</i> omega-3.