Founders & suicide

The names in this post are all pseudonyms.

Last July my friend John decided to end his life.

John was someone I had gotten to know in the San Francisco tech/startup firmament; he was an ex-FAANG software engineer who had started a successful media business and became a minor industry celebrity in the process. He had a pretty extreme and public meltdown (following an early-pandemic breakup with another semi-well known VC person) that culminated in a lot of pain and ostracization and lost professional opportunities, leading him to a place where things seemed hopeless and he couldn’t take another day. Now he’s gone.

Another friend, Bill, went through a similar saga at around the same time. He was the co-founder and CEO of a startup that had experienced some growing pains under his leadership. The board decided that he should no longer be the leader, and he was removed from his CEO position and replaced with his co-founder. This decision came as a shock to him, and he deteriorated very quickly thereafter. It’s a little unclear what happened next (he’s still alive) but what we do know is that a major depressive episode led to multiple police encounters, forced institutionalization, and likely one or more suicide attempts.

These are two different people who did not know each other, and their stories have different outcomes. But I sense some commonalities between the two. Both of these men had recurring mental illnesses that got a whole lot more severe during a taxing and isolating period in world history (2020-2021). They both founded startups and took pride in the “founder persona” and everything that came with it — prestige; proximity to important people; the expectation that one day they’d be very rich and very famous. When that identity was annihilated in dramatic fashion (both in private via boardroom action, or in public via manic Twitter fights, dis-invitations to conferences, etc) they didn’t have any support structure remaining to prop up their egos in a healthy way. It was like they had so much riding on their professional identities that they could not manage to be resilient to severe setbacks or adversity without collapsing.

The role of the founder in our society (particularly American society) is very odd. On one hand we lionize these people and talk about them like they have some special voodoo or creative powers that the rest of us don’t. (Note that at most startups, the title “founder” is held in more reverance than “CEO”… a new CEO can come in to run the company but they can never be a founder, and a founder remains a founder even if he/she leaves the company). We put them on the covers of magazines and let them get away with things that most regular folks can’t.

And yet we absolutely beat the shit out of them. The SVB saga revealed just how widely despised they are by the general public. Many are mocked, vilified, and doubted. Founders have to make payroll while at the same time building something out of scratch that hasn’t existed before. The vast, VAST majority of them don’t make any money or get famous. And if they do become successful, it’s only a matter of time before somebody or something much richer than them tries to get them fired and replaced.

There’s just a lot of emotional energy pent up in being a founder, and an extremely strong impulse to make their job into their entire identity in an attempt to deal with all of that shit. I’m talking nominally about founders but really I could be talking about executives, investors, professors, coaches, whatever; anything hard and all-encompassing that might tempt you as an answer to the question “who are you?”.

Paul Graham has a great essay about keeping your identity small. It would be pretty ridiculous for me to give this advice, considering that my work involves typecasting founders in clear violation of that suggestion. But I guess all I want to say is that there can be a lot of misery in over-identifying with your profession, or really any descriptor that you signal to the outside world about your intrinsic qualities. If your self-worth rests on something that needs to remain continuous for you to feel OK (your job, your status) then you’re vulnerable to having your entire sense of “okay-ness” eradicated by a few unlucky breaks. Like what happened to my two friends.

I hope you know that, regardless of whatever kind of grind you’re on, and however many hours you put in each week, and how badly you want to win… you are a lot more than just your day job.

"So all is lost?"

Describe yourself: your traits, qualities, both good and bad. 

Do not use the word "am." 

Practice this.

(The Last Psychiatrist)