Emotional debt in startups
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Very few entrepreneurs are able to let go. At 5 p.m. At 3 a.m. On the weekends. On your wedding day.
It can consume you, particularly if you've tied its success directly to your ego.
Hard for me to not think about the late nights with the laptop. Even after getting married. Even after having a kid. Being tired as hell and not playing with the kid. Not taking the wife on a date in years.
Lot of success stories. Lot of untold cautionary tales.
You are trading that for the chance to strike gold. Which you might do, but more often than not, you won't. And then you might end up on the very same 9 to 5 job you wanted to avoid in the first place. And retire even later because you could have been building your 401k in that time.
9 - 5 working for somebody else can feel a lot longer than 6 - 9 working on your own biz. Especially when you're talking in decades.
And striking gold doesn't always have to be the desired outcome. Simply achieving freedom and autonomy is success.
Of course, if someone is working on a startup just to get rich, this won't be the case, but I think this isn't that common, or at least isn't in the majority of cases. You only get one chance to exist, and it's infinitesimally short and fleeting; why not spend it doing something that maximizes your enjoyment of it, rather than your financial reward, if it's at all possible to do so?
i’ve worked with founders who would check slack on their honeymoon, who has their wife begging them not to go in a holiday, and who took a whopping two weeks off (i.e. working from home) to help their wife after their first child was born.
but i also know founders who have found work life balance and have made sure their employees have it too.
I’m a solo founder, company started 2015, went through accelerator, VC funding, etc.
There’s a certain level of emotional stress I can handle, and with everything that goes into making a startup succeed, I was right at my limit for multiple years.
Looking back (with my startup profitable, stable, running well), the thing I hate thinking about most is simply that I’ve lost 4 years of my 20’s that I could have used dating, finding “the one”.
Now I’m 28, still not “too late” by any measure, but now in “catch up” mode as far as dating goes.
For many founders, the same applies to becoming disconnected with family and friends. Founders endure an enormous amount of stress, and the simplest way to cope (when you have the mindset “startup over everything”) is to simplify and strip one’s life of everything outside your startup, which I absolutely don’t recommend, but am guilty of doing and I think is a not so uncommon thing amongst founders as a whole.
Maybe it’s not emotional debt in the same way as technical debt, but there is a time debt that results from prioritizing 1 thing so highly, and pushing all else to the side, often years on end. When you come around the other side and realize it 3-4 years later, it’s difficult.
28 is still very young - you'll be fine! I am also a founder, and do wonder sometimes if I'm not working hard enough - ie: stripping away everything in my life. I'm a bit older than you, and worked myself to the bone in my 20s without much equity to show for it - and now I pace myself a bit. That said, I often notice times where my 20 year old self would have simply not slept, and instead I sleep for 6 hours and call it a necessary compromise.
Sometimes I feel good about this, responsible. Other times I feel guilty, a slacker or worse: old.
Looking back, do you think you would have accomplished as much as you did had you balanced your life - for example, "spent" those 4 years going on the occasional date? I often hear the "yes, I burnt myself hard for my startup", from successful founders, and I don't often hear the conclusion to the thought: "would you have done it differently?"
A resounding “yes”. Not because I would have been less burnt out, but because I would have less tunnel vision (which is a symptom of focusing on 1 thing so hard for so long). Less tunnel vision = broader perspective. I think I would have contributed more to the growth of our company faster had I slowed down and not turned down every social engagement to “reply to just a few more emails or push that last bug fix”.
I would 100% have done it differently. Looking back, those “last few emails” and “last few bug fixes” were not nearly as important to our company as keeping my social circle (and by proxy, dating life) intact.
I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say I regret it, because a lot of good things happened that may not have if I weren’t as focused. Probably easiest to sum it up by saying if I could tell my younger self 1 thing, it would be that being a successful founder / having a successful exit will only be as rewarding as the people you have to share it with (family, friends, significant other). Money on its own to a single person is worth very little
I remember doing that when I was twenty. I also remember how useless I always was come 10AM, and how I could fall asleep standing by noon.
By and large I don't think I'm any less able to pull an all nighter, get really drunk, eat trash, or do the other things. I think I'm just a lot more aware of the consequences.
The toxic part of this cycle is that as an introvert I don’t even find myself missing having friends. For now. If I ever hit a rough patch in life hot damn is that gonna be bad.
But you know what? Friends can be remade. Relationships rekindled. All is not lost.
The grass is greener where you water it.
