This was a tough week for whoever cares about Tech and Startup news. One very nice, respected and loved member of the (World / LA / Las Vegas) community shot himself taking everyone by surprise. Close friends or members of the startup community had a big “Why?” stuck on everyone’s mind.
Some of the news:
- Techcrunch
- PandoDaily (1) and (2)
- Both Sides of The Table / Mark Suster
Let me say this:
THIS THING FREAKS THE SHIT OUT OF ME!
It also makes me angry.
During my first years as an entrepreneur (last 3 years + warm up) I’ve been earning all the “me too” opinion makers saying that building your own company is awesome, being entrepreneur is awesome, joining a incubator is awesome. Everyone should be an entrepreneur! A Zuckerberg gets filthy rich with a once-in-a-lifetime thing called facebook, someone makes a movie about it and suddenly everyFuckingBody says it’s so cool to be an entrepreneur.
Fuck That! I’ve always got scared about doing this incredibly difficult thing. It is hard! Why are people romanticizing it?
I called my startup a “project” for a long time even if I was working full time on it. I was scared to fail. Like I wouldn’t call myself surfer just because I was trying to stand on a surfboard, I was not calling myself entrepreneur openly. Specially at first, I was scared to fail. Entrepreneurship was/is even something negative in my culture when parents, friends and society thought that a job in a bank is definitely better! I was, still am and probably will always be freaggin’ scared to fail. That’s both good and bad, I guess.
But I never understood those people promoting the romantization of entrepreneurship. Expressing my negativity toward that in a country like Denmark where negativity is usually not a welcome doesn’t come clean.
The second thought that comes to mind is exactly that. It’s just NUTS how it works: It’s HAAARD; Ups & downs 7 times a week. It’s nuts how no one cares or appreciates it and sometimes even seem to fight the little peace of mind that one can (&must) have. Depression, on any form, can come and go so fast that tipping over the edge isn’t that hard. It’s sad. And scary.
Now depression is starting to be seen as something that needs to be addressed since it’s more common than thought before. And it’s part of our industry. Interestingly enough, Ben Horowitz mentioned it long time ago when saying that CEO’s have the worst job in the world and it’s all about their own mind. Having to grant salaries to your people sucks when you’re sitting on the edge between nothing and chaos!
Mark Suster and Brad Feld always advocated for the role of family, friends and balance in live. Brad Feld’s recent book (Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur) is sadly but fortunately timed perfectly and one book on my wishlist: we should all put more into ourselves and into the ones that matter.
