Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the builder's seat, working on an in-person social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lesson he learned from the $310 million Bonobos exit has less to do with entrepreneurship and more to do with staying sane.
Dan was diagnosed with bipolar disorder during college, but didn't receive adequate treatment until 2016 when he was hospitalized for a second time for a manic episode.
“Mania is just a disaster. It's like being in a psychosis, with delusions like a savior. “…You can't accomplish anything in that state,” Dunn said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. The incident was enough to set off a wake-up call that, 16 years after his initial diagnosis, he finally took his condition seriously and began treatment, taking medication. , and monitor his sleep.
Dan wrote the book Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind to document the parallel process of building Bonobos and finding ways to accept and manage his bipolar disorder. But the lessons learned from this book can be applied beyond entrepreneurs who have received Dan's diagnosis.
“We all have mental health, right? You don't need a diagnosis to suffer and suffer,” he said.
Still, entrepreneurs tend to report higher rates of mental health problems over their lifetime than the average person.
“There's definitely a correlation between neural divergence and creativity,” he says. “We don't know whether entrepreneurship attracts neurodivergent people or whether entrepreneurship makes neurodivergent people more neurodivergent, but there is a kind of virtuous and sometimes unvirtuous cycle there. It is certain that there is.”
For Dunn, the interplay between mental illness and entrepreneurship is even more evident, as hypomania (the high phase of bipolar disorder), as opposed to periods of severe depression, can be helpful in running a startup. It is said that there is a sex.
“The DSM criteria are: [hypomania]”Speaking faster, being more creative, having grandeur, less sleep deprivation, the ability to be more creative…more or less, these are the core qualities of an entrepreneur who has a good day,” he said. spoke. “I was able to benefit from it, but the price I paid in the end was too high. I was depressed for a few months a year with suicidal thoughts, but in the end I was completely depressed. The mania and psychosis flared up again and it was devastating.”
But even in his surprisingly productive hypomanic state, Dan doesn't think he was the best boss or coworker. He said one of the side effects of hypomania is that he becomes easily irritated when people have different opinions, which is essential to running a joint company. Dan, who now runs Pai, welcomes the discussion.
“When you disagree, let's stop, let's disagree even more, because we'll make better decisions from there,” he said.
While discussions about mental health have become more mainstream, founders still worry about the stigma of disclosing their diagnosis to colleagues and investors. Dunn is an advisor to the Founder Mental Health Pledge, which asks investors to advocate for the mental health of the founders they invest in. But he is not naive that the stigma still exists. When a founder asks for advice on when to disclose his mental health, he says to wait six weeks before closing the deal due to health concerns for investors.
“We raised $125 million with Bonobos. Would you please donate $125 million to someone who may be mentally ill or catatonic?” Dan said. “But you shouldn't do what I did and hide it, because when a crisis happens, it's surprising.”
Dan's talk about his experience with bipolar disorder doesn't seem to have hurt his fundraising efforts, as Pai just raised an $11.5 million Series A. As much as he's been open about the severity of his bipolar disorder, he's also been open about his treatment. Treatment and medication allowed him to lead a stable life.
“I treat bipolar disorder like an Olympic cure. For Simone Biles, it's how to navigate it and win the gold medal,” he said. “For me, a gold medal would be dying from something else, right? Because the scary thing about bipolar disorder is the suicide rate.”
Now, Dan's next challenge is to do the work necessary to make Pi successful without sacrificing Pi's stability.
“Here's the challenge,” Dunn said. “We want to maintain good mental health and we want our team to have a balanced mental health, but a 40-hour work week is still not enough. You can't change the world with too many people.”
One way Dan navigates this fine line is by being open