1. "Friends" can be a very bad influence. It really depends on their quality and most times you don't know that until a decade later. The bad influence can be insidious and barely noticeable but it adds up. The influence is not even intentional, it just comes from the inner insecurities that we all have, it's a human thing. In some cases for me it led me to some dead ends and wasted life opportunities (sometimes even bad situations I had to recover from and took a huge toll on me stress wise). Because I was weak and influential (might not be your case, but it was mine) and just a few words and ideas spoken and planted in my head were enough that in the long run I did not do what I knew inside that I was supposed to do. Sure, that is my own weakness of character at cause, but I'm just saying.
2. I want to strongly emphasize this: you now have a successful business you say. You have something set aside to live off so look at it this way: your life starts.... NOW! From now on you can start dating and "living" without too many worries and you do not depend on anything that much. Now you can date, raise a family and everything without all the stress of also needing to grow a business or climbing the corporate ladder.
3. Do you think that after 4 years of dating you would have "found the one"? I wouldn't be so sure. I've seen young people in long therm relationships ... and most relationships started at that age fell apart by 30. And then? You would have been with no business AND no "the one". Also, before 28.... most guys and girl are still immature. They do not know what they want in life and are not realistic. I've seen marriages fall apart after 4 years in their 20s. Now towards 30s and beyond people are more mature and the quality of dating will be much higher, you will see.
4. You don't have to catch up to anyone. Just do your own thing. You now have the comfort of not worrying about a job, because of your hard work. You are free to go date. 5. Being an independent business owner might be appealing to potential "the one" material ladies, you proved that you can succeed in life.
6. Lastly if you are a bit down because of all the missing out, take some time gather some money, after this corona crisis is over, do some traveling. Go to Europe, go to Japan, spend some time trying new things if you can safely afford it. Or if you are completely worry free financially, maybe enroll in a MSc program at some university and live the campus life.
7. Now you can focus on a partner when you find one, much more that people (like me :) ) who also have to focus on career at the same time. Find someone with the same life goals as you.
I saw some TV show where some guy said he flew more than a hundred missions in the Air Force and was shot at in all of them. He went into commercial real estate after he left the Air Force. He figured it would be less nerve wracking than that.
With nerves of steel, he made a killing.
I've spent plenty of time in therapy and journaling and what not to deal with serious trauma in my life. It's a valuable skill to have.
But I have some trouble imagining that business success is something I would deem to be some heavy emotional burden to bear.
I'm not trying to be dismissive. I'm trying hard to avoid saying something like "First World Problems." But I will suggest that if you are finding it hugely emotionally burdensome, you should make an effort to get some perspective because these really are good problems to have overall and many people live with much worse and absolutely didn't choose it.
> With nerves of steel, he made a killing.
I think the trouble with anecdotes is there is always a counter anecdote.
In our state there has been a spate of doctors committing suicides. A doctor, when interviewed about the phenomenon, had a similar story to yours, but with a different outcome. Someone who had spent a fair amount of time in the military, including combat, decided to become a doctor later in life. He found the work environment so toxic he couldn't handle it. Nothing in the military/combat prepared him for this. In the military, you are surrounded by people who will give their lives for you, whereas in the work environment he was in there was always a sense of "no one has your back".
I don't know how common this sentiment is in the medical industry, but I do remember a medical student friend of mine talking about how in smaller cities, surgeons work hard to make the lives of other surgeons difficult, in the hopes that they will leave and they can thus charge hospitals more to perform surgeries (even though the need for more surgeons existed).
Anyway, I don't see this as a "first world problem" or a "good problem to have". You can have these exact same problems while failing - it's fairly orthogonal to success.
That doesn't mean there are no real challenges. But to some extent, perspective is a matter of choice.
You can choose to freak out every minute of every day about the latest supply chain snafu or whatever or you can look out your window at the homeless bum on the corner, realize he probably has very intractable and nightmarish personal problems or he wouldn't be a homeless bum and get a grip on your big emotional reaction.
Please note the guy in my story went into business, not medicine. This is a forum about business, not medicine.
Medicine is a whole other ball game and not comparable to the sorts of problems you run into as a founder of a business.
But he may well have the same problems in that job (not always as severe, but sometimes it can be). He may well have the same problems in a crappy job. That's why it's not a first world problem. It's convenient to believe that he causes his own problems by chasing wealth, but it's a flawed to think he would avoid them had he not gone that path. Not processing emotions well is not something unique to people who are in the elite. And not trying to get filthy rich will not cure your problem.
I view it very similar to physical ailments. It's a problem, and one needs a cure/salve. I don't couple it with one's behavior/motives/aspirations.
