7 ms·

Emotional debt in startups

128 points by LeonW 6y ago

tony 6y ago
I like viewing groups as emotional systems, probably more than is helpful in a work environment, but I think some of this could be worth mentioning. > 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)#Family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(psychology)#Fam... - The 8 concepts here: https://thebowencenter.org/theory/eight-concepts/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLQOWoom2d0 (Bowen), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJEewdFPB7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJEewdFPB7M (Minuchin), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql3mPOcX7kY 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!
dumbfoundded 6y ago
I don't entirely agree with the concept. Going through stressful situations can either hack away at your being or it can help make you a more informed and resilient person. 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.
- vageli 6y ago
  > I don't entirely agree with the concept. Going through stressful situations can either hack away at your being or it can help make you a more informed and resilient person. > 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).
  - hosh 6y ago
    It always sucks when you experience it in the moment. This is me with knowing a lot about the meditation and concentration techniques, and having been through numerous rough cycles.
  - dumbfoundded 6y ago
    You're right that it's not always the either/or. A single experience can help in some ways and hurt in others. Maybe a better way to phrase it is that there are some painful experiences that teach us to change ourselves and others that help us learn acceptance and resilience. 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.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    > That doesn't and didn't make the experience more bearable while I was undergoing it 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
DoreenMichele 6y ago
It seems to me we are doing something really wrong if people have so very much emotional baggage from their success. 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.
- grantsch 6y ago
  do you have a link or know the name of the show? i'd be very interested in watching that
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    It was some HGTV show, possibly "What's with that house?" My recollection: He had some huge, sprawling, insane house in the desert with his own indoor shooting range. It took seven years to build it. The host of the show pointed out that the Empire State Building only took two years, iirc.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > 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 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.
cj 6y ago
I agree with this article, from a slightly different perspective. 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.
- erulabs 6y ago
  Hey Cj! 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?"
  - cj 6y ago
    > 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? 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
hosh 6y ago
Glad to see this kind of stuff coming out into the mainstream. I think the author did a good job of normalizing and explaining this.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > Glad to see this kind of stuff coming out into the mainstream. 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 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.)
  - hosh 6y ago
    I am not talking about emotional intelligence becoming mainstream. In that, I agree with you. 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.
nkozyra 6y ago
There's a cost of ownership here and it's bigger than most people think. You see the success stories, the dramatizations ... 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.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Sounds like a very expensive lottery ticket
- willio58 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing, good to put these things in perspective every now and then.
- outworlder 6y ago
  There's an enormous opportunity cost. You could be doing somewhere. Yes, that 9 to 5 job at a megacorp sucks. But you are building your 401k. You can turn off after work. If the company has cashflow issues, the worst that could happen is that you might be let go. You are not really on the hook. 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.
  - factsaresacred 6y ago
    I think this discount the enormous satisfaction that comes with creating your own thing. 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.
thinkingkong 6y ago
I hear you. I also think framing emotions through an analogy of finance send you down the wrong path. 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.
- _curious_ 6y ago
  Refuel, drive fast, walk slow, repeat ;)
skmurphy 6y ago
This strikes me as the wrong framing. It's more about managing your expectations and maintaining a clear-eyed view of the way forward. Life rarely goes as planned. Three rules of thumb I try to remember in a crisis or setback are Gerald Weinberg's set of Rhonda's Revelations: 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.
- _curious_ 6y ago
  Interesting reframe, thank you.
moneytide1 6y ago
So that's whose been buying all the toilet paper. Ideal moisture absorption texture (tears of emotion). A precious snowflake will also melt Perfectly into this texture (produced from the pulp of trees, see recent paper mill explosion in Maine). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AhKsmLS1cM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AhKsmLS1cM
hirundo 6y ago
To the extent that you're anti-fragile the sign flips and emotional labor leaves behind a credit balance. To a candle flame the wind is an existential threat but if you're a bonfire the wind can make you an inferno. 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.
ptrenko 6y ago
It was too painful. Spent 6 years or so. I;ve given up. Honestly corporate salaries will earn you 3-4 million by the time you are 37 or so. Why bother with rinky dink startups anyways?
- yashap 6y ago
  Verrrrrry few people earn 3-4 million in the corporate world by 37. Depending on whether you get an undergrad or a masters, that’s ~12-15 years of work. That means you’d have to AVERAGE 200K-333K per year, over your first 12-15 years, to hot that. That’s really, really rare - considering you’d be starting at a much lower salary, you’d have to be at ~$500K by your mid 30s. 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.
  - ptrenko 6y ago
    Read this analysis: https://www.myroadtofire.com/blog/how-engineers-can-fire-in-15-years-and-have-4000000-in-net-worth https://www.myroadtofire.com/blog/how-engineers-can-fire-in-... 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.
    - yashap 6y ago
      That analysis is for a software developer, in the Bay Area, going straight to Google out of undergrad. That’s already the exceptional case. 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.
ptrenko 6y ago
People give all kinds of wrong advice when you start out: Take risks when you're young. Fail fast, break things. 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!
- dasil003 6y ago
  Agree if you want to be a millionaire by your mid-30s then aiming for FAANG and saving most of your salary is the most statistically reliable path for a reasonably smart technically-minded person. 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.
rudiv 6y ago
As someone who works for a startup, I long for the day every jackass and their donkey who sold a company to a tech conglomerate will not rule the minds of other startup founders. Sadly it's more likely that I will witness the heat death of the universe.
cercatrova 6y ago
I wonder what the stress would be like if you were running a bootstrapped, profitable business instead of betting everything on one big break, as in VC backed companies. I follow IndieHackers (https://indiehackers.com https://indiehackers.com) and people seem to be pretty chill on there, just treating it as more like a small business making 5 figures a month instead of trying to build unicorns.
hinkley 6y ago
Any serious investigation of stress and how to cope with it will lead to a conversation about activities that energize you, and activities that soothe. Pairing these with stressful events (especially ones you can schedule) can take the edge off. Self-soothing becomes problematic when it is unacknowledged and thus unregulated. Like binging on whatever ice cream is in the frigde after a hard day at work or a difficult conversation with your partner, versus having a little of your favorite ice cream as a reward for making a difficult call to a relative or going to that appointment you've been putting off. 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.

