Startup Founders’ Drivers, Stressors and Coping Mechanisms
We live in the era of unicorns and decacorns, where being a founder of a startup is glorified. The stories of startup successes are often shortened and one can rarely learn about the reality and the cost of doing so. I have explored this topic in-depth in my thesis “Transcending The Price of Innovation: From Coping with Stressors to Inspiration” based on the interviews with eleven founders and co-founders of nine innovative startups. My focus was on social and psychological challenges, the tremendous stress founders are experiencing, what helps them cope and keep going.
Upon sharing this work with a few founders, I received some fantastic feedback, which inspired me to write this post and make the thesis publicly available for them and their peer network of entrepreneurs.
“As a Founder, you only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.”
Although everybody talks about founders' success, it is a challenging and stressful journey. There are not enough platforms where experienced entrepreneurs share their failures and the common mistakes novices make. Those who dream of becoming successful entrepreneurs need to appreciate the risks and challenges involved beforehand. There is little literature showing the reality of how hard it is to be a founder and the emotional roller coaster they go through.
I have been running an executive search firm focused on Emerging Tech for almost a decade, helping Founders build great executive teams. In addition to that, I am deeply immersed in a startup ecosystem as an accelerator mentor, a startup advisor to the founders of globally-dispersed portfolio companies of a few VC firms and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD. Through this work, I have heard many stories about the difficulties founders face on their way to success. Observing their progress over a period of a few years, it made me curious “What drives the founders of innovative startups despite the high levels of stress they experience?”
This curiosity turned into the main thesis topic for Executive Master in Change at INSEAD - the program that integrates business education with a range of psychological disciplines focusing on the basic drivers of human behaviour and the hidden dynamics of organisations. The importance of understanding yourself and others at a fundamental level is at its’ core as it allows us then using that knowledge to create more effective organisations.
“The most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology.”
The entire experience of working on this research, co-creating the findings presented below through my conversations with the successful entrepreneurs, turned into a fulfilling experience. I could easily write a thesis on each of them and appreciate them giving me time during their busy day to share their stories in a sincere and authentic manner, allowing me to capture the pulse of every founder.
I focused my research on innovative founders, as they have to deal with the additional stress that builds up over time. For them, the pool of validators is often limited to zero and they experience a constant feeling of not being understood presenting their solutions. Founders need to keep working on their idea and be a driving force for their company while making difficult business decisions. Such an intense environment is referred to as “the purgatory of entrepreneurship”.
“The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.”
To give you a taste of the findings, I’m sharing the highlights of one of the three themes covered in the thesis - The Coping Mechanisms, where we dig deeper into the experiences of innovative entrepreneurs, the importance of having social support network of like-minded individuals.
Coping Strategies and Social Support Network
Lifestyle and the change of the environment - especially important during the COVID’s work from home times. What helped our founders was changing the scenery, carving out some “me time” for overall well-being and sports. They also have provided the depth of examples to really grasp how crucial it is. From my experience of working with many founders, I know they tend to disregard the work-life balance as long as they can keep going. It is not sustainable long-term, and it’s better to learn from the experiences of others than figuring things post burn-out, when not just your health, but your company, and sometimes your entire life is ruined.
Cognitive restructuring and reframing - the nature of entrepreneurship makes tolerance for ambiguity a more valuable asset than other commonly attributed characteristics. The concept of negative capability is a state in which a person can be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. One may simply call it reflective inaction.
A social support network of like-minded founders - while traditional informal support networks like family and partners are helpful, there is a gap only like-minded founders can fulfill, as they could truly empathize. It proved to be the most useful as a way to fit in and feel less isolated and misunderstood, playing a role of a safe space for our founders, e.g. allowing them to be vulnerable and share their struggles and thoughts as their True Self while applying humor to alleviate the stress.
External independent parties with no vested interest because their focus lies solely on a founder. They create a holding environment, helping founders build emotional capability to successfully navigate their path. Like entrepreneurial mentoring, they play a key reflexive role by asking founders questions, allowing them to learn and grow leveraging their own experience.
By sharing this thesis, I want to create a higher level of awareness of the emotional struggles amongst entrepreneurs and provide them with a practical tool for coping with stress. For the wider startup ecosystem community, it reiterates the importance of creating an effective social support network for startup founders.
Regretfully, due to the limitation in the number of words, a large part of the research is not yet public. I intend to cover it with a series of future blog posts dedicated to fundraising and common hiring/firing mistakes when engaging co-founders and core executive team members.
I will keep you updated using the email you will leave when downloading the thesis.
And now, I encourage you to allow yourself to take a break, empty your mind and enjoy the reading, reflecting on what resonates with you on a deep level.
Feel free to reach out, yours truly, author,
Juliet Kasko