Why running a start-up is mental torture with a time clock
They say it’s lonely at the top but what they don’t say is that most people who get to the top have had years of experience before getting there. When I worked as a COO of a Fintech what I observed and found to be by far one of the most difficult issues for the exec team was the pressure and stress that it put on relatively young shoulders, usually people in their mid-30s. Before you judge and call me a snowflake, let me come clean and say that I am not in my 30s nor was this my first job. In fact, I came from years of work and started my career in investment banking and have had an enormous amount of experience at what most people would call stressful work conditions from junior to VP roles in banking.
But the reality of the start-up world is much less glamorous than that publicised. It is a world still dominated by men, similar to the financial world where I came from (both testosterone-led industries), where admitting to stress is frowned upon. It is also a place where most tech founders know that their chances of turning their venture into a unicorn are still infinitesimally small, where the exec team have little experience managing people, while trying to grow a customer base at exponential speed and where your investors (board) can be a little bit like petulant children. The difficulty of managing your business would be enough to stress anyone normally but, in addition to this, in the early stages of your fundraising (seed, series A to D at least), you are constantly fending off your board’s questions, requests and sometimes incoherent demands.
Most exec teams, CEO and founders, don’t have a clue of how to do the job really and that is where the stress and anxiety start to rise to titanic levels as the responsibilities and the stakes increase. The CEOs and execs I worked with had to appear in control when you could see that they weren’t. They had never risen through the echelons and been trained for this. This cognitive dissonance was very detrimental to their health — as they went to work every day taking multiple decisions on the fly hoping that they would be the correct ones. In addition, while you can share some worries with your exec team, it is still very lonely, particularly for the founders. Most founders get into tech start-ups because they have a good idea to start with and are on the whole very smart. These qualities, however, do not make a leader or CEO.
As an executive coach and former start-up exec, I know that the facade of the perfect team and company is not really the reality and that a lot of pressure is put on relatively young shoulders. These founders and CTOs, COOs, CMOs, CFOs, etc need someone who has no vested interest to relieve the pressure and coach them. Managing your own inner voice is a big part of this and as coaching is about listening attentively and developing self-awareness, it is the perfect tool to help these talented individuals develop their management skills, team collaboration and emotional intelligence.
The CEO in the Fintech in which I worked had heart palpitation, chest pains and suffered from anxiety and sleepless nights. It is not uncommon to hear of founders having panic attacks and depression. When you think about it, is it that surprising. A start-up is a perfect environment for mental torture. Investors have invested relatively large sums of money into your tech product. Putting their faith in you. In exchange, you have signed this Faustian pact that you will against all odds (99% of start-ups go belly up), make your business succeed and fend off the competition. In the meantime, you will also run out of cash on a regular basis, so you will be constantly fundraising for the next cash injection and appeasing your board, by telling them that all is well on the home front, when you know very well that it is chaos central, inside your head, and at the company.
The appeal of creating the next Deliveroo, Farfetch, Revolut, Funding Circle or TransferWise has meant that the UK is the “unicorn factory” of Europe. With this, we must also recognise that leadership development and executive coaching are a core tenet of ensuring that these start-ups succeed because a good idea is only as good as its execution and if you do not back it with all the help you can give it then — you are not fully committed.
When I worked in start-ups, all our funding was spent on our business and there was no money left for helping executive become better leaders. But, training and helping your exec team and accepting that they are not perfect (just like you) should not only be a necessity but seen as an essential expenditure. I have read in a few articles that being stressed at work in a start-up and admitting to this is a weakness. What a load of rubbish.
It is proven that long term stress can have detrimental effects on your health but also on your behaviour making some people withdrawn, indecisive or inflexible. I bet many founders have a problem sleeping at night. Your mind is racing, constantly thinking of your business and the millions of things and issues you must deal with. Is it a surprise that many become irritable at work and fly off the handle? Others resort to smoking, drinking or taking drugs. That must be good for decision making. I know how I react when I’m stressed. I get more aggressive and that’s not pretty. I get annoyed with people too fast. I shut off my support network (family and friends) because I am working around the clock. I stop exercising because there is just no time. Did I not tell you already that I had no time! Are you not listening? There is so much to do, so little time, and we have releases out all the time. The site was down for an hour yesterday and that can’t happen again, blablabla.
Running a start-up is mental torture with a time clock. Your exec team is being tested every day, all day and the best thing you can do as an investor is to invest in your assets and that is the people you have bought into. Not only the tech and the IP. If investors started to invest by developing the people, they might find that their ROI would actually improve. Because, as with large companies, start-ups also need soft skills to succeed and a healthy exec team and founders/CEO will make for a healthier start-up and a more likely unicorn.
Call me foolish.
