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Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the construction chair, working on a personal social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he’s learned from his $310 million bonobo exit are less about entrepreneurship and more about staying sane.
When Dan was in college, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but didn’t get proper treatment until 2016, when he was hospitalized during his second manic episode.
“The manic state is just a catastrophe — this is like being in a state of psychosis, you know, messianic delusions. You can’t accomplish anything in this state,” Dunn said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. The incident was a wake-up call after 16 years after his initial diagnosis, he took his condition seriously and began treatment, taking medication, and monitoring his sleep.
Dan wrote a book called Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, in which he documents the parallel processes of building a bonobo and learning how to accept and then manage his bipolar disorder. But the lessons from the book are applicable to entrepreneurs beyond those diagnosed with DAN.
“We all have mental health, right? It doesn’t take a diagnosis to suffer or struggle,” he said.
However, entrepreneurs tend to report a High infection rate of mental health problems throughout their lives than the average person.
“There is definitely a relationship between neural difference and creativity,” he said. “I don’t know if entrepreneurship attracts neurodivergent people, or if it makes them more neurodiverse, but there’s definitely kind of a virtuous and sometimes not-so-virtuous cycle there.”
This interplay between mental illness and entrepreneurship is even more pronounced for Dunn, who says that a hypomanic state — the peak of bipolar disorder, as opposed to crushing periods of depression — can help run a startup.
“Here are the DSM criteria for hypomania: rapid speech, increased thinking, grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, the ability to be more creative… These are more or less the central selection traits of the businessman who spends a day,” he said. well”. “I was able to benefit from that, but the price I paid in the end was very high. I was depressed with suicidal ideation for two to three months a year, and then eventually, the full-blown manic-psychotic state came back, which was disastrous.” .
But even in his amazingly productive hypomanic state, Dan doesn’t think he was the greatest boss or colleague. One side effect of hypomania is that you become irritable when people disagree with you, which is essential to running a collaborative company, he said. Now, while running Pie, Dunn welcomes that discussion.
“When we disagree, let’s go, let’s disagree more, because we’ll be able to make a better decision as a result,” he said.
While discussions about mental health are becoming more common, founders still worry about the stigma associated with disclosing a diagnosis to colleagues and investors. Dan is a consultant to Founder’s Pledge to Mental Healthwhich asks investors to advocate for the mental health of founders in whom they invest. But he’s not naive that the stigma still exists — when founders ask for his advice on when to disclose mental health concerns to investors, he says to wait six weeks until after the deal closes.
“We’ve raised $125 million in bonobos — are you going to give $125 million to someone who could be suffering from psychosis or catatonic depression?” Dunn said. “But also, you shouldn’t do what I did and hide it, because then, you know, when there’s a crisis, it’s a surprise.”
Dan’s discussion of his experience with bipolar disorder doesn’t appear to have hurt his ability to fundraise, though Bey just brought up $11.5 million Series A. As much as he speaks publicly about how serious bipolar disorder is, he is also open about how his treatment regimen and medications have helped him live a stable life.
“I treat bipolar as my Olympic system. For Simone Biles, it’s about how you navigate it and win the gold medal. “For me, the gold medal is about dying because of something else, right? Because the shocking thing about bipolar disorder is the suicide rate.
Now, the next test for Dunn is to do the work required to make Pie successful without sacrificing his stability.
“That’s the challenge,” Dan said. “We want to have good mental health, we want our teams to have balanced mental health, and yet the 40-hour workweek doesn’t do that. You can’t change the world with a group of people working 40 hours a week.
One way for Dunn to cross this fine line is to be open with job candidates about what the work will entail, as well as how he will support them with company benefits.
“I have a new saying when hiring, which is that this job takes 50 to 60 hours a week, and in return, you get two great things. First, you get to learn more, grow more and develop more. Second, you have equity.
Like any startup leader, Dan wants his team to work hard, but he believes there is a way to do it without it backfiring. Describing his time at Bonobos in Burn Rate, Dan wrote: “I came to the classic wrong conclusion of an immature startup founder: If the company isn’t working, then we’re definitely not working hard enough.”
There’s no denying that founders need to work hard, but taking care of themselves is part of that hard work.
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