How I Manage My Founder Hindbrain

N.B. No worries RevBoss team, customers, and investors — nothing triggered this post, just been thinking about it. :)

The ups/downs of starting a high-growth company are very real, sometimes very scary (both the ups and downs), and very frequent, as in touching the sky and then assuming the fetal position under my desk in the same 15-minute span.

If you’re being very honest with yourself, when a down happens really hard, it is awfully easy to spiral into this thing is never going to work, I’m completely unqualified to do this, all of my customers are going to churn, all of my employees are going to quit, I should just try to get a job at Company XYZ.

The crazy spiral doesn’t happen every time…but it definitely happens sometimes.

While I suppose the aforementioned doomsday scenario is possible, it is awfully unlikely and isn’t a rational response to a problem. It is just fear triggering the 1000s-of-years-old self preservation response buried deep inside your homo sapien hindbrain, the primitive part of the brain that switches on the fight-or-flight reflex when confronted with fear.

Start-ups are very, very hard and the odds are very, very long. So the fight-or-flight response is usually flight.

Here’s how I deal with it:

Recognize and get comfortable with the downs. They’re going to happen a lot and many times they’re unavoidable. So I’ve tried to teach myself to never get too high or too low…and to recognize when my reptile brain is going off the rails.

Work the problem. Something triggers the fear, which triggers the crazy. Instead of worrying about the crazy, I try to uncover what actually triggered the fear. This is often easier said than done.

Look at the numbers. Looking at our financial plan helps me separate truth from fiction. Understanding the past and digging into the assumptions that model the future give me a sense of control and helps me simplify the crazy into unit economics. Granted — numbers can very easily lie and thus this approach can be a slippery slope, but it helps me kick the rational brain back into action.

Talk to a customer or colleague. I make decisions by getting perspective from various stakeholders and then making a call. I sometimes do the same thing when a problem has me reeling. Feedback from customers and/or employees often helps ground problems into reality.

Walk away. When all else fails, something that completely changes my frame of mind — a non-work conversation with my wife, cuddle time with my kids, ripping some jams with my weekend rock band, a few beers in the back porch hammock, etc. — usually does the trick.

All founders have hindbrain freakouts — they’re instinctive and natural human reactions to start-up problems. I have far fewer these days because I’ve gotten better at recognizing and managing them.