Can you create a startup without sacrificing your mental health? Bonobos founder Andy Dunn thinks so | TechCrunch

Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the builder’s chair, working on a social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he learned from his $310 million Bonobos exit aren’t so much about entrepreneurship as they are about common sense.

While in college, Dunn was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but did not receive adequate treatment until 2016, when he was hospitalized during a second manic episode. .

“The state of insanity is a disaster — it’s like being in a mental crisis, you know, messiah’s laughter. … There’s nothing you can achieve in that state,” Dunn said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. The event is was enough of a wake-up call that 16 years after he was first diagnosed, he finally took his condition seriously and began going to therapy, taking medication, and take care of his sleep.

Dunn wrote a book called “Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind,” documenting the same process of building Bonobos and finding a way to accept and manage his bipolar disorder. But the lessons from this book are more applicable to entrepreneurs than those with Dunn’s syndrome.

“We all have good mental health, don’t we? There is no need to be diagnosed to feel pain or struggle,” he said.

However, entrepreneurs tend to report higher incidences of mental health problems throughout their lives than the average person.

“There is definitely a connection between neurodivergence and creativity,” he said. “I don’t know if the business attracts neurotic people, or makes them neurodivergent, but there is some kind of positive and sometimes negative cycle.”

That link between mental illness and business makes even more sense to Dunn, who says a state of hypomania — a high level of hypomania, as opposed to periods of severe depression — can be beneficial to start.

Here are the DSM categories [hypomania]: faster speech, more emotions, creativity, less need for sleep, the ability to be more creative … more or less the central characteristics of an entrepreneur who has a good day, “he said. “I was able to benefit from that, but the price I paid ended up being very high. I was depressed for two to three months.” in a year, and finally, complete insanity and psychosis returned, which was disastrous.”

But despite his incredible performance, Dunn doesn’t think he was a great boss or co-worker. One of the side effects of hypomania, he said, is irritation when people disagree with you, which is essential to running a collaborative company. Now, while running Pie, Dunn accepts this argument.

“When we disagree, let’s go, let’s disagree more, because we’ll be able to make a better decision out of it,” he said.

Although conversations about mental health have become more common, founders are still concerned about the stigma of disclosing a diagnosis to colleagues and investors. Dunn is an advisor to the Founder Mental Health Pledge, which asks investors to advocate for the mental health of the founders they invest in. Concerned about the health of investors, he says to wait six weeks until after the deal is closed.

“We’ve raised $125 million at Bonobos – would you give $125 million to someone who might be psychotic or depressed?” Dunn said. But again, you don’t have to do what I did and hide it, because then, you know, when there’s a disaster, it’s a weird thing.

Dunn’s discussion of his experience with bipolar disorder doesn’t seem to have hurt his fundraising ability, however — Pie recently raised an $11.5 million Series A round. Depression is serious, he is also open about his treatment. of therapy and medicine have helped him live a stable life.

“I treat bipolar disorder as my Olympic form. For Simone Biles, it’s a way to go and win gold,” he said. To me, the gold medal is dying for something else, right? Because the scary thing about bipolar disorder is the suicide rate.”

Now, Dunn’s next challenge is to do the work necessary to make Pie successful without sacrificing his stability.

“Here’s the challenge,” Dunn said. “We want to be mentally healthy, and we want our teams to be mentally healthy, and yet the 40-hour workday isn’t going to cut it. You can’t change the world with a team of people who work 40 hours a week.”

Another way that Dunn has managed this well is to talk to job seekers about what the job will entail, as well as how it will support them with the company’s benefits.

“I have a new spiel that I offer when I recruit, that is, this is a job of 50 to 60 hours a week, and in return, you will get two surprises. Point. first, you will learn more, and grow more, and improve. Second, you have balance,” he said.

Like any new leader, Dunn wants his team to work hard, but he believes there’s a way to do that without getting frustrated. Describing his time at Bonobos with “Burn Rate,” Dunn writes, “I came to the wrong conclusion of an immature founder: if the business isn’t working, we shouldn’t be working hard enough.”

There’s no denying that founders need to work hard – but self-care is part of that hard work.