精疲力尽、焦虑空虚：公司创始人披露创业黑暗面
对大多数纽约人来说，2002年2月都是个艰难时刻。这座城市尚未摆脱“9.11”恐怖袭击的阴影，清理工作仍在进行中。 杰瑞·科罗纳每天都能感觉到这场悲剧的沉重份量。一天上午，在离开一场在金融区召开的会议后，他觉得自己再也坚持不下去了。他不想工作，什么也不想干。科罗纳说：“我走出办公室，站在世贸中心遗址前，打算自杀。” 他给治疗师打了个电话，说自己准备在火车驶来时跳下去。但后者说服了科罗纳到她的办公室去。 彼时，科罗纳38岁，已经是一位小有成就的风险投资家。他和弗雷德·威尔森在1996年创立Flatiron Partners——这是纽约市首批风投公司之一。该公司一度很成功，但在互联网泡沫破裂后开始衰落。Flatiron Partners关门歇业后，科罗纳在摩根大通合伙人公司(JP Morgan Partners)找了份工作。就在“9.11”之前，他在感情和职场上都陷入了困境。这次恐怖袭击过后，科罗纳变得一蹶不振。他说：“我把日程排得满满的，因为我无法忍受那种孤独和空虚；然后我又会取消这些安排，因为我没法去参加。” 2月份的那个上午之后，科罗纳走下了传统的初创公司/风投职业阶梯，而且是一去不复返。他仍是一名创业者，但这家创立于2014年，名为Reboot.io的新公司旨在帮助公司创始人和高管管理劳神费力的工作带来的压力、焦虑和疲劳。 科罗纳说自己并不后悔做出这样的决定，因为这份工作让他过上了健康、诚实而且有意义的生活。同时，科罗纳在职场上的成功远远落后于前合伙人弗雷德·威尔逊。后者又成立了著名风投机构Union Square Ventures，现在是一位货真价实的亿万富翁和风投权威。就像今年夏天科罗纳在布鲁克林的一次科技大会上登台演讲时开的玩笑一样：“《纽约》杂志曾把弗雷德和我称为‘纽约王子’。现在他成了他娘的国王，我则是个宫廷小丑。” 科罗纳知道，许多创业者都不愿做出同样的选择。这意味着他们要扮演好自己的角色。特别是在硅谷和纽约城这样的科技核心区域，信心就是金钱，承认不确定性或者害怕则会导致自信心迅速流失。 然而，最近几年涌现了另一种相反的言论。风投资本家布拉德·费尔德、Moz公司创始人兰德·费舍金和Y Combinator总裁山姆·阿尔特曼等知名风投人士和创业者都曾表示，不，他们并不总是觉得自己“所向无敌”；相反，他们都曾经历过（或者知道其他创业者有过）深深的怀疑和阴郁心理。 这种趋势开启了许多创业者的心扉，促使他们更加坦诚地探讨自己在创业道路上经历的情感折磨。毕竟，他们付出全部心血创建的公司，从统计学意义上讲，恐怕很难生存下去。但就像对失败的描述一样，某种抑郁故事比其他故事更合人们的口味。面对媒体和公众时，还不像费尔德那样声名狼藉的公司创始人，经常把他们的抑郁描述为一段不长的弯路。疲惫、焦虑、甚至是临床上表现出来的悲伤都很痛苦，但在通向最终胜利的道路上，这些都是可以克服的障碍。 以下这个经典案例源自《Inc》杂志于2013年发表的一篇文章，说的是金融危机过后，一位管理咨询公司所有者在必须裁员时怎样陷入了深度抑郁。他远离家人，而且不再离开自己的住所。但不知怎的，“他自始至终仍在努力，以便开发出新的服务项目。”在文章末尾，他不再抑郁了，他的公司也赢得了“有史以来最大的一份合同”。销售额增长了50倍。 类似的事迹不胜枚举，对此科罗纳并不觉得意外。他说：“我们喜欢救赎故事。没人想提及那个黑洞从未真正消失这一事实。”但对许多跟科罗纳打交道的创始人和高管来说，抑郁并非故事的第二章。相反，它随时都可能给人带来打击，造成初创公司倒闭，或者因为公司倒闭而出现。 加州大学旧金山分校精神病专家迈克尔·弗里曼正在研究创业者的性格特征。他说：“大家读到的许多故事最终都会回到愉快的话题上——曾经出现了问题，我们解决了它，现在万事大吉。但精神健康问题并不是这样”，这其中就包括抑郁。弗里曼相信创业者出现抑郁的比例要高于全国平均水平，部分原因可能是性格使然，另一部分原因则是整个创业过程都建立在巨大的风险之上。哈佛商学院经常被引用的一项研究显示，90%的初创型企业都以倒闭告终。逾50%的美国初创公司都挺不过五年。在那些撑过五年的初创企业中，大多都不是价值10亿美元、光鲜亮丽的成功事例，而是苦苦挣扎，以求生存。倾其所有进行创业却以失败收场让人很受伤，这可以理解。 以下两位创业者是朋友，都住在博尔德，他们的初创公司处于不同的阶段——其中一人的公司已经倒闭，目前在别的公司上班；另一个则正在设法为自己的公司进行新一轮融资。他们讲述了自己的抑郁经历。 “公司倒闭就意味着我是个废物吗？” 泰勒·麦克勒莫尔31岁，2010年创立自己的公司前，他从来不知道抑郁是什么东西。最初，他的公司只是一些闪亮的期望以及种子轮融资筹集到的50万美元资金，前景看来很光明。工作繁重，而且作为公司联合创始人，麦克勒莫尔不是被别人洗脑，而是自行洗了脑。 但挫折接踵而至。作为社交游戏网络，麦克勒莫尔的初创公司未能获得足够的成长动力，进而转型为基于Facebook的梦幻体育游戏公司。2013年底，也就是加入博尔德的初创公司加速器项目Techstars不久，这家公司就遭遇大客户欠款问题，资金随即耗尽。 麦克勒莫尔不得不和创业伙伴一起关闭这家公司，也就是说，他们要辞退几名员工，并告诉早期出资人他们的投资已经化为乌有。情感上的痛苦经历就此开始。“公司倒闭就意味着我是个废物吗？”麦克勒莫尔记得自己当时的想法，而且这个问题一直困扰着他。在随后的几个月里，起床要花费极大的气力，离开住所的时间也远少于以往。负面想法在他的脑海中不断循环往复，他不停地剖析自己身上的不足之处。曾经让他感到愉快的社交活动也变成了痛苦的磨难，这在很大程度上是因为别人似乎都干得那么好。 理智告诉他，在博尔德联系紧密的创业者团体中，许多朋友并非“所向披靡”。但麦克勒莫尔说，就算公司实际经营状况一塌糊涂，展现虚假的信心其实是一种“风险最小的做法”。创业者像打仗一样争夺着资金、人才和曝光度，信心则是一种防御机制，也就是说大多数熟人都只会展现光明的乐观态度。 在妻子、朋友和职场熟人连续几个月的关怀和鼓励下，麦克勒莫尔终于能够去寻找新的职业发展机会了。 2014年初，他开始为一家刚刚起步的初创公司提供咨询服务，后者的业务是对科技公司进行投资。如今，他是商业运营负责人，也就是说他有了收入，而且再也不用为了给投资者赚钱或者筹集足够资金来发工资而操心了。 对于是否愿意用目前的相对稳定来换取从头再来一次的机会，麦克勒莫尔停顿了很长时间。最后，他回答说，愿意。统计数字没有变化，他的第二次尝试很可能失败，而且他认为第二次应付那种羞耻、挫败和失望的感觉并不会变得更容易。这听起来是在自讨苦吃，但创业真的就是一种心理柔道。麦克勒莫尔说：“这就是创业者悖论。”你得了解这个行业的“死亡率”，然后“必须驱逐这种疑虑，以便开启自己的事业。”要不然又是为了什么呢？在忙着把这些极高的期盼融入现实的过程中，你自己的身份会和你的公司融为一体，这马上就会变成最好的动力，但也会带来情感灾难。 但麦克勒莫尔说，第二次他会采取不同的做法。最重要的是，他会更早地寻求朋友们的帮助。