
Post YC Depression - takinola
https://www.bmaho.com/articles/post-yc-depression
======
drenginian
People seem to become really attached to the validation from YC.

Getting into an incubator or getting money from investors is zero measure of
business success. Business success is users and growth and revenue.

Whether YC blesses you is also zero reflection on you as a person. Rejection
by YC means nothing at all.

I think business is about trying to make money, it’s not about YC and funding
and the scene and investment rounds and hyper growth and beers after work and
been seen as one of the cool kids.

Head down, work, balanced lifestyle, try to make something small succeed on
your own.

~~~
throwaway_tech
>Getting into an incubator or getting money from investors is zero measure of
business success.

That is sort of like saying money doesn't buy happiness...true, but financial
stress or poverty typically can be outright bars to happiness. As you say YC
admission or raising funds from investors isn't a measure of business
success...but then again I haven't seen a tech unicorn that hasn't been funded
by investors.

>Head down, work, balanced lifestyle, try to make something small succeed on
your own.

That is a great message to tell to the 99% that get rejected from YC and will
never touch VC funding...but even that sounds more like a pipe dream than the
American dream now a days.

~~~
JangoSteve
> As you say YC admission or raising funds from investors isn't a measure of
> business success...but then again I haven't seen a tech unicorn that hasn't
> been funded by investors.

There is a difference between a company getting investor funding and the
investor funding being a significant measure of success.

There are plenty of unicorns that didn't raise money until well after they
were already considered a success. A couple examples off the top of my head
would be:

* Github - first round was a $100mil series A at a $650mil valuation about 5 years after founding.

* Atlassian - first round was a $60mil round 8 years after founding.

I'm sure there are plenty more that are easier to find once you know what
you're looking for.

------
quelsolaar
You have to work on something you are passionate about. If you work on Sundays
because you cant keep yourself away from it, then great. If you work Sundays
because you think if you work hard enough you will become rich and successful,
then you are likely going to burn yourself out. Your life is NOW, be happy
now. Don't push it off. If coding all day makes you happy do so. but if you
rather hang out at the beach do so. There is nothing wrong with that.

I see a lot of startups made up of people who bought in to the startup myth
and all they want to do is be successful. They dont care the least about the
problem they are trying to solve, or like to do the work needed to solve it.
If you would spend day and night on something even if you knew it would never
come to anything, then that's the thing you should do.

A lot of people try to figure out what the pattern for the perfect startup is,
and I think its just what ever you are passionate about. Maybe it will work
out, maybe it wont, but at least you wont have wasted your time.

If you are passionate about caviar, be a sturgeon fisherman, or a chef. dont
start a startup.

~~~
smacktoward
_Fill your bowl to the brim

and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife

and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security

and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people's approval

and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity._

\-- Tao Te Ching, ch. 9, Stephen Mitchell translation
([http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=9&a=Stephen+Mitchell](http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=9&a=Stephen+Mitchell))

~~~
eitland
> Keep sharpening your knife

> and it will blunt.

With real modern knives this doesn't make sense if you know what you are
doing. Either I am missing something or something got lost in translation?

~~~
rckoepke
My guess: Sharpening is the process of removing material, if you sharpen a
knife forever it will grind down to a useless stub. It is possible something
got lost in translation, or possible that the metaphor isn't quite as
satisfying as some of the others used.

------
StevenWaterman
This was a good article, but I want to briefly call out that `6X more likely
to suffer from ADHD` is not a useful stat when trying to argue that being a
founder causes health issues. ADHD is present from birth and cannot develop as
the result of trauma.

It's still an interesting statistic, but for a different reason. People with
ADHD are more likely to _become_ founders, as they're more driven by passion,
challenge, and novelty. Meanwhile, they're less driven by the security and
consistency offered by traditional workplaces.

~~~
ghusbands
> ADHD is present from birth and cannot develop as the result of trauma.

