Founders as Soldiers

I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my life. Not always successfully mind you, but I’ve always been trying.

There was the Don Lapre National Reminder Kits at the flea market business, the selling Cutco knives business, the network marketing (I’ve since renounced MLM) business, a mini real-estate empire, and a variety of other pursuits that led me to where I am now, as a startup founder that builds software for a living.

Having lived most of my adult life in the ranks of the permanently unemployable, I know a thing or two about what it takes to keep going when things get tough.

We’ve heard a lot of advice from startup founders that have made it. They say that we should talk to someone when we’re feeling depressed, that suicide isn’t worth it, etc. And while they are right, these are the opinions of people who made it through the other side. They have found solace, and it’s easy for them to offer such advice. But what about those of us that haven’t, or worse, that never will?

This is where founder depression starts. This lack of solace that we expect to arrive at any moment.

In our minds, we’ve already painted the perfect future wherein our entrepreneurial efforts are successful, and we’re sitting on piles of money, riding around the world in private jets or on a crusade to change the world. Money, impact, power, and most important of all, confirmation. Confirmation that we are right about the world, that our efforts were not in vain, and that we earned our perfect future.

But what happens when this doesn’t happen? What happens when things go wrong?

Years have been spent, the venture has either died or is near death, and the founder is now forced to confront an alternate reality that is so far from what he believed to be true, that the sheer weight of it all shocks his/her mental state into one where they cannot reconcile reality.

Picture Neo waking up in the real world, the implications of his new life as they weigh on his past, present,and future, spinning around until he can’t take it anymore and collapses under the weight of it all.

Founders visit pieces of this story every single day. It’s the startup life, and we paint ourselves as Soldiers and samurai because we willingly embrace this gruesome reality. But when it ends, and we, not our foes, are forced to confront the full reality that is startup death, we are so surprised that we simply cannot cope.

It is our resiliency that gives us the strength to build powerful worlds, and it is this same resiliency that betrays us in the end, when we can’t see death coming.

So it is not unexpected that so many of our fellow founders are finding difficulty coping with this new reality, and unfortunately, choosing to take their own life.

Oddly enough, this is the very same struggle that my former employer, the United States Armed Forces, is dealing with in spades. Having been deployed as a Soldier in a combat zone, and as an entrepreneur in startup combat, I would argue that the similarities are not trivial at all.

The parallels of military related PTSD and startup failure PTSD are striking. In either case, the world you’re living in is not the same as you left it.

Soldiers put everything on the line - friends, family, civilian life, and career.

Founders put everything on the line - friends, family, career, social life, etc.

Sound familiar?

I know there will be people who claim that startup life doesn’t have to be this way, and they are right. For some, it doesn’t have to be, but not for all.

In any case, the damage is done, let’s talk about how to cope with what happens after you’ve returned to find your friends ambivalent, family gone, and financial state in disrepair.

What do you do next, raise more money?

Hardly.

You don’t want to raise more money because you don’t care. The wind is knocked out of your sails, and you can’t take time off because even if you had the money to support yourself, there isn’t any time to take. You’ve already taken it.

It took me 7 years to recover from the first time that this happened to me. I shudder to think what would happen the 2nd.

Yes, many of us do continue and fight on. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. More often than not, it doesn’t.

And yet we founders talk a lot about changing the world. We talk about income equality, improving the lives of others, and making the world a better place.

If that is truly the case, then why is our support system so broken?

In the US Soldier’s Creed it states:

“I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.”

It’s easy to glorify success when we so willingly ignore that final statement. Perhaps we’re not really Soldiers after all.