That's not at all what I said by any stretch of the imagination. I said "These are good problems to have. Having some perspective on that fact can help you face them more calmly."
not trying to get filthy rich will not cure your problem.
There are actually loads of people who report otherwise. There are myriad books by people who chose to walk away from the rat race and report gleefully that life is better now because they made that choice.
"How to survive without a salary" by Charles Long is one such book. He paid cash for a house in the country so he could grow his own food and have low taxes and damn little need for actual cash.
There are many such stories.
That doesn't mean no one should ever try to pursue their dreams or seek to strike it rich. But it's a completely valid choice to say "I find this too stressful and would rather do anything else. What are my options for just refusing to play this game?"
I, on the other hand, give most of my wisdom away for free, which is one of the reasons I remain poor.
I'm poor in part because I find it morally objectionable to tell people to keep shooting themselves in the foot and to come hire me when the pain and bleeding get bad enough and I will bandage them back up and kiss their boo-boos for a steep fee. I have a bad habit of saying things like "the emperor has no clothes" and "not shooting yourself in the foot is an option here."
On the upside, I've avoided an estimated $9 million dollars in medical expenses. So it's not all downside.
In the interest of not looking like I just must get in the last word (or similar), I will likely step away from this conversation at this point in time.
Have a great (whatever time of day in your part of the world).
The reality is, if it's difficult for you to handle/process, that's worth honoring. Just because you're really hardcore in dealing with one kind of situation doesn't mean that you're prepared for a different kind of stress, even if it seems much 'easier'.
When your coworker just getting into fitness starts walking regularly, then jogging, then trains for a bit and runs their first 5k, you congratulate them, you don't tell them "that's nothing, I ran a marathon last weekend".
The only mistake is not recognizing that you're incurring debt, and not having a plan or means to deal with it. Unacknowledged debt of any kind compounds and eventually destroys.
I would guess that your pilot example was less about nerves of steel than about someone who had learned to handle (i.e., process) a lot of stress effectively--which is just a way of saying that nerves of steel is more about efficiently incurring and discharging debt than about withstanding cumulative effects.
"I would guess that your pilot example was less about nerves of steel than about someone who had learned to handle (i.e., process) a lot of stress effectively--which is just a way of saying that nerves of steel is more about efficiently incurring and discharging debt than about withstanding cumulative effects."
In your view, how does withstanding cumulative effects and efficiently incurring differ?
Withstanding cumulative effects is like continually re-financing your home to pull more equity out: at some point you can't keep up, and the failure mode is catastrophic.
Here's the reality I've experienced as a startup founder. Its not the holy truth, but its been my life and my experiences.
If you shoot an arrow even a few degrees off-center, it hits somewhere far from the board.
Similarly the decisions you take early on are so much more critical to your life.
As an Indian student these are all of the decisions you take:
Age 15: Science, Commerce, Arts
Age 17: Medical, Engineering
Age 18: Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil engineering etc
Age 22: US Masters or Local Job
Guess what?
If you want to realistically be a millionaire by 37-38 you have to take 5 correct decisions in a row (Science, Engineering, CS, Masters).
You have to do 5 very difficult things to be a Google level engineer.
Even if you do four out of five correct after 20 years your life will be in a far lower orbit with respect to finances. Its sad but true.
This is why you should do your startup after you clear this early minefield of difficult decisions. Once you can comfortably have a good job at your whim. I'd advise people to startup only after 30.
And remember, one misstep and the outcome can be wildly different after 20 years!
However the next question is whether you are 100% optimizing for money, because there are a lot of other considerations. First of all, working at Google with the best tools, at the largest scale, and the smartest colleagues will teach you a certain way of doing things. What it won't teach you is how to bootstrap a successful business with open source and cheap SaaS components. The type of resourcefulness you learn will be around navigating a specific corporate culture, which is arguably less generally applicable than figuring out how to solve problems in startups or more average companies that aren't funded by insurmountable moats built decades ago for which your impact as a late-stage incoming IC will be negligible. Also if you have a twenty year timeline, realize that these companies' reputations are a lagging indicator and the situation on the ground could change a lot and disrupt many of your assumptions.
But my point is not to endorse an alternate path. If you can enjoy your work and also get paid more, that's the dream. However I would very much caution against slogging through something you hate in the hopes of some distant payoff. Life is about the journey not the destination.
You have to be very very efficient. You understand why Heroku costs 3x of AWS. You understand that raising money is not necessary for every project. For most tourist entrepreneurs its just cargo culting.
But now I think I wanna spend a good 10 years in corporate before even thinking of doing anything else. Make that moolah first.
