The Dark Side of Founder DNA

In May we were invited to hold a keynote at a foodtech startup conference, FoodHack Summit. They asked us if we could cover a topic that’s important to founders and operators, but that doesn’t get the attention it deserves on typical startup conferences.

As two former entrepreneurs, we immediately realized that we need to bring up mental health — both among people in general, and entrepreneurs in particular. By anecdotal evidence, we already knew that it was a big problem not really being talked about, but while studying the topic we realized that far more entrepreneurs are affected than we anticipated.

A lot of people have reached out after the talk and we realize that we should share our actionable learnings not just with the people at the summit, but also to everyone else involved in the startup ecosystem.

TL;DR

• A quarter of all people globally will experience mental health issues at some point in their lives.
• Founders are running a much higher risk of suffering from conditions such as depression, substance abuse and bipolar disorder (but not anxiety!).
• Entrepreneurs and their startups would benefit from breaking the stigma around mental health and we all have to contribute to make it happen.
• Read our five commitments and think about what you can do.
• Share, and contribute to, our list of recommended founder coaches.

The invisible pain

When I was building my previous startup, as soon as someone asked “how are you doing?” I quickly replied “we’re doing great” before taking a brief pause to think about how to motivate it this time. “Yeah, we’re crushing it. Growing like crazy, launching in new markets, hiring top talent.”

If someone then would have stopped me said “no, sorry, I mean: seriously, how are you, Erik, doing?” I probably would have burst into tears, crying that one colleague had become an alcoholic, one was depressed, one was having panic attacks and I hadn’t seen my family for months.

But no one asked, so on the outside, we kept the shiny look while “crushing it”.

If you ask founders in your network, everyone is crushing it. Everyone is killing it. Everyone is putting on their shiny shoes.

But on the inside, they all have blisters, twisted toes and missing nails.

As a founder, you’re supposed to be a true visionary, a brave risk taker, a relentless executor, a charismatic leader, and you’re supposed to be a crazy genius. There are extremely few, if any, individuals who have all these qualities. Trying to fit all founders’ feet into a one-size-fits-all shoe simply won’t work.

Why are founders putting on their shiny shoes? Because they have to. They have to always be pitching, always be selling and always be recruiting.

Founders simply cannot afford to show weakness.

Hence, we can’t blame founders for putting on their painful ballet shoes. The music is already playing. The audience is expecting them to dance. If you don’t enter the stage and perform, you can just as well quit.

My old startup grew to about a hundred people in four countries before our exit. At that point, mental health was of course an unavoidable topic. Not to say that I think we had more issues than other startups, but any team with 20+ people are very likely to have to deal with mental health problems (as you will soon learn more about).

As an investor, I’ve had the privilege to work with perhaps a hundred talented founders from diverse backgrounds. All of them are truly unique in their own ways, but they also have many things in common: They’re visionary, they’re ambitious, they’re working hard, but they’re also humans. Humans who try to meet the expectations of the people around them, which is sometimes causing more harm than good.

Breaking the stigma

I’ve learnt over the years that mental health is not only the problem of the individual, but everyone around them is affected too, including the company they’re working on (no matter if they’re founders or employees). I’ve also learnt that the stigma around this topic is very much real and is in many cases preventing people from recovering.

In order to try to help fight the stigma and support individuals who try to break loose from their sufferings, we at Trellis Road have decided to start talking much more openly about mental health by bringing it up at conferences, writing about it and commit to support our founders in different ways (more about that later).

Mental health issues are common…

Let’s just first set the stage a bit. According to WHO:

• A quarter of all people in the world will be affected by mental health issues at some point in their lives.
• One in 20 adults globally suffers from depression.
• >700k families lose a family member to suicide every year.

But what are the ties to startups and founders? Well, it turns out that those numbers are even more depressing if you only look at entrepreneurs.

…especially among entrepreneurs

A few years ago, a professor of psychiatry, Michael A. Freeman, published the largest study to date relating to entrepreneurs’ mental health, titled “Are entrepreneurs touched with fire?”. Out of the hundreds of entrepreneurs that participated in the study, half of them were themselves having mental health conditions, and another 25% had family members with similar conditions. Only 25% were unaffected.

Now you may be thinking: no surprise founders are struggling with mental health, building a startup means a lot of pressure. No wonder one gets anxious from time to time.