他们也许不会公开地讲，但其中大多数人都经历过失败以及自信的最低谷。其他人的同情很有用。 他的建议是：依靠你的支持体系，并寻求周围其他创业者的帮助，其中许多人可能都有过类似的情感经历。 “当你去筹集资金时，人们都视你为支柱。但不能保证一年后你的公司依然存在。” 49岁的大卫·曼德尔一直都是个相当忧郁的人。他说：“我天生如此。我们都有一个设定值，有些人设定在快乐的那一侧，有些在不快乐的那一侧，我的设定值则是慢慢接近抑郁。”不过，尽管他从高中开始就情绪多变，但那些通常都被列为自我反省和内向。 当他以不那么骄人的业绩离开自己的第一家公司时，情况有了变化。和许多核心人物一样，曼德尔在两年之后已经不再信任这家和别人共同建立的公司。这在很大程度上是因为来自董事会的“鞭策”（这家初创公司起初是一个社交媒体平台，随后重塑品牌，成为实时搜索引擎，最后则转型为实时广告交易平台）。员工队伍变得庞大起来，但曼德尔痛恨企业文化的改变。他说：“它不友好了。出现了许多‘闭嘴、去干活’的现象。好人都离开了，因为他们不快乐。坏人都留了下来，因为他们不在乎。” 因此，他在2008年秋天辞了职。那是一个黑暗的时刻。他无法阻止自己创立的公司变成一个让自己毫无自豪感的东西，这让他觉得一败涂地。他的脑海中不断重复着一段可憎的话语：“我筹集了大量资金，投资者却不再信任我。我聘请了一大批好人，他们却再也不会和我共事。我要养家糊口，但我不知道以后怎么赚钱。” 他最初的想法是退出，并且不想跟别人打交道。他甚至不想离开家。他难以走出无边无际的失败感。曼德尔说：“我妻子对我不满意。经常出现‘我们现在到底该怎么办’的对话。” 他一直没能摆脱自我封闭状态，直到大卫·科恩找上门来。曼德尔和科恩在Techstars担任导师时相识，后者问他是否愿意给一家进入这个加速器项目的初创公司当顾问。这正是曼德尔需要的救生索；虽然没有这样的感觉，但他的经验和技能仍有些价值。这足以让他从家里走出来。曼德尔开始觉得好了起来。 2011年，曼德尔和一位朋友聊了聊天，后者为自己的公司租了办公场地，但那家公司还不够大，并未充分利用租下的办公室，这给曼德尔带来了灵感。这个意外收获随后变成了转租网站PivotDesk，初创公司可以通过它把闲置办公空间租给自由职业者和更小的公司。和WeWork不同，PivotDesk名下没有任何房地产，但它可以解决短期租赁这个令人头疼的问题。 现在，PivotDesk已经进入了30个市场，包括旧金山、纽约市和波士顿，并已融资近700万美元。但它的资金即将耗尽，曼德尔的新一轮融资也已接近尾声。他对公司的前景很乐观。曼德尔说：“我觉得这个行业已经有了重大变化。显然，很多公司现在都愿意尝试我们提供的解决方案。”但他也意识到，任何一家初创公司都没有十足的胜算。员工向他提出对未来的担忧时，他的态度很明确——他觉得很有希望，但无法做出任何承诺。 这家初创公司倒闭了该怎么办？首先，他说现在自己能更好地应付由此产生的影响。但他也主动表示，自己有一系列的顾虑——他不能让PivotDesk倒闭，因为“我不能让这些人失望，我不能让员工失望，不能让投资者失望，不能让客户失望。”诡异的是，这番话听起来似曾相识。 曼德尔说，如果公司真的倒闭了，他会试着让自己接受他为别的创业者提供的建议，那就是“你没有失败，你的公司没能成功。你白手起家，承担了几乎没人承担过的风险，而且学到了很多东西。”鉴于他和抑郁的“渊源”，曼德尔成了一批公司创始人的导师，他经常采用的逻辑是“你的价值并不等同于公司的价值”。 但说实在的，他知道这会把自己击倒在地。曼德尔说，公司倒闭时，“根本没办法将其抛诸脑后，这是一个令人悲伤的过程。” 他的建议：不要逃避自己的情绪，但要告诉自己，公司倒闭和人生失败是两码事。“你很有价值，可以为别人做很多事，没人知道接下来你会做什么，但你会去做一些有意义的事。”他觉得，陷入困境的创业者应该多听听这样的话。（财富中文网） 译者：Charlie 审校：詹妮 | February 2002 was a difficult time for most New Yorkers. The city was reeling from the attacks of September 11th. The cleanup effort was still underway. Jerry Colonna felt the weight of the tragedy every day.One morning, after leaving a meeting in the financial district, he decided he couldn’t do it anymore. Not the job, not any of it. “I stepped outside the office and stood in front of Ground Zero and wanted to kill myself,” he says. He called his therapist and told her he was going to jump in front of a train. She convinced him to come to her office instead. Thirty-eight at the time, Colonna had found early success as a venture capitalist. Along with Fred Wilson, he launched Flatiron Partners in 1996, one of New York City’s first VC firms. It was a success until, following the dotcom crash, it wasn’t. When the firm shut down, Colonna took a job at JP Morgan Partners.Just before September 11, Colonna was struggling emotionally and professionally. After the attacks, he was a mess. “I was filling my calendar because I couldn’t bear the loneliness and emptiness, and then canceling them because I couldn’t bear to go,” he says. Following that morning in February, Colonna got off the traditional startup/VC career ladder — for good. He’s still an entrepreneur, but his venture, Reboot.io, which