128 points by LeonW 6y ago

tony 6y ago

I like viewing groups as emotional systems, probably more than is helpful in a work environment, but I think some of this could be worth mentioning. > 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)#Family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(psychology)#Fam... - The 8 concepts here: https://thebowencenter.org/theory/eight-concepts/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLQOWoom2d0 (Bowen), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJEewdFPB7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJEewdFPB7M (Minuchin), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql3mPOcX7kY 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!

dumbfoundded 6y ago

I don't entirely agree with the concept. Going through stressful situations can either hack away at your being or it can help make you a more informed and resilient person. 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.

vageli 6y ago
> I don't entirely agree with the concept. Going through stressful situations can either hack away at your being or it can help make you a more informed and resilient person. > 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).
- hosh 6y ago
  It always sucks when you experience it in the moment. This is me with knowing a lot about the meditation and concentration techniques, and having been through numerous rough cycles.
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  You're right that it's not always the either/or. A single experience can help in some ways and hurt in others. Maybe a better way to phrase it is that there are some painful experiences that teach us to change ourselves and others that help us learn acceptance and resilience. 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.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > That doesn't and didn't make the experience more bearable while I was undergoing it 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

DoreenMichele 6y ago

It seems to me we are doing something really wrong if people have so very much emotional baggage from their success. 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.

grantsch 6y ago
do you have a link or know the name of the show? i'd be very interested in watching that
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  It was some HGTV show, possibly "What's with that house?" My recollection: He had some huge, sprawling, insane house in the desert with his own indoor shooting range. It took seven years to build it. The host of the show pointed out that the Empire State Building only took two years, iirc.
BeetleB 6y ago
> 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 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.

cj 6y ago

I agree with this article, from a slightly different perspective. 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.

erulabs 6y ago
Hey Cj! 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?"
- cj 6y ago
  > 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? 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

hosh 6y ago

Glad to see this kind of stuff coming out into the mainstream. I think the author did a good job of normalizing and explaining this.

