Mental Health

Startup Snapshot, a think tank uncovering the unspoken realities of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, has released its latest report, The Untold Toll (Part 2): Navigating Stress, Wellbeing, and Burnout in Startup Teams . The emotional and mental state of startup teams has emerged as one of the most overlooked drivers of company performance. Startup Snapshot illuminates the unseen side of startup life through global data collected from startup employees. It’s the first study of its kind, and the findings are candid, revealing, and deeply human. ...

I’m currently at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2025 in Indianapolis. Yesterday, at the end of the day, I spent several hours at High Alpha hanging out with my friends and then doing a Give First: The Power of Mentorship book event with them and about 150 people. One of the questions during the book talk was around mental health and entrepreneurship. I talked about my own experiences with anxiety and depression and explained that my core diagnosis, which I was diagnosed with in my 20s, was obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I said that one of my goals for being open was to destigmatize mental health issues, especially in the context of entrepreneurship and mentioned that I periodically hear something like “I’m OCD and it’s my superpower” and dismissed that idea as nonsense, since OCD is an insidious thing that gets in the way of so many things in life. ...

After I wrote my post on Unhibernating , my long-time, empathetic friend Christopher Schroeder , whom I originally met through Ben Casnocha (that story is discussed in Give First: The Power of Mentorship ), sent me a short note asking, “Have you been ok?” I responded with a long email explaining why I decided to hibernate in the summer of 2023 and why this hibernation lasted almost two years. After writing a long email (which I’ve been doing a lot of during my hibernation), I asked Chris if I could post my response to my blog, and he said, “Of course.” ...

Startup Snapshot, a data-sharing platform for the entrepreneurial ecosystem, recently released its latest report, The Untold Toll: The Impact of stress on the well-being of startup founders and CEOs . Clearly, the emotional state of founders and entrepreneurs in any period, especially now in this economic environment, is a critical driver of success. Yet the emotional, cognitive, and physical toll that founding and leading a startup takes is dangerously overlooked and rarely spoken about. ...

After my post about the Founder Mental Health Pledge , I received a note from Kari Palazzari, the Executive Director of Studio Arts Boulder , a local nonprofit that manages a community pottery studio. She lamented that very few members of the Boulder startup community seem to take advantage of their programs. She said, “Studio Arts Boulder would love to help support the Founder Mental Health Pledge.” A couple of my local colleagues have taken classes at the pottery studio, and they speak avidly about the impact of working with clay. It helped them be less stressed and more focused, which makes a big difference when tackling a startup’s unique problems. Kari said, “People come out of the studio less twitchy, for sure.” ...

Since the middle of last week, there has been extreme stress on founders, startup leaders, and the extended startup community. This stress accelerated on Friday when the FDIC shut down and took over Silicon Valley Bank. By late Friday, anyone who banked with SVB was concerned about … well … everything. Once it became clear that payroll accounts needed to be funded on Monday to make Wednesday’s payroll, we focused on the immediate short-term to ensure our portfolio companies’ thousands of employees got paid on time. We bank at SVB, so our maneuverability was also unknown, so we searched for what I’d consider heroic options from various sources. ...

David Cohen and I have co-hosted the Give First podcast for 71 episodes. I think our host ratio is 80/20 David/Brad, and he’s covered everything in 2021 because I was burned out on all things public-facing and needed a break. He figured a good way to get me back in the mix would be to interview me about entrepreneurship and mental health, so that’s what Episode 71 is about. Listen & subscribe to the Give First podcast on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , and more .

It’s time for the 2nd annual Emerge Virtual 5k Run produced by Rise Against Suicide (formerly Second Wind Fund of Boulder County). It’ll be from 8:00 am to Midnight MT on Sunday, May 2, 2021. Amy and I are helping underwrite it as we did last year and I just signed up to run it. Rise Against Suicide provides access to funded counseling services for at-risk youth struggling with suicidal ideation in the geographic areas included in Boulder Valley School District and St. Vrain Valley School District. Youth up to the age of 19 who are at elevated risk for suicide, uninsured, or underinsured are eligible for funded counseling services through Rise Against Suicide. The organization receives referrals from private and public elementary, middle and high schools, community social workers, psychologists and mental health professionals, hospitals, and mental health facilities. Within hours of receiving a request for help, at-risk youth can be connected with qualified, private therapists. This immediate response is unique to Rise Against Suicide. ...

The Covid crisis has generated an extraordinary amount of what I like to call “false reassurance.” Consider how many times you heard something general like the following some time in 2020. Everything is going to be ok. We will get through this pandemic. Things will go back to normal. You’ll look back on this as a unique time in your life. Or, consider all of the messages you heard about the severity of the disease over the past year. Most of the messaging, until recently, was not “79,000 people in the US are going to die of Covid in the first 26 days of 2021.” ...

Mental health has been an issue among tech entrepreneurs for a long time, but has been exacerbated by the stresses of the Covid crisis. On March 31, I wrote a post called The Three Crises in which I suggested that the Covid crisis was the collision of three crises, each of which is a complex system. The health crisis (the disease) created the economic crisis (our economy was in strong shape before Covid), which would accelerate a mental health crisis. In the US, we have a fourth crisis amplified – the racial equity crisis – which has been going on since the inception of our country. ...