Pain can either be useful or useless. Physical exercise is painful. That's useful pain. Falling down and breaking your hip is useless pain.
Many of the stressful and painful situations in starting a company are actually extremely valuable life lessons. Learning how to continue after hearing "no" multiple times, criticism and doubt, continuing to be productive despite uncertainty. All of these traits can really only be developed through trial by fire.
There are some emotional situations though that are useless. The pain teaches you little to nothing. Even these situations can teach us acceptance over the things we can't control.
I believe pain is necessary to feel to grow. You have to take the time to absorb it properly though or else it can destroy you. The only way you can build emotional debt is by trying to forget about it, shoving it into a tiny box in your brain until it explodes out. If you take the time to self reflect and even just acknowledge pain, allowing yourself to experience sadness, you can better yourself in a way impossible without it.
> Pain can either be useful or useless. Physical exercise is painful. That's useful pain. Falling down and breaking your hip is useless pain.
In my experience it's not either/or, it's both. I've been in traumatic experiences during which I've told myself that I would come out on the other side better from the experience, and I have. That doesn't and didn't make the experience more bearable while I was undergoing it. It may have offered comfort but not much, and even then in the moment I felt guilty for feeling like I was experiencing something positive (the comfort).
I also agree with your sentiment that while you're going through it, you may not really care or not if it makes you a better person in the long term. The immediate pain can be overwhelming.
I do believe we should engage our painful experiences though. Really self reflect on them and allow ourselves to feel the emotion. Avoidance is the only surefire way to build debt.
Amen. Once you are through then, and provided you survived the experience unscathed, then that might build a thicker skin.
Or it might not, and you start having issues requiring psychological treatment. YMMV
That's Nassim Taleb's spin. Nietzsche would say that which does not kill you makes you stronger. Neither of which is very helpful if it does blow out your candle.
Technical debt can't so easily be converted to credit with an attitude adjustment, breaking the metaphor.
Scrum has been so co-opted by management that it tries to disallow any sort of self-soothing on a project. I am forever having to misrepresent the importance of work that I 'needed' to do that perhaps not everyone else sees the wisdom of. Either hiding it entirely or overselling it. Because if I have to deal with the consequences (including dealing with other people who are affected) of this goddamned piece of code any longer I'm going to quit, and what will happen to your precious schedules then?
"Refactoring" 1st Ed is, through this lens, formalized self-care represented as philosophy instead of psychology. For many of us it feels good (or at least, not doing it feels awful) but we can't say that, so we make it about ethics.
There was a videotaped interview with Joel Spolsky a ways back, and I couldn't tell you a thing about what he was being interviewed about except for his answer to the warmup question, which was delivered half jokingly, about how over time his job has changed to psychotherapist, and that his bookshelf has slowly converted to a few technical books and a lot of psychology books. Of course we cannot be serious about such things, so he had to joke about it.
> Therapy (with a body focus) ... IFS (I tend to recommend against traditional talk therapy, I find it a poor way to deal with ourselves)
Though in the end they probably won't be helpful for anything more than soft skills, since it's work.
On the subject of family therapy things in general, the broad concepts taught in them are so good, some of them can come up in groups and basic interaction.
- Triangulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(psychology)#Fam...
- The 8 concepts here: https://thebowencenter.org/theory/eight-concepts/ (triangles are the first one)
Good ones: Murray Bowen, Salvador Minuchin, Virginia Satir
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLQOWoom2d0 (Bowen), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJEewdFPB7M (Minuchin), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql3mPOcX7kY (Satir)
Good book: Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model
As I say this though, Family therapy is intense stuff that I don't think would make sense out of nowhere. Unless they were open minded and willing to put the legwork in. I've been exposed to it many times over years and didn't really connect with it.
Ever been through family / life / circumstances where you were dependent on a selfish jerk who viewed others as their own pin cushion, with no interest in cooperation? Come out of those a couple of times, then look these concepts/books up. You'll get where they're coming from!
What looks like a crisis is the end of an illusion.
When change is inevitable, we struggle most to keep what we value most.
When you create an illusion to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely--and harder to take.
It requires a great deal of emotional energy to do things that are uncomfortable. And stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone as first time founder compounds the experience. But emotional “debt” cannot be paid back in the same way technical or monetary debt can be. Those are tools. Pushing yourself too hard can destroy you and your capacity to achieve your goals.
Treat your feelings more like gas in a gas tank with no gas station for 100s of miles. You can drive as fast or inefficiently as you’d like; just remember you’re walking the rest of the way.
