7 Sources of Suffering in a Startup
And what you can do about them
Hustle, but don’t suffer
As someone who teaches about entrepreneurship and advocates for it as a career path, I have to admit that I find it to be a path of tremendous suffering for a lot of people. The reality is, beneath all the exciting milestones, and hyped-up press releases, entrepreneurship by its nature creates the perfect conditions for loneliness, stress, burnout, and depression.
Time and time again, I encounter ‘successful’ entrepreneurs — ones that have raised millions, ones that have found product-market fit, ones that are nearing a big exit — who are utterly miserable.
Doing a startup will always entail some degree of “hustle” and overcoming big challenges, but it doesn’t need to entail suffering. In this post, I outline different sources of suffering in a startup, and actions to treat or avoid them.
Sources of suffering
1: Equating yourself with your startup
You pour your heart into your startup. You work crazy hours. You represent yourself boldly to the world as the Founder or CXO of Startup Z.
While this “all in” attitude is often needed to push the startup off the ground, the unwanted side-effect is that your sense of identity starts to become dependent on your startup. With the daily highs and lows of your startup (and the likely chance that the lows outnumber the highs), your sense of identity is constantly bruised or broken. Left unchecked, this can lead to the feeling of being “trapped” in your startup.
Things you can do:
- Remember, you are not your startup. Startups are a dime-a-dozen. You are not.
- Bake in scheduled times to meet with friends, family, and your supportive professional network. Among the many benefits that this offers, it helps ground your sense of identity in the different groups that you are part of, making it more resilient in the long run.
- Make sure you’re scheduling other non-startup activities that contribute to your sense of identity (sports, a hobbies, taking a class, etc.)
2: Wearing too many hats you don’t like
As a founder or an early employee, you need take on a lot of different roles (the CEO, the shipping department, the sales team, the janitor). As your company grows, your roles and responsibilities grow too, often in the opposite direction of what you like doing.
You founded your company because you were passionate about the problem, or passionate about the product. You may not be so passionate about managing people, doing accounting, or solving the operations headaches that come on a daily basis.
This eventually takes its toll.
Things you can do:
- Ensure that you’re allocating at least 20% of your time doing the stuff you actually like. A recent study showed that just 20% is sufficient to feel fulfilled and avoid burnout.
- As early as possible in your venture process, write down what you enjoy doing, what your strengths are, and what strengths you want to develop. Discuss this with your co-founders. Then make a plan to hire out the other jobs as needed as your cash flow allows. You’re chances of success will be higher if you play to your teams’ strengths and interests rather than by continually relying on people to do what they don’t like doing.
3: Simply working too many hours
The funny thing about entrepreneurship is that there is always an infinite amount of work to be done, and there always will be. Trying to push through it by working more hours is not sustainable and will lead to burnout. Guaranteed.
All-nighters and short-term crunches have their place in startup life, but they shouldn’t be the norm. Entrepreneurship is a marathon. Your success depends on your long-term resilience more than meeting short-term targets.
Things you can do:
- See your ever-increasing workload as an opportunity for you to learn the art of delegation and ruthless priority management. The earlier you master these things, the better off your startup will be.
- Use the power of the calendar. Schedule times in your calendar to do non-work things like spending time with friends and family and doing hobbies. These benefit your sense of identity too, as mentioned above.
- Recognize that working beyond 50 hours/week probably isn’t actually helping you accomplish more (as explored in the study linked here).
4: Feeling Lost in the Process
The three most common questions I hear from entrepreneurs at Stanford and in accelerators in the Bay Area are: “Which experiments should we run right now? Is our user feedback positive ‘enough’? Are we actually making progress in creating a viable venture?
Sure, you’re operating with high uncertainty, but you don’t need to feel lost.
Things you can do:
5: Poor Team Dynamics
This is a startup killer. And if it doesn’t kill your startup, it can be a huge source of suffering within your startup at the very least. Working so intensely with your co-founders and colleagues and constantly needing to make decisions based on little data will undoubtedly instigate team dynamic issues.
Argument and debate is healthy and useful in a startup, but it must be done in a way that doesn’t compromise the underlying respect among your teammates.
Things you can do:
- Schedule team hygiene activities, such as an “I like, I wish, I wonder” activity that you find plenty of online. Put it in your team calendar for once per month or once per quarter. It’s important to have them scheduled, even if your team dynamic is great, because if you wait until the team dynamic has soured and trust has been damaged, it’s too late.
6: Comparing Yourself to Others
Your buddy from high school just posted on LinkedIn that his startup raised a $15M Series A. Your competition just announced a huge partnership. Your friend keeps moving up the ranks at big tech company Z, while your startup seems to be chugging along.
Comparison is a huge source of suffering in life in general, but this is especially pronounced in the context of entrepreneurship where success is hard-fought, is never linear or predictable, and is also hard to measure.
Things you can do:
- Realize that others are struggling too in their own ways, that luck is a huge factor in a startup’s success, that another person’s success does not equate to your failure, and that there are aspects of your startup life that others envy too. When you look at the whole picture of another person’s success story, it usually comes with its own drawbacks that are hidden from view.
7) Things are Just Not Going Well (i.e. Mistakes and Bad Luck)
Working hard, making smart decisions, and applying good processes are necessary for your startup succeed. You know what else is necessary?
A ridiculous amount of luck.
Markets change, competitors emerge, people make mistakes, relationships sour, manufacturing errors happen, shipping fiascos happen, bugs happen, apparently pandemics happen!?!?…
Shit happens…all the time.
Things you can do:
- Invest time and money in team resilience (I’ll write more about this in a future post).
- Recognize there are things that your startup can’t control. All you can do is design the best response by staying resilient as team and focusing on your ability to adapt.
- Make sure your tracking the right metrics. In an early-stage startup, your primary metrics should be centered around key learnings you want to obtain through experimentation.
- Be open with your team about mistakes you make, things that are not known, assumptions that have not been tested. Setting the example for an open and honest team culture will pay dividends now and in the long-term.
The Silver Lining
You may have noticed that the solutions to most of these sources of suffering are centered around planning and scheduling — the things that are hardest to do in a startup context, I know.
Make no mistake; entrepreneurship requires some “struggle”. But implementing the exercises and processes outlined here will help ensure that the struggle doesn’t result in suffering. Instead, that struggle can present rare opportunities for self-discovery, for finding a sense of purpose, for being your best self, and for developing life-long friendships with your co-founders and colleagues — rare opportunities that make entrepreneurship the best career path a person can take.
About the Author: Keegan Cooke serves as Associate Director for the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (CES) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB). The thoughts expressed here are his own and not the GSB’s. Prior to the GSB, Keegan has served as a founder coach and innovation consultant, founded a STEM education startup, Magical Microbes (acquired) and served as Principal Research Scientist for a cleantech startup, Trophos Energy (acquired).
