Your VC wants you to get good sleep

Dear startup community, we need to talk.

Famous words you will often hear from a founder:

‘This is so exciting, one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my life!’

‘We have a big launch coming up, can’t wait to show you!’

‘I work 16-hour days, but it’s fine, in fact it’s great because I do what I love!’

Some not so famous ones:

‘I am so frustrated I never want to look at this product again.’

‘I’m exhausted, I should go on holiday.’

‘I don’t want to spend every minute of my life thinking about the business.’

Some things they only tell you when they’re drunk or so tired, they’re having an exhaustion black out:

‘I must be doing something wrong, everyone else has already done X, I’m the only one who’s failing.’

Do we all see the problem here?

We live in a society that only ever talks about its successes, praises waking up at 4 am and glorifies the mythical creature of the ‘average CEO who reads more than 60 books per year’. This mindset coupled with the enormous pressure that founders are facing to deliver on the exceptionally high expectations we all have of them is a self-fuelled recipe for disaster.

With all our talk about support and mentorship, I feel we, the investors, are failing at the basics. So I want to address that and say to you, dear founder, the following:

Please take good care of yourself!

We know you have a great responsibility towards your shareholders, your employees and your clients, all the people that put their trust and their money behind you, and we know you want to honour that. I mean if we thought you didn’t, we wouldn’t have invested, right?

To be very clear — entrepreneurship is not your average 9–5 job, where you leave the office and forget all about work until the next time you’re in. It never will be and we, your investors, employees, clients will never stop holding you to the very high standards we know you are capable of delivering.

That said, it also your responsibility to manage your personal well-being. So you can actually build your business and also, so you can be happy about it. Remember why you started all this and the vision we all bought into? Nowhere in there did we have a burned-out founder on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

I know you think venture capitalists care more about the money than they care about you, and you’re right in assuming so, they never said otherwise. So here it is, again — we want you to be healthy and happy as well as deliver our returns. In fact, we don’t believe it’s possible to do one without the other.

Take a break. Look at things from a different perspective. Or have some time to not look at things at all. Successful CEOs say it pays off.

There will continue to be a stigma on talking about your less than glorious moments. Most of our conversations will still be about your performance, but we want you to know that success doesn’t come at the expense of your health — because that wouldn’t be success at all.