he started in 2014, is devoted to helping founders and C-suite executives manage the stress, anxiety, burnout and other byproducts that come with a demanding job. He says he doesn’t regret the decision — it’s allowed him to live a healthy, honest and meaningful life. At the same time, Colonna is far less professionally successful than his former partner Fred Wilson, who went on to launch Union Square Ventures and is now a bonafide billionaire VC guru. As Colonna joked onstage at a tech conference in Brooklyn this summer, “New York Magazine had called Fred and I the ‘princes of New York.’ He’s now a f**king king, and I’m a court jester.” He understands that many entrepreneurs aren’t willing to make the same trade, which means they need to act the part. Particularly in the tech enclaves like Silicon Valley and New York City, confidence is currency and admitting uncertainty or fear quickly drains the bank. And yet, over the past few years, a counter narrative has emerged. High-profile venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, including venture capitalist Brad Feld, Moz’s Rand Fishkin and Y Combinator president Sam Altman, have declared that no, they don’t always feel like they’re “crushing it,” and yes, they have (or know entrepreneurs who have) experienced feelings of intense doubt and darkness. It’s a trend that’s opened the door for more honest discussions about the emotional toil of pouring everything into a company that, statistically, won’t make it. But as with the failure narrative, certain types of depression stories are more palatable than others. To the press and public, founders who have yet to reach Feld-level notoriety often portray their depression as a contained arc. Burnout, anxiety and even clinical sadness are painful but ultimately surmountable bumps on the road to eventual success. Here’s a classic example, courtesy of a 2013 Inc. article, which describes how the owner of a management consulting firm fell into a crippling depression when, following the financial crisis, he had to lay off employees. He withdrew from his family and stopped leaving the house. And yet, somehow “through it all, he kept working to develop new services.” At the article’s close, he is no longer depressed and his company “scored its biggest-ever contract.” Sales are up 5,000%. There are a lot of accounts like this, which doesn’t surprise Colonna. “We love stories of redemption,” he says. “No one wants to talk about the fact that the black hole never really goes away.” But for many of the founders and executives he’s worked with, depression isn’t a story’s second act. Instead, it can strike at anytime and contribute to a startup’s failure, or spawn from its collapse. “In a lot of stories you read, it regresses back to happy talk at the end — there was a problem, we solved it and now it’s all fixed,” says Michael Freeman, a psychiatrist who is studying the personality traits of entrepreneurs at University