This is a misleading claim, as secondary ADHD can result from traumatic head
injury, and childhood trauma can result in a condition that may differ from
but is behaviourally very similar to ADHD.

~~~
ryanmercer
And sleep deprivation/poor sleep habits, psychotropic use, stimulants, etc can
all cause comparable conditions. I imagine the original quote isn't talking
about a specific, concrete, diagnosis and is leaning more towards the
colloquial use.

I had some meetings at the YC SF office 2 years ago and everyone I saw, and
talked to, had a phone or laptop screen they were staring at while trying to
also talk to you and in some instances pausing at their laptop to do something
on their phone while occasionally looking up to notice you were still there
and talking.

Anecdotally I find that doing the above can start to cause you to not be able
to focus on any one thing with any real level of attention and I'm not a
founder or startup employee that has a ton of real, and imagined,
pressure/worry added to that.

------
DoreenMichele
_In the midst of the business flailing, I loved that I could at least say we
were working constantly. It felt like the only "positive" metric that showed
we were true "entrepreneurs."_

This is the wrong metric to use. It's a metric that's practically guaranteed
to lead to unhealthy patterns.

When I worked at Aflac, a lot of my coworkers were enthralled that they were
there. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened to them and they had
stars in their eyes.

To me, it was just a day job. I was punching a clock for a paycheck.

I had done other things that I felt mattered a whole lot more, were far harder
and made more of a difference in the world. My psychological relationship to
the job was different from that of many of my coworkers.

Don't use suffering or hours worked as metrics to measure your worth. It won't
go good places.

Don't get too starry-eyed about getting accepted to YC. It's a first step, not
a last.

I'm glad he wrote this. I hope he gets things sorted out. Best of luck to the
man.

~~~
sbierwagen
Aflac? These people were excited to work at an insurance company?

~~~
DoreenMichele
It's headquartered in Columbus, Georgia. At the time I worked there, it was
the largest civilian employer in town and a Fortune 500 company. It actually
made the Fortune 200 while I was employed there.

It was founded in June 1955 by three brothers. When I was growing up in
Columbus, I can remember it being advertised locally as American Family Life
Insurance/Assurance Company of Columbus.

I'm not sure when they changed the name. It began as American Family Life
Insurance Company. Some other company in some other state had the same name.
Internal stories when I worked there indicated it was settled with a
_gentleman 's coin toss,_ which Aflac lost. So they legally changed the name
in all 50 states to American Family Life Assurance Company.

Had that not happened, you wouldn't have the name Aflac, which is an acronym
for their legal business name, and you would have never had the Aflac duck
commercials.

Anyway, it's a homegrown business started locally and they own the tallest
building in town, known locally as The Tower. It's the only real skyscraper in
all of Columbus that I know of and school kids get taken on tours of it as
school field trips. The Aflac Tower is a local landmark and they do Christmas
lights every year in the windows. Like making a Christmas tree based on which
windows are lit or something like that.

It's a very big deal locally and a lot of the more interesting stuff I know
about the company is stuff I never see articles about. I've looked and can't
find them. I wrote up a few things at one point on a blog, none of which is
online anymore, because the company really is interesting and doesn't seem to
talk about a lot stuff I think is interesting.

It seems to have shrunk since I left, but when I worked there everyone would
ooh and aaah when I was getting a haircut or a meal and making small talk and
people asked me where I worked and I said "Aflac." It's kind of how when
programmers work at a FAANG company.

Although Columbus is one of the bigger cities in Georgia, it's really not that
big. But it has this big company that started there and grew and grew.

The other big thing locally is the Army base, Ft. Benning. It's a much more
sophisticated city than it really should be, given its relatively small size,
because of those two things giving it international connections and
international flavor. Aflac was getting about 75-80% of it's revenue from
Japan when I worked there. The CEO spent about one week a month in Japan and
this is another thing that most of the world seems largely unaware of.

So Aflac is a really big deal locally and one of my teammates spent several
years trying to get good enough to qualify for a job there. They have trouble
filling jobs and have to do a lot of internal development of talent, in part
because it's not a very big city and insurance is complicated stuff that
requires substantial training, even for entry level positions.

------
fab1an
One of the advantages of running your own business is that you set the tempo
and values of it yourself. You. No one else. If you end up with something that
isn't working out for you, you're doing it wrong.

At my previous company, one of our (somewhat implicit) values was "suffering
is not a KPI".

And even though there are times when things are rougher, these should be
exceptions, not the rule.

At the same time, working 100 hours per week is the most bullshit business
myth of all.

This is usually touted by the type of person who spends a lot of time in
meetings or 'catching up on important news', and within industries where
people are flat out lying to each other about how much they actually work
(management consultants come to mind, and certainly some investor types.)

When you meet these people IRL you realize many of their 100 hours are spend
sipping coffee in another part of town while having casual meetings, prior to
running some personal errand. While some of this may qualify as 'work', it is
not the type of 'work-work' that a naive coder/entrepreneur is pursuing en
route to their burn out!