BeetleB 6y ago
> Glad to see this kind of stuff coming out into the mainstream. 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 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.)
- hosh 6y ago
  I am not talking about emotional intelligence becoming mainstream. In that, I agree with you. 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.

nkozyra 6y ago

There's a cost of ownership here and it's bigger than most people think. You see the success stories, the dramatizations ... 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.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Sounds like a very expensive lottery ticket
willio58 6y ago
Thanks for sharing, good to put these things in perspective every now and then.
outworlder 6y ago
There's an enormous opportunity cost. You could be doing somewhere. Yes, that 9 to 5 job at a megacorp sucks. But you are building your 401k. You can turn off after work. If the company has cashflow issues, the worst that could happen is that you might be let go. You are not really on the hook. 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.
- factsaresacred 6y ago
  I think this discount the enormous satisfaction that comes with creating your own thing. 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.

thinkingkong 6y ago

I hear you. I also think framing emotions through an analogy of finance send you down the wrong path. 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.

_curious_ 6y ago
Refuel, drive fast, walk slow, repeat ;)

skmurphy 6y ago

This strikes me as the wrong framing. It's more about managing your expectations and maintaining a clear-eyed view of the way forward. Life rarely goes as planned. Three rules of thumb I try to remember in a crisis or setback are Gerald Weinberg's set of Rhonda's Revelations: 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.

_curious_ 6y ago
Interesting reframe, thank you.

moneytide1 6y ago

So that's whose been buying all the toilet paper. Ideal moisture absorption texture (tears of emotion). A precious snowflake will also melt Perfectly into this texture (produced from the pulp of trees, see recent paper mill explosion in Maine). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AhKsmLS1cM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AhKsmLS1cM

hirundo 6y ago

To the extent that you're anti-fragile the sign flips and emotional labor leaves behind a credit balance. To a candle flame the wind is an existential threat but if you're a bonfire the wind can make you an inferno. 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.

ptrenko 6y ago

It was too painful. Spent 6 years or so. I;ve given up. Honestly corporate salaries will earn you 3-4 million by the time you are 37 or so. Why bother with rinky dink startups anyways?

yashap 6y ago
Verrrrrry few people earn 3-4 million in the corporate world by 37. Depending on whether you get an undergrad or a masters, that’s ~12-15 years of work. That means you’d have to AVERAGE 200K-333K per year, over your first 12-15 years, to hot that. That’s really, really rare - considering you’d be starting at a much lower salary, you’d have to be at ~$500K by your mid 30s. 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.
- ptrenko 6y ago
  Read this analysis: https://www.myroadtofire.com/blog/how-engineers-can-fire-in-15-years-and-have-4000000-in-net-worth https://www.myroadtofire.com/blog/how-engineers-can-fire-in-... 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.
  - yashap 6y ago
    That analysis is for a software developer, in the Bay Area, going straight to Google out of undergrad. That’s already the exceptional case. 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.

ptrenko 6y ago

People give all kinds of wrong advice when you start out: Take risks when you're young. Fail fast, break things. 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!

dasil003 6y ago
Agree if you want to be a millionaire by your mid-30s then aiming for FAANG and saving most of your salary is the most statistically reliable path for a reasonably smart technically-minded person. 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.

rudiv 6y ago

As someone who works for a startup, I long for the day every jackass and their donkey who sold a company to a tech conglomerate will not rule the minds of other startup founders. Sadly it's more likely that I will witness the heat death of the universe.

cercatrova 6y ago

I wonder what the stress would be like if you were running a bootstrapped, profitable business instead of betting everything on one big break, as in VC backed companies. I follow IndieHackers (https://indiehackers.com https://indiehackers.com) and people seem to be pretty chill on there, just treating it as more like a small business making 5 figures a month instead of trying to build unicorns.

hinkley 6y ago

Any serious investigation of stress and how to cope with it will lead to a conversation about activities that energize you, and activities that soothe. Pairing these with stressful events (especially ones you can schedule) can take the edge off. Self-soothing becomes problematic when it is unacknowledged and thus unregulated. Like binging on whatever ice cream is in the frigde after a hard day at work or a difficult conversation with your partner, versus having a little of your favorite ice cream as a reward for making a difficult call to a relative or going to that appointment you've been putting off. 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.