of California, San Francisco. “But that’s not the case with mental health issues,” including depression, which he believes affects entrepreneurs at a higher rate than the general population. That’s likely partially due to personality type, partially because the entire proposition is built on outsized risk — according to a frequently cited Harvard Business School study,nine out of 10 startups fail. More than 50% of U.S. startups don’t make it past the five–year mark, andmost that do aren’t flashy, billion–dollar success stories, but companies fighting to keep the lights on. Pouring everything you have into a venture that goes belly up understandably hurts. Below two entrepreneurs, friends living in Boulder who are at different stages in the startup cycle — one is working at another company after his own venture failed, and the other is trying to raise a new round of funding for his business — share their experiences with depression. “If this business was a failure, does that mean I’m a failure?” Before Taylor McLemore, 31, started his own company in 2010, he’d never experienced anything close to depression. And in the beginning, when it was nothing but shiny expectations and $500,000 in seed funding, the future looked bright. The workload was heavy but as the company’s co-founder, McLemore hadn’t just drunk the Kool Aid — he’d mixed it himself. But then came the setbacks. After failing to gain enough traction as a social gaming network, his startup pivoted to become a Facebook-based fantasy sports company. At the end of 2013, shortly after joining the startup accelerator Techstars in Boulder, one of its largest clients failed to make a payment and the startup ran out of capital. Along with his co-founder, McLemore had to shut the company down, which meant letting go of a handful of employees and telling early backers their investment was effectively worthless. That’s when the emotional anguish set in. “If this business was a failure, does that mean I’m a failure?” he remembers thinking. The question wouldn’t leave him alone. For months getting out of bed, much less leaving his house, took enormous effort. In looping cycles, pernicious thoughts dissecting each one of his many inadequacies ran through his brain; once pleasurable social activities became painful ordeals, in large part because everyone else seemed to be doing so well. On an intellectual level, he knew many of his friends in Boulder’s tight-knit entrepreneurial community weren’t “crushing it.” But engaging in feigned, projected confidence even when things fall to pieces is “the lowest risk move,” says McLemore. Entrepreneurs are at war for cash, talent, exposure — confidence is a defense mechanism, which meant most acquaintances projected only sunny optimism. Only after months of persistent outreach, from his wife, friends and professional connections, was he able to seek out new career opportunities. In early 2014, he began consulting for an early stage startup