Founding startup(s) is really, really hard, but people do it because it’s a chance to get fuck-you money by your 30s/40s. The corporate world rarely offers that, most have to work until 60-65 before they can afford a decent retirement.
You have to be an L5 engineer at Google. And I know a guy earning $700k per year at 32-33 in ARM. Plus other VPs. Depends on your vantage point, but starting a startup is way harder. Personal experience here.
The author of this post is non-technical, and from Austria, this path was not an option. Or speaking from my experience, as a software developer in Canada, starting salaries out of school at your average Canadian tech company are ~$60-70K CAD, and as a senior developer you’re looking at ~$100-150K CAD. Even getting to $200K (CAD, not USD) by 37 would be rare for a Canadian software developer.
Your comment was “Honestly corporate salaries will earn you 3-4 million by the time you are 37 or so”, as if that’s easy/normal. It isn’t, it’s exceptional and rare.
For a tiny fraction of the world, earning $3-4 mil by 37 in the corporate world is a possibility, but for the vast, VAST majority, like well over 99% of the world, it isn’t, at all. Globally, the annual salary to be in the top 1% of earners is ~$32K USD. In America, it’s ~$420K USD, but that’s made up largely of C-suite executives and business owners who are well above 37 years old.
Most startup founders are deciding between “work in the corporate world until I’m 60-65, or try founding a startup.” Based on that, some still give startup founding a shot, even though they know it’s going to be super hard and will likely fail.
The probabilities are completely uncertain. You just never know how big it can get or how likely it is.
If you are optimistic like I was, you "hope for the best" since that one guy did it right? In essence, you don't know how hard the problem is.
In the corporate world you do know the probabilities, so you get scared by it.
TL;DR: Once you know the true probabilities you'll know which is a better option
For example, this is the typical salary range for a Senior Software Engineer in Vancouver (in CAD): https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...
“Big 5” salaries in SF/Seattle are way, way above what you’ll make almost anywhere else. Lots of startups are founded outside the Bay Area/Seattle, where these types of salaries don’t really exist.
I assume anyone who wants to startup is atleast a top 5% engineer. Otherwise its just a bad punt. You have to be terribly good to be in the startup biz
I was debating saying the following, for fear that the HN crowd will not like to hear it:
This is not just "coming out into the mainstream". This is mainstream, and has been for longer than the tech industry has existed. Many adults have always known this - it's not something unique to founders or startups. When someone outside of the tech world reads this, it merely reinforces their view that tech folks are less emotionally mature.
Take a look at the comments on this thread (about NVC):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746830
Search the comments for the words "emotion" and "feeling". Note how often the commentor pushes back on having a discussion about them.
And now note what this submission says:
> Regular peer-coaching sessions with other CEOs/founders (most helpful if both or one of the people has some knowledge of how emotional integration works, through NVC, therapy experience, etc.)
Instead, I am talking about how the methods to work through emotional debt becoming mainstream.
I am speaking as a long-time meditator. I have worked through a number of really intense issues. The most recent relating to my wife's miscarriage a couple months ago. I was fortunate in that my manager gave me some space with that ... but believe me, the guilt from not being able to keep up with the team would come up.
The methods I have used are certainly not mainstream, and draws from a wide variety of traditions. From where I look, a lot of people are just rediscovering those methods, but are still scratching the surface.
While people know there is something off -- it leaks into a search for "work life balance", or a growing realization of the overwork culture in the name of productivity -- actually employing the therapeutic methods is not really mainstream.
The reaction to the pandemic is a great example. I see a lot of people getting caught by their existential anguish, what the Hindu and Buddhists call dukkha. I see this not just from people inside tech, but also the people outside of tech. I sensed it and saw it in the first few days when people were panick buying things at the grocery store. Making runs to buy up all the chickens they can. I see it in the reports as parents have to homeschool their kids for the first time. I see it in folks as the boredom settles in with the confinement.
I don't just see it in the mainstream. The folks who dabble in the alternative spirituality got caught up in this too.
It is clear to me that this author has faced his own dukkha. That's a journey that is ... no backyard picnic. There is an deep-seated aversion to this work. That is at the root of carrying the emotional traumas.
What is brilliant about the author is that, he is speaking about this as a leader. He is turning these methods our modern society have abandoned, and reintroducing them.
So yeah, he talks about "emotional debt". That isn't what I was talking about becoming mainstream. It is facing existential crises and the dukkha that he is slipping in there. Once you start on this kind of work, it goes into the rabbit hole, and surfaces up a lot of things.