It turns out though, that the number of people struggling with anxiety was actually NOT higher among the entrepreneurs than the control group. Here’s the interesting stuff:

• Entrepreneurs were 2x as likely to suffer from depression.
• Entrepreneurs were 3x as likely to suffer from substance abuse.
• Entrepreneurs were 6x as likely to suffer from ADHD.
• And — the most extreme: they were 11x as likely to suffer from bipolar disorder.

That is serious shit.

Another interesting finding is that even entrepreneurs who are themselves asymptomatic often come from families with lifetime mental health conditions:

• Half of the entrepreneurs come from a family with mental health issues, which is twice as common as for the control group.
• It’s eight times as common for entrepreneurs to come from highly symptomatic families (with three or more different conditions).
• And the saddest realization of them all: Entrepreneurs, as well as their family members, are almost three times as likely to be suicidal than others.

What can we do?

What does this tell us about the mental health of founders?

We know that founders are more depressed, they use more drugs, they’re more likely to be bipolar and suicidal. They rarely come from families without any mental health conditions.

We can’t say for sure if there is a causality or simply a correlation. However, because of the link between symptomatic families and their kids becoming entrepreneurs, it seems like there may be a causal effect where certain genetic or environmental factors related to mental health increase the chance of some people starting companies.

This is of course neither a good nor a bad thing in itself. It just is. But we all have a responsibility to avoid pushing vulnerable founders closer to the edge. Because that’s where it gets dangerous.

Our five commitments

Having established that all founders to some extent are struggling with the pressures related to building a startup, it seems clear that we would all benefit from a more open culture when it comes to these things. Obviously no one is benefitting from the charade of pretending that being a founder doesn’t come with these challenges. As investors, we also need to realize that this is something that ultimately affects the outcome of our investments as well.

It’s always easy to argue what others should do, but it’s typically harder to ask oneself: what can I do to change the situation for the better?

Me and my co-founder Anna sat down to have that conversation and landed in five concrete actions that we are hereby committing to going forward, and we’re encouraging you to think about what you can do.

Our five commitments:

1. Distinguish between founders and their startups

We will become better at separating “how are you doing” vs “how is your startup doing” and we need to understand that thriving startups doesn’t necessarily equal thriving founders, and vice versa.

When I was building my own startup I was lucky enough that we were doing great as a company, so I could use that as a proxy for the team’s success and could avoid talking about, or even acknowledging, that we had mental health issues in the team. In hindsight, that was of course a mistake.

2. Not contribute to the hustle porn culture

Alexis Ohanian is the husband of Serena Williams. He introduced the term hustle porn a few years ago when he spoke about the dangers of glorifying founder suffering. He knows what he’s talking about because he’s not just Serena Williams’ husband, he’s also one of the co-founders of Reddit and suffered depression while building Reddit.

I think all of us in the startup ecosystem are definitely guilty of some of this when we interact with founders. It’s easy to joke about founder pains, but going forward we will be more mindful of how we talk about these topics with founders.

3. Encourage founder wellbeing

I’m not saying that founders shouldn’t work hard, because they have to. But sleeping, eating, exercising, being social and taking a break every now and then will not only benefit the founders’ mental wellbeing, it will also serve the company they’re building.

4. Enable founders to create safe founder spaces

We understand that despite our good intentions, we as investors might not be able to provide that safe space that founders should have access to. In our experience, it’s very helpful for founders to have those contact points with other founders and we will continue to help our founders connect with each other to create these safe spaces.

5. Help founders get professional support

Founders who are suffering need professional help with their struggles, and pretending otherwise is irresponsible.

In the same way that we wouldn’t encourage someone with cancer to cure themselves by eating ginger and drinking green tea, we shouldn’t tell founders struggling with depression to take a walk and eat more vegetables. They should have access to professional help.

If you don’t have serious mental health issues, but instead want to get in touch with a mentor to support you as an entrepreneur, please take a look at our public list of coaches in this spreadsheet. It’s a first step where we have started collecting recommendations for coaches who regularly support founders. It’s a very early draft and work in progress, but please use it and add your own recommenced coaches to the list.

Don’t stop talking

We’re definitely no experts on mental health but we’ve seen it too many times firsthand to know that it’s important to give the topic more attention and break the stigma. In order to do that, more and more people need to bring it up, to normalize the topic.

Please reach out to me or my Trellis Road co-founder Anna if you have any ideas on how to take this conversation further, or simply just start talking and writing about it yourself, to help spread awareness and break the stigma.