that invests in technology companies. Today, he’s the director of business operations, which means he gets a paycheck and no longer has to worry about making money for investors or raising enough capital to pay his employees. When asked if he would trade this relative stability to try it all again, he pauses for a long time. His answer, ultimately, is yes. The statistics haven’t changed — his second attempt would likely fail, and he doesn’t think the feelings of shame, defeat and disappoint will be easier to handle the second time around. It sounds masochistic, but really it’s just that starting a business is a game of mental jujitsu. “That’s the paradox of being an entrepreneur,” he says. You need be informed about the industry’s mortality rate and then “you have to expel that disbelief to start something.” Otherwise, McLemore says, what’s the point? In the race to merge these outsized expectations with reality, you conflate your own identity with that of your company’s, which is at once the best motivator and a recipe for emotional disaster. Still, next time around he says he’ll do things differently. Most importantly, he’ll reach out to friends earlier. They may not advertise it, but most have their own experience with failure and basement-level self-confidence. Commiserating helps. His advice: Lean on your support system and reach out to other entrepreneurs in your community — many of them have likely experienced similar emotions. “When you are out raising money, people are counting on you. But there are no guarantees you’ll have a business a year from now.” David Mandell, 49, has always been a pretty melancholy guy. “It’s been my whole life. We all have a set point — some people’s set points are on the happy side, some people’s set points are on the not as happy side. My set point is edged towards the depression side,” he says. But while he had moody tendencies from high school onwards, it typically registered as introspection and introversion. When he left his first business on not-so-great terms, that changed. After two years — and just as many pivots — Mandell no longer believed in the company he’d co-founded. In large part, this was due to board-incited whiplash (the startup began as a social media platform, rebranded as a real-time search engine, and finally morphed into a real-time ad exchange platform). Employee count had blossomed, but Mandell hated what the culture had become. “It wasn’t friendly,” he says. “There was a lot of just ‘shut up and do it.’ The good people were leaving because they were unhappy, and the bad people were staying because they didn’t care.” And so in the fall of 2008, he left. It was a dark time. His inability to stop his startup from turning into something he wasn’t proud of made him feel like a complete failure. An ugly mantra ran through his head on repeat: “I had raised a bunch of money from people and they aren’t going to have any faith in my any more. I hired a bunch of good