Startup Adolescence, Suicide and Tomorrows
Startups are the prodigy adolescents of the business world, with angst and stupidity, but also genius, beauty, revolution, and salvation. They also mature or die. Sometimes fantastically. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes tragically.
In startups your day almost never goes as planned. Thanks to Brad Feld, instead of prepping for a few awesome weeks in California with developers, partners, VCs, the Autotech Council Hackathon, and Dreamforce, I’m thinking about suicide and depression.
Not my own, but Scotty’s, Susie’s, others, and the parallels between adolescents and the “adolescence” of startups. First, if suicide has ever been a consideration, reach out. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline if you don’t know where to turn. The 800 number is 1–800–273-TALK (8255).
By nature, I’m private. Until kids, my favorite birthday activity was to go off into the outdoors, by myself. This is something I’ve barely ever spoken of, so bear with me, it may be TLDR for many but it needs to be said.
A friend once lamented that she missed college because it compressed everything. In the course of a few weeks she could have a deep, meaningful relationship, breakup, mourn and move on. In the real world, that takes months. The startup ecosystem offers a similar, amazingly intense distillation of the full range of life, but with broader, grown up consequences.
My cousin Scotty was having a really crappy time while I was in college. I set up a special number, local to him, so Scotty could call me anytime and it worked great. We talked more regularly than we had in years, about nothing, about deep stuff, about cool stuff and about the shitty stuff in life. On my side of the phone, things were great. Killing it academically, hot girlfriend, president of my fraternity, vice-president of the inter-fraternity council, being courted for other roles, 98 percentile the LSAT, overall, great. Scotty was a little younger and things were decidely rougher in his high school experience.
The phone rang in my room, a friend picked it up, and tracked me down as I was literally walking down the steps for some event in my “great” life. I asked him to tell Scotty I would call him in the morning. When morning came my father called. Scotty had shot himself.
My “angry young man” period began that day. Angry at Scotty for being so selfish. I offered him a place to crash if he ever wanted to just run away? Why so short sighted? Didn’t he understand what this would do to everybody else? Maybe he did.
Anger at myself. What was so important that I couldn’t take just a moment for him? I don’t even remember where I went that night, but anything could have waited 20 minutes. Instead of 20 minutes that night, anger and “what if” drove my life in a different direction.
Off the law school track, I went for bartending, sailing, kayaking, writing, re-kindled my tech curiosity and began dabbling in startups. That dark period didn’t really close until I married my wife. She literally made me want to get better and be better. I’d trade so many things to take Scotty’s call but that period also burned into me how much we impact others and any hurt can eventually pass.
When you’re young the world tells you anything is possible. In the gangly adolescent stage, everyone has dark moments of doubt where you wonder “how am I going to get through?” In startups, it’s the same. You launch, get some press and look like the sexy new thing. Then you spend several years, slogging it out, building, eating ramen, chasing customers with a bad website because you’re too busy chasing investor. Chasing investors with a bad deck because you’re too busy chasing customers. All the while hoping you survive long enough. If you push past the dozens of “I quit” moments, you might.
“You’re going to be lonely. When everything is down, you’re the one expected to pick it up. No one will really understand how hard & lonely this is except another founder-CEO.” Marc Postlewaite
That’s the most prescient advice I ever received on startups.
On one hand, Carvoyant’s in our best spot ever. Our market is emerging just as we’re bringing our platform-as-a-service to scale. New sign ups are coming in everyday and there are enough developers on board that engagement with pools of already connected cars are tipping over. We have customers shipping products built on our platform and raising venture capital of their own. Our investment round is over half committed and we have lots of activity in the next few weeks to hopefully push that over the edge.
Every car I see driving down the road I know we can help. That driver can tap their data to save hundreds of dollars a year with some mix of the connecting partners, developers & marketers Carvoyant works with. We knew we couldn’t build the best connected car app for everyone, but we could help everyone get access to the best apps, services and offers.
Our team built a business on a crazy low burn rate, created jobs and other companies are using our platform to build and create jobs of their own. One of our engineers told me yesterday how cool it was that other companies are building on us and relying on our platform. Our role as an enterprise platform is becoming tangible and it feels like Carvoyant’s emerging from startup adolescence.
On the other hand, we’ve been bootstrapping, walking a tight rope for so long that crazy feels normal. The patience of our spouses has been tried, repeatedly and we’ve had our share of tense co-founder moments at the office. Cash is too tight to take anything casually, making every meeting or activity a deliberate consideration. At moment’s like these, when nobody’s coddling your adolescent company anymore, when the press covers the new company that won’t ship for a year, with family, friends, co-founders, employees, customers, and investors relying on you, things can be as dark for a CEO-founder as they were for Scotty.
As adults it’s hard to reframe our experiences as “adolescent.” But for startups, it fits and adolescence passes. And, there people that can help with both the success and pain. AngelList alone has thousands of adolescent companies. Along with higher profile founder suicides, like Jody Sherman, there are countless founders in those dark places, every day, founders like Susie Steiner.
If they reach out, take the call, reach back. If you’re a founder in rough patch, talk it out. Should suicide ever come into consideration, call friends and call National Suicide Prevention Lifeline if you don’t know where to turn. The 800 number is 1–800–273-TALK (8255). I regret not having a chance to talk with Scotty or Susie. Hopefully, a more frank acknowledgement of the rough side of startups means fewer people will have similar regrets.
OK, back to the chase. I’ve got a company to build and product to ship.
