The Community Letter: The Mental Health of Founders during COVID-19

Founder: “Something that I definitely struggled with was feeling like I didn’t make a big enough exit.”

Me: “What’s big enough?”

Founder: “Well, I guess I didn’t make the $10-15 million personal gain like my peers in the Valley.”

This conversation was before COVID 19. I can't imagine what it would be like now.

Being in San Francisco for almost ten months, the amount of comparison between founders’ success was palpable when I first moved. Now with COVID-19, founder mental health and resilience have entered a whole new era.

After a few high profile founders took their own lives a few years ago, the conversation around mental health became a necessity for the entrepreneurial community. And after running a conference in February of last year at the intersection of mental health and business and hurting my own mental health in the process, I understood just a glimpse into the founders’ world. Now when founders are hurting the most, we as a community need to come together to better resource founders.

Fear of Failure

“There’s this feeling of ‘Oh, I have to protect my flaws to keep investors, customers, and other stakeholders happy.’”

When I first came to SF, I rewatched “The Social Network”. I remember having friends gawk at how “fascinating” it made the founding of Facebook and how it enticed them to join the “hustle” of tech startups while still in high school and college.

But alongside the reputation of being a successful founder comes a culture of constant comparison and pressure, and now the questions have changed. Before it was: How much money have you raised? How much money have the founders sitting beside you raised? And now I hear founders asking themselves and their peers: Will you have enough money at the end of the month to take care of your employees’ salaries? How are you going to pay your own bills at the end of the day? How do we just survive this?

Founder Identity

“My identity was my startup. When I sold my company, I had no idea who I was. I had to go back to my family and figure out how I was going to actually start having meaningful relationships.” 

If you are spending all 24/7 on a company for years on end, you are bound to make sacrifices when it comes to your relationships. And when times get tough, it can be hard to sacrifice time for things outside of the business. During these times of economic contractions, founders are going to need the support of fellow founders more than ever to find empathy in a time of social distancing.

Why It Needs to Be Addressed

There are very few “trainers” when it comes to mental resilience. Even as an employee of a company, no one could have truly prepared me to handle the isolation, anxiety, and dread that comes from our collective experience during this pandemic. Since the beginning of my tenure at 500, every time I go to help out a 500 portfolio company with advice on social media or marketing, I end the conversation by asking how the founders are really feeling and offering to talk about life outside the office. While it’s a small gesture, I want to make sure I am helping founders in any way I can to create a growing, sustainable company, no matter if it is during COVID or not.

How has COVID-19 pushed you to talk more about mental health within your community? There's a ton in this that I didn't explore like the toll it takes on founders to make decisions around layoffs, cutting budgets, etc... What topics would you like me to explore more of?

NOTE: Thoughts and opinions are my own and not that of 500.