people and they’ll never work with me again. I have a family and I don’t know how I’m going to make money.” His initial recourse was to retreat. He didn’t want to socialize. He didn’t even want to leave the house. The sense of failure was all-encompassing. “My wife was not happy with me,” Mandell says. “There were a lot of ‘what the hell are we doing to do now’ conversations.” He didn’t shake the claustrophobic self-image until David Cohen, whom he’d met when they both were mentors at Techstars, asked if he’d be an advisor to one of the the startups cycling through the accelerator program. The request was the lifeline he needed; while it didn’t feel like it, his experience and skills were worth something. It was enough to get him out of the house. He started to feel better. In 2011, after speaking to a friend who had rented space for his company but had yet to grow enough to fill it, Mandell had an idea. That revelation would become PivotDesk, which enables startups with extra square footage to rent out space to freelancers and smaller companies. Unlike WeWork it doesn’t own any property, but manages the headache of facilitating short-term leases. The company is now in 30 markets, including San Francisco, New York City, and Boston. To date, it’s raised nearly $7 million. But PivotDesk is running out of cash; Mandell is in the process of closing a new round of funding. He’s bullish on the company’s prospects — “I think we’ve seen a big shift in the industry…the willingness to try and accept what we’re doing as a real solution is more significant now,” he says — but also recognizes that a startup is never a sure thing. When employees approach him with concerns about the future, he’s transparent: he’s hopeful, but can’t make any promises. What if the startup fails? At first, he says he’ll be better equipped to handle the fallout this time. But unprovoked, he runs through a list of concerns: He can’t let PivotDesk fail because, “I can’t let these people down, I can’t let my employees down, I can’t let my investors down, I can’t let my customers down.” It sounds eerily familiar. If things do fall apart, he says he’ll try to internalize the advice he tells other entrepreneurs: “You didn’t fail, your business didn’t succeed. You started something from nothing, took a risk few people ever take, and learned a lot.” Since his bout with depression, he has become something of a mentor to a network of founders, and ‘your value is not the same as your company’s’ is a line of logic he employs often. But realistically, he knows it it would crush him. When a company fails, “there’s no way to brush that off,” he says. “It’s a mourning process.” His advice: Don’t run from your emotions, but remind yourself that failing at a business is different from failing at life. “You are valuable, you have a lot to offer, who knows what you will do next, but you’ll do something good” are things he doesn’t think struggling entrepreneurs hear enough. |
