Let’s talk about finding balance as a founder

“Good week or bad week?”

I was sitting in the little office of an Australian startup. The founders were a pair of awesome brothers who were running me through what Horowitz would call The Struggle.

I was moved by the idea that these two friendly Aussies would preface so much authenticity to something a simple as how they talk to other startups. Even that invitation to be anything other than “crushing it” is rare in our industry.

But why? The emotional rollercoaster of being a founder is common to the point of predictability — so why aren’t we intercepting these emotional downturns and better educating the community in the process?

Talking about founder struggles encourages better conversations

This particular post is inspired by a conversation I’ve just seen in my network on Facebook. And investor and a founder are talking about mental health issues, and so many of our community are contributing positively.

I started to write a reply and realised this would be better to do so publicly. Precisely because that’s often so hard to do. What founder would want to share potential weakness with investors or their team or their competitors?

Except competitors don’t matter, teams love authentic and human leaders, and investors are actually human too. A leader that can show willingness to grow in their own resilience and empathy is a surely a better bet to navigate a company and grow a team over a mid to long term timeline.

And because if anything:

1. I want founders to know that they’re not alone in how they feel.
2. I want to build the kind of company that allows the entire team to be as well-rounded humans as possible.
3. I want to contribute to the positive momentum of this conversation.

We’re probably on a similar journey

My own founder journey is barely into the second year. I spun Corilla out of a global software company with the founder as an investor, left sunny Australia to attend an accelerator in Europe, and had an adventure across ten countries in the last year alone. If you’re following an Instagram feed from afar it’s probably been quite a ride.

But that’s never the reality. The last year has been one of the hardest years in terms of frequency and depth of challenges. And yet somehow the most rewarding in terms of growth.

What’s been interesting to me as I’ve worked on my own balance is how common the core feelings are despite the differing personal manifestations that trigger them. The isolation of the role and moving abroad have been my personal challenge. For others it’s the fear of failure or excessive pressure to perform. We may have different triggers but we also have similar ways of experiencing them.

Our cultural signals can allow us to move quicker to the core emotions

Underneath these examples we’re all feeling similar core emotions. And we wrap them in what is still a narrow set of “startup” cultural signals.

What we can learn from our own personal relationships is that we can get caught up on responding to these projected narratives.

Interpreting what someone simply says is a minefield of triggers, misunderstanding and sheer perception error. We need to start from the core emotion and remember that we’ve felt the same thing too. Common ground for empathy rather than interpretation.

In a weird way, the advantage we have as a startup community is knowing that these common experiences will be encountered. And knowing what they actually feel like.

So why aren’t we better preparing ourselves and each other for it?

Three actionable ideas to improve founder balance

1. Encourage founders to talk about their coping mechanisms and support each other in small or private networks. While the sharing occurs in little circles, the experience of feeling safe to talk about these issues scales across the community.

I’m grateful to be a part of a little Messenger group of a handful of founders. We have that deep level of trust of “foxhole buddies”, along with the associated short-hand humour and ability to switch to Real Talk when required.

I’m not sure how to accelerate the creation of these little circles. But they are catalysed by deep shared experiences and a certain willingness to be exposed and vulnerable. Nobody is really “crushing it”, bro.

2. Encourage accelerators and incubator programs to discuss founder health, and train their staff where to point founders to resources. Even better if they have counsellors in their mentor network. Best in class if they work this content into the curriculum.

We joined a great accelerator in France . When we first arrived and settled in, it was all an adventure. Visas and house hunting and cultural familiarity and even the chance to adjust our business model rapidly were exciting.

Until the real work of drinking from the startup firehose began. Now those fun adventures were joined by a growing list of things that needed to be done yesterday. And hey did you just say “pivot”?

As a foreign team in an evolving program, it wasn’t as much that the program lacked the empathy or awareness of founder psychology — we just didn’t know what kind of assistance could be available or even how to ask for help.

After all… how do we ask for help in an industry where everyone is always “crushing it”?

3. Encourage the community to tone down the culture of comparisons and the mythology of “crushing it”. The bravado doesn’t help anyone. We make long-range change by taking even tiny steps together.

Everything improves with authenticity.

The job of the community is the community

Where we go from here is really up to us. Being the change we want to see is hard. Nobody likes to see where they are in need of improvement, and the homework to get that done is pretty confronting.

But we’re lucky that there are definitely resources around for those ready to take this journey (I’m considering doing one of Reboot’s bootcamps later this year myself).

There’s a lot we can do and do right now. Not just as a way to normalise the challenges of the #startuplife, but as humans in general.

And in the grand scheme of whatever project we’re working on now, that seems like a pretty awesome update to ship.