~~~
fastball
I work 85ish hours a week and nearly 100% of it is spent on actual productive
work.

~~~
EinsDueTresFour
I believe the focus of what's being said is that people who claim to work
these insane hours, _and_ manage to keep all other plates in their personal
lives spinning, usually do not spend that much time doing productive work.

That is not to say that there are others who can do many actual productive
hours. But usually, at least in my personal experience, when one does that
they are sacrificing other aspects of their personal life in the hopes that
when they achieve their goals they can then deal with everything else.

In my experience, things don't really work out all that well. Ideally one
should find balance in the now.

~~~
tim333
It kind of depends what the work is and if it's tiring. Take someone like
Warren Buffett - he's reading and thinking pretty much all working hours but
it's what he likes to do and not especially tiring. Seems to work quite well
in that case. The only real downside seems to have been his family complaining
they didn't see enough of him.

------
saadalem
From Patrick Collison : "While long hours can't be a goal, I worry that it's
easy to mislead. As a descriptive matter, creating Stripe required obsessive
intensity. Maybe better founders could have worked "smarter", but I do know
that long hours were needed for _us_ to build something great."

[https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1135886195253284865](https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1135886195253284865)

~~~
aguyfromnb
> _but I do know that long hours were needed for us to build something great._

This is textbook selection bias.

~~~
tim333
"Great" is seldom easy pretty much by definition. Building something ok can
probably be done without the long hours.

------
jwr
Don't let work dominate your life. Work is important, but it should not be a
grind, or you will end up with serious mental health issues.

I have some observations to contribute (context: I am a solo founder of a
bootstrapped business):

* Much of the "news" you read will be stacked against you, because it is in the interest of VCs and employers to see you work your butt off for years, with the mythical carrot of a major payout hanging in front of you. Your mental health is not a consideration.

* You can make good progress working reasonably. In fact, I'd wager that you can often make _better_ progress, because the quality of your work is better than when you are tired.

* Being a solo bootstrapped business founder is not necessarily a panacea, the anxiety and pressure are still there. You have to learn how to deal with them (I'm still learning, but making good progress).

* Consider your goals. Does it really need to be a multi-million payout, or is a healthy income for you and your family enough? Do you really need huge growth, or are you OK with modest growth once you reach a comfortable level? Your goals might not align with those of others, and there is no such thing as "obvious" goals. I believe that a lot of problems in today's world are created by the pressure for constant growth (at all levels, both startups and companies like Apple).

~~~
hef19898
Why is there only one up-vote to give? Being a Solo-founder myself, you are so
right.

My, and as soon as the business can sustain another person our, goal is
helathy growth to a sustainable levelwhere we can oneday employ an handfull of
people so we don't have to do everything our selves. So one of the most
important metrics is cash flow. Success is positive cash flow, profits and
happy customers. If you ask me, that might very well be easier to achieve
without VC money as you can aim lower with a smaler chance of missing.

Agree on the anxiety and pressure part, it is still there. And since your
entire runway depends on yourself maybe even more. But that you don't have a
board nd investors pushing you on a course to hypergrowth.

One of the main reasons I started the company was to _not_ have a boss
anymore. So I won't replace a boss with an external investor if I can help it.

EDIT: Taking guys like Gary and people considering sleeping on factory floors
to be a good idea as role models is a problem. In the first case bacause Gary
is making a living of selling his message and merch online. In the second case
because it indicates grave mistakes happened a long time ago.

------
mettamage
Disclaimer: I know a bit about these things from either personal/friend/family
experiences or through my psychology degree. I'm not a clinical psychologist
though, I simply graduated a psych program one day.

Before I go into the author's claims let's explain in a visceral way how
stress becomes unhealthy. This is how I experience it: stress is normally
fine, just like exercising is fine. Stress is just like lifting heavy things.
If you do it every minute of the day, at one point your body will collapse and
need to heal. So you don't do that.

Well, in some situations the stress _can 't go away_. That is when your mental
health starts taking a toll. Imagine if you have to lift 50kg all the time and
it can't go away, want to stop? No, you have to lift right now. Broken arm?
Lift! You have to! It won't go away. You can imagine that your body would
collapse and burn out.

Don't get stress that you can't summon away, because if that stress becomes
too much, then you have hitched a ride to the gloomy village of depression.
Sometimes you don't have (or don't feel like you have) a choice though, that's
the bitter sweetness called life, unfortunately.

\---

With that said, I think Techcrunch and this author are doing a disservice to
the psychological conditions that were listed. Let me show what I mean:

> 2X more likely to suffer from depression

I get that.

> 6X more likely to suffer from ADHD

That seems like self selection people with ADHD seem to me to be better suited
for a generalist role. It doesn't seem like you get ADHD because you choose to
be a founder.

> 3X more likely to suffer from substance abuse

Stress is a nasty thing.

> 10X more likely to suffer from bi-polar disorder

Seems like self selection the mania states of people with bi-polar can be
super productive (or destructive, depending on the person). But again, it
doesn't seem like you get bipolar because you choose to be a founder.

> 2X more likely to have psychiatric hospitalization

Did I say that stress is a really nasty thing?

> 2X more likely to have suicidal thoughts

Chronic not-going away stress can do this to a person.

\---

Leave bipolar and ADHD out of it. Also, psychiatric hospitalization is better
than whatever I whenever I'm in San Francisco. Getting help (or being forced
to get help) should not be on this list.

------
arexxbifs
> Farmgirl Flowers CEO Christina Stembel normally sleeps just 4 hours per
> night

Doing this for sustained periods of time will lead to reduced cognitive
performance[0] and, eventually, severe fatigue and possibly depression. Sounds
like optimal operating conditions for a CEO.

If the dotcom bubble taught me anything, it's that working all the time is
neither cool nor a measure of success, but rather the opposite.

[0]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12683469](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12683469)

~~~
KnobbleMcKnees
If a stat sounds like it was invented for dramatic effect, then it probably
was.

This is nearly always something touted as a self virtue, but actually just a
ploy to get subordinates to work unreasonable hours.

(I'm not saying that there _aren 't_ people working these kind of hours, but
they certainly aren't bragging about it or trying to convince others to join
in).

~~~
arexxbifs
Yeah, it's likely to be hyperbole, but articles like that perpetuate dangerous
ideals by reinforcing the myth that successful people are somehow superhuman,
and that we all need to push ourselves with dangerous habits to be able to
succeed.

------
6510
I consider any job a training schedule. Progress is then defined entirely
differently. I comfortably scale down the amount of work I do by monitoring my
own mood. I must be under sufficient stress not just to maintain but also to
expand my abilities. Doing slightly less would just do maintenance, doing
slightly more in the long run causes injury and burn out.

I get a lot of extra comfort from the knowledge I will continuously improve.
If I keep the stress slightly to low I wont grow as much but the recovery
window will be smaller. If it is slightly to high recovery takes longer and
the speed of progress is less than ideal.

Needless to say: Nothing is as important as eating properly and getting enough
sleep.

I'm able to do idiotic amounts of work and enjoy it but if I explain the above
to people who know this they never seem to understand. It hurts seeing people
ruin their health with work but I keep seeing it.

After lots of fiddling I'm 99% sure that a 3 day work week is ideal to fully
exhaust ones abilities. (If I'm not recovered fully in 4 days I do slightly
less the next week.)

I use to think it depends on the job but if the work cant be done any faster
you just make longer days. Something like 1 day 16 hours, 1 day off, 2 days 16
hours, 3 days off. If I work 6 or 7 days 8 hours per day I do roughly 1/3 per
hour.

As one coworker of mine "famously" said when he was again asked to work extra
shift: When do I live?

------
blueboo
I admire this post as an exception to the usual cheerful failure porn. Failing
sucks.

But-I-learned-something is the very least you can achieve without being in a
coma.

The time is lost.

Your waning bank account measures your (and maybe your families) prospects in
an undeniably meaningful way.

The silver lining is...there isn’t one. The loss of time, energy, and money is
something to grieve for. Every day is a reminder that it all could have been
better spent.

When jumping into a startup, the question “why not” has very real and
consequential answers. Beware and take this shit seriously.

~~~
ramraj07
You can come out of a failed startup with something still, if you consider
yourself to be the product. So perhaps people should constantly ask themselves
if what they are doing every moment improves them in some way or not first?
Perhaps if you don't feel that way doing entrepreneureal stuff perhaps you are
not suited for it.

~~~
blueboo
Every moment you're working, you're getting better at doing that thing, so
there's that box ticked.

Now you can justify going down with the ship, because you're getting really
good at bailing water.

Magical thinking to the very end...and beyond. Well, those VC furnaces need
their coal.

------
robomartin
Years ago I wrote a series of educational iOS apps for kids:

[http://www.tommyteaches.com/](http://www.tommyteaches.com/)

After a few years of Apple --for no good reason at all-- forcing code rewrites
and maintenance I could no longer justify keeping these apps on the App Store,
so they are now gone.

Anyhow, the Tommy Teaches apps used a combination of spaced repetition,
genetic solvers and other software witchcraft to improve the rate of learning.

I mostly developed these out of personal need, when one of my kids was having
trouble with a few letters of the alphabet (I forget how old he was, very
young obviously). I downloaded a few apps to try and solve the problem only to
discover they really didn't know how to teach a kid anything. The simple
example being that they would keep repeating letters he had absolutely no
problems with and gave the trouble letters equal treatment.

Tommy Teaches worked extremely well. Our local schools asked me to develop a
version for Special Needs kids, something I started to do but ultimately could
not complete due to Apple making it impossible to make money to fund such
development (which, I learned, is very expensive).

Just a quick note/anecdote to say spaced repetition, perhaps along with other
techniques can work very well if applied to a domain that might benefit from
the approach.

------
speedplane
This article should be another datapoint in every entrepreneur's handbook that
simply going through the YC and Silicon Valley VC community does not ensure
good outcomes. Owning 100% of a company making $1M/year is far more rewarding
and valuable than owning 1% of a company making $100M/year.

Consider YC as a last resort if you have no other options.

~~~
hawkice
For most people, owning 100% of a company making $1M/year would be preferable
to owning 10% of a company making $1B. It's not just that money has decreasing
marginal value. It's about what life you want to live. The ten percent life
is... just not for everyone, and maybe not for anyone, which is why it needs
to be incentivized so much to ever happen.

~~~
speedplane
> For most people, owning 100% of a company making $1M/year would be
> preferable to owning 10% of a company making $1B. It's not just that money
> has decreasing marginal value. It's about what life you want to live.

Being in control of your life, or of anything, is a huge benefit and comes
with a big premium. When one company acquires a public company, they usually
pay more than the public stock price. If you don't drive to work, owning a car
is very likely more expensive than renting, but many buy because control over
when and how to drive is gained is worth the cost.

~~~
heavenlyblue
>> owing a car

But there are no car rentals which would bring a car to your door in the next
15 minutes.

~~~
dnh44
There is a small car rental company in my town that does just this although
it's more like an hour rather than 15 minutes. They've got all of my details
on file so it's as easy as a 10 second phone call because the person
recognises me by voice.

------
gist
What comes to mind is the saying 'if you can't take the heat stay out of the
kitchen'.

I think of this constantly when hearing about people who want something (YC,
acting, medicine, sports, music career, endless list) but then for some reason
aren't built to take the punishment (that others are).

There are some people that can take the punishment (if you want to call it
that) and not miss a beat. Just like there are people that can climb
mountains, race cars, play football, run marathons and live off in the jungle.

This idea that everyone should be suited for anything is just not correct.

And don't think 'well I won't know so why not try?'. Most people have some
basic idea of what they are cut out for and can do and tend to stay away from
(smartly) things that aren't for them.

------
Traster
I think one really important thing people need to be better at is choosing who
they listen to. Gary Vaynerchuk is a social media star. He has about as much
advice to offer a tech startup as Jake Paul. Now Jake Paul at least has the
decently not to claim to be able to offer advice to Tech startups. It's like
listening to Ashton Kutcher about how to do Venture Capital, if you want to do
VC like Ashton Kutcher then step 1 is be a fucking movie star (it's also how
you end up on a sofa next to Adam Neumann being very vague about what your
financial interest in WeWork).

It's also true that even real entrepeneurs are speaking publicly for PR and so
they're saying what they think they should say rather than actually what they
think (or atleast to some extent self-censoring). It's important to really be
critical about what you're hearing from these people, especially people you
idolize.

------
eandre
Great article. Working on my own startup
([https://encore.dev](https://encore.dev)) I also feel the urge to measure my
progress in terms of output, not outcomes. I have to constantly remind myself
that what matters is the outcome. Focus on producing a concrete, visible
artifact every day and use that as your measure of progress instead.

And make sure to stay sane; startups are not a balanced lifestyle but that
just means we need to push ourselves harder to find balance, as opposed to
pushing ourselves even further out of balance.

~~~
TheUndead96
Encore looks like an awesome project. What would you say is the value-add
compared to other serverless offerings by cloud providers? At the moment
simplicity/ease-of-use seems to be its biggest strength.

~~~
eandre
Thanks, that means a lot! Unlike other offerings the focus is really on the
development experience, hence the focus on ease-of-use and simplicity as you
say. The goal is to provide a best-in-class developer experience; the
serverless part is really just a piece of that, if that makes sense?

------
jck_mddx
Great share. I've definitely found the residual effects of pulling a couple of
coding all-nighters absolutely ruins my productivity the next few days. I just
end up staring at the screen and not knowing what to do.

Also, I love the term "hustle porn". It's so true and destructive.

------
forgingahead
Glad the writer has written openly about this, and I hope he continues to get
better and find more balance in his life.

Businesses are tough endeavours, and those who truly do it honestly and with
love for their biz and their customers can seriously run the risk of draining
themselves if they're not careful.

It's also tough because there _is_ an entire industry of "hustle porn" out
there, and the world is moving so fast it is easy to not feel like you're
getting left behind when your business isn't moving forward the same as
others.

VCs (like YC) and others are also in a numbers game. While I'm sure they're
not planning for burnout and depression in their founders, their model
practically requires whoever drinks from the cup to push until they either
succeed or fail. A binary outcome is required, middling along is not allowed.
Even pg himself has said a variation of the Vaynerchuk quote (can't remember
if it was a blog post or tweet).

It's a complex topic, but if you're reading this, find some solace in the fact
that there are many others out there who have similar ups and downs, but more
importantly, work to find balance in your life. This means time for eating
well, sleeping, and relaxing time (video games, walks, gym, spending time with
family). By the way, "relaxing time" is separate from "sleeping time" \--
don't pick one or the other.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't have strong work ethics or push hard when you
need to, but constrain things and re-evaluate constantly. I sometimes have a
hard week of 70-80 hours because of coding sprints or sales pushes, and then
break for 2 days. Eg: Monday and Tuesday this week were chill days for me, as
a break from the past 10 days.

Overall, try to plan out the trajectory of your business and the work you are
doing. Don't just flit from one priority to another, take a step back, take a
deep breath, and plan for a definite outcome in a short period of time (2-4
weeks). Do this constantly, and you're basically tinkering with the the
trajectory of your startup based on your efforts.

If you can't do the above (maybe because you've got a few people already on
the team, have customers and are just running about hair on fire every day
dealing with operational and customer issues), I would recommend getting some
professional coaching advice about how to eventually structure your biz to be
more manageable.

Bottom line, none of the stresses should be permanent or long-term (despite
what banks, VCs, or any other funders may say), so definitely work towards
building smaller bite-sized sprints for yourself and your team.

~~~
speedplane
Founder burnout is simply a result of the stress of the increased
responsibility you have. Your employees expect a pay-check every two weeks,
and even if you pay yourself nothing, you have to make that happen. Lack of
income stability destabilizes a lot. You don't have a boss, regardless of who
is on your board of advisers or claims to be your mentor, all they can offer
is words, the founder has the responsibility and has to make the decisions.
You may have friends doing their own startup, and despite your best efforts to
resist, you compare your own success to them. You make excuses for those that
surpass you, feel schadenfreude when others fail, and then feel guilty for
even having such thoughts.

In practice, founder burnout is pretty rare. The stresses of running a
business are real and can affect your life and decision making process, but
the business challenges themselves are often even more difficult. Also,
founders don't just start a company as any employee would start a job, they
need to start with a huge reserve of enthusiasm or motivation. Emotionally,
they start from a higher place, are subjected to higher than normal stresses,
but their stress tolerance itself is not often the limiting factor.

------
fluuuhi
Reads very very illusional.

What is it what people actually want? Change the world or become rich?

I have seen enough ideas or things people persue not because they really love
that idea or product but because they wanna be 'entrepreneur'.

Just wierd to read.

~~~
krapp
The allure of startup culture has always been the chance to get rich like Mark
Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos - "changing the world" is just hype. Most
startups are just schemes to make the founders as rich as possible as fast as
possible, with no real intent of ever delivering a product or service to
market that actually makes a profit.

------
professoroaks
Seems like he's still depressed by reading the article. Poor guy.

------
Legogris
> Only recently, have a select few started to promote less destructive
> lifestyles for founders:

I think at the bottom of this is the futility in trying to emulate others. You
are unique and the only one who can be responsible for your lifestyle choices
is - you. Figure out what works for you in terms of workstyle, lifestyle and
work-life balance, rather than using role models as a blueprint.

I know a few people who have been living on <5h of sleep for decades and it's
actually right for them. Telling those individuals that they need 8h is not
improving anything. That doesn't mean it can work for most people.

~~~
mnsc
> Telling those individuals that they need 8h is not improving anything.

Of course not, but telling these individuals that they are outliers and
shouldn't give this as advice on "how to be successful" will improve things.
They desperately need some of that humbling self critique that we ordinary,
impostor syndrome suffering people do all the time and we can help them!

~~~
Legogris
What I'm trying to say is, stop letting others telling you how you should live
your life and figure out what works for you.

You may be an outlier in some aspects and so even the advice from "normals"
won't apply.

~~~
mnsc
> What I'm trying to say is, stop letting others telling you how you should
> live your life and figure out what works for you.

I'm no entrepreneur but I think the article is saying that this is easier said
then done when you want to do something you are passionate about, eg. changing
the world with some new software thing, and everyone who have done something
similar is acting like the examples in the article. Like that farmgirl article
doesn't once ask if her "seemingly superhuman work ethic" is an example to
others or rather should be presented as how an extreme sports practitioner
often is: "you are clearly an adrenaline junkie! _laughs_ but really, how do
you cope with the stress of endangering your health just to free climb that
large rock wall".

------
bilekas
Sounds more like PT(YC)SD! That drive to succeed is healthy, but that
environment you were is was really not ideal.

------
DailyHN
Fun read.

Psychology trumps time-spent.

------
jorgenveisdal
Great post! Can relate to a lot of it.

------
zenincognito
Gary vee talks like he does something amazing while what he does can really be
done by a good cold caller. I don't see what he has done to earn the
recognition he has. I agree with the author. Selling a $90 poster that
basically is the worst advice you can give to an entrepreneur.

~~~
speedplane
> Gary vee talks like he does something amazing while what he does can really
> be done by a good cold caller. I don't see what he has done to earn the
> recognition he has.

Gary Vee's main resume star is that he has become successful and well known.
He has become more of a celebrity than an oracle, and many of his side-
companies have not done well. Still, his main points that the internet has
changed the way of doing business and you need to utilize social media to be
successful are sound.

~~~
juskrey
He is a PR consultant, what would you expect him to sell? PR conultant's way
of doing things: Spend the budget. If project was a win, claim own success. If
the project was a failure, blame a business, never show results.

~~~
speedplane
> PR conultant's way of doing things: Spend the budget. If project was a win,
> claim own success. If the project was a failure, blame a business, never
> show results.

Close but I don't think this is quite right ... "PR conultant's way of doing
things: [Find and convince the client on your abilities.] Spend the budget. If
project was a win, [convince your client that it was your] own success. If the
project was a failure, [convince the client that it was their] business,
[always] show results."

------
stjohnswarts
Eh lost me at "boring monotony of the suburbs". I have zero problems with the
burbs, I don't like these insult everything at the new place I go to pieces. I
wish the guy luck though, I read the conclusion of the story.

------
totalZero
"Pineapple Pizzas from Dominos (plus cinna-stix cause we're not fucking
heathens)"

The author lost my interest here.

~~~
sergiomattei
So, in front of us we have a very eloquent and well written article talking
about very serious issues that take place in the entrepreneurial community...
and you're going to dismiss it because the writer decided to have fun for a
split second?

Gimme a break.

~~~
totalZero
I don't think it's eloquent; it's pretty poorly written IMO; it is more cutesy
than serious. Despite your assertions, those are subjective things. If you
feel that your opinion is more valid than mine, feel free to explain why.

I read up to the cinna-stix line and my only thought was, "why am I wasting my
time reading this?" It doesn't appear to be thoughtful and it puts focus on
all the wrong things.

I realized at that moment that this post was not really about depression. It
was about not getting what you want, not meeting your own expectations, and
having to deal with reality.

YC is, for many people, a path to building a business. For others, it is a
status symbol, a place where they try to make the next "Uber for X" as a way
to spend time working with friends on something cool. That has nothing to do
with YC and everything to do with the person's mentality. It is not specific
to entrepreneurship and has everything to do with saying, "oh shit, this is
actually hard to do."

Ultimately we are all alone with our thoughts, feelings, goals, and pain.
Nobody else can sense or really know these things, but us. Getting kicked in
the face teaches us this reality. There is some pain in beginning to
understand reality. In this context, disappointment is healthy. It means you
recognize the incongruence between your mental model of reality, and reality
itself.

Depression sometimes has no connection to outcomes, and at other times it is a
lingering rot from past outcomes. It is a trick that the mind plays, a tiring
mental race through the muck of the past that leaves no energy to address the
challenges of today. Depression is not burn-out, fatigue, nor disappointment.
It is a slothy form of mental pain about an irreconcilable disparity between
past expectations and the present. Irreconcilable means there's nothing I can
do today to bridge the gap.

For me, the useful part of depression is the clarity it can offer about the
future.

Do you note the difference in the way I am writing about the topic? I am not
talking about pineapple pizza, nor cinna-stix.

It's not a childish topic and I don't want to be the audience to someone who
discusses it in a childlike way.

You may now have the break that you requested I give to you.

------
sebastianconcpt
Some good points but no diagnose or solutions beyond the expression of the
problem.

Here is what I'd add for it:

I don't care if you're make or female, people need to improve constantly in 3
parameters for their whole life-span:

1\. Looks (basically proper nutrition and some degree of bodybuilding
training)

2\. Psychological strength

3\. Affluence

You need a life meaning mission that makes you feel good at improving these,
using that mission as the vehicle. If you can do that, you'll be an example
and all the rest will fall into place.

If you unbalance these, you'd be screwing up and diminishing the overall life-
satisfaction returns.

Startups, or business, in general, are only going to (when they work) improve
affluence and (always) consume psychological strength.

Proper nutrition and going to the gym (and I mean lifting HARD) falls into
improving looks which also helps in relieving psychological and physical
stress.

If you break that delicate balance you're investing in some kind of deformed
creature that will eventually show. Hence, this kinds of depression wouldn't
be a surprise to emerge as a manifestation of breaking that sustainable self-
improvment equation.

~~~
hfdh434535
"people need to improve constantly" No they don't. Plenty of people happy to
be as they are. When you're constantly running on this treadmill of self
improvement, you'll probably get depressed real quick.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
Degradation is Nature's default. Guaranteed by entropy. But for sure you are
free to totally ignore how to make good use of an opposing force and get older
faster, less healthier, less attractive and less free while "feeling happy".

~~~
hfdh434535
Thanks!

