Boulder Startup Week: Leaders talk stresses of the founder lifestyle

BOULDER — Boulder Startup Week 2020 started off with a focus on how startup founders are facing an epidemic of untreated mental health problems, and how they can strike a balance between work and their lives.

The panel was moderated by Aaron Houghton, who spent his twenties building marketing software firm iContact before selling it for $170 million in 2012.

Initially, the first three years were fun for him as the head of a high-growth tech firm as a 20-something in the early 2000s. But as investors placed more pressure on the company to grow rapidly, he started working so hard that he began to have panic attacks and suffered sleep and nutrition deficits. In 2009, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer.

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Soon after selling the company, he said he had a panic attack so great that it felt like cardiac arrest. That suffering led him to want to help other startup owners find balance between their work and their health.

A 2015 study estimates just under half of entrepreneurs have some sort of mental illness, with 11% reporting a history of bipolar disorder. But Houghton believes many of those startup owners are keeping their health issues out of public view, putting their ideas and drive potentially out of society’s view.

“This leaves us as entrepreneurs incredibly and particularly vulnerable to the stress and pressure and uncertainty that we endure doing what we do every day,” he said. “But most of us suffer in silence.”

Kristin Darga, a Denver-based executive coach, said while running her first company out of her apartment, she got to the point where she would sometimes drink a bottle of wine in a single night. Eventually she made a rule to stop drinking alone in her home, but that didn’t address the deeper issue.

“It wasn’t really the drinking that was the problem,” she said. “It was really just the loneliness, the thoughts, the trying to not go out and spend money on all those little things for entrepreneurship.”

Startup culture is pitched to society by showing only successes instead of the considerable risk and stresses that running your own company brings, she said, leaving many hopefuls unprepared to handle the toll it takes. She later launched Impact Founder in 2015, a project where Denver-based startup leaders talk about their struggles with balancing external success and internal illnesses.

Dave Mayer, CEO of Boulder-based Technical Integrity, started the tech recruitment firm in 2010 as he was co-founding another startup. Several 80-hour workweeks and a falling out with a co-founder later, and he said he was sent to the hospital for exhaustion.

He has since sat on multiple panels talking about entrepreneur mental health.

“It’s OK to be stressed, and it’s OK to understand the difference between being stressed and in distress,” he said.

The panelists later took questions from the audience about:

Honesty with the team: Mayer said it can be awkward for founders or leaders to tell their subordinates or their board about failures. He recalled a story from a CEO who was trying to raise money in 2008, taking the stance that the company is about to get plenty of funding. When the economy contracted, so did access to capital.

She returned to her office not saying a word to anyone because she was embarrassed. But upon some reflection, she was able to be vulnerable with the board and her staff, priming the planning for charting the company’s next strategy.

“The answer is always a measure of humbleness and candor,” he said. “It’s not cockiness, it’s not holding stuff in, it’s not withholding information or withholding secrets.”

Seeking counseling: Darga said she’s working with a company that encourages its staff to seek support from a therapist when needed. While that’s easier said than done for companies that can afford health insurance policies covering mental health services, she said it’s partially the responsibility of startup leaders to keep their staff well.

“Just as you are creative with your company, you can be that creative with their founders for their mental wellness,” she said.

Impostor syndrome: Houghton said competitors the marketing software segment and crimped the free growth iContact had in its early years. He had spent so much of the past several years building the company that he aligned his identity to it. If it failed, his self-confidence would as well.

The offer to sell the company for $170 million came at a turbulent time, and Houghton took the chance because he was beginning to agree with the part of himself that didn’t think he could keep the business as successful as it became.

“Everything was on the line,” he said. “If my business failed, 98% of my identity would be destroyed, and it felt so risky.”

But in that time, he said he realized he was ignoring the other parts of his identity, including as a husband, and realized he had to find more time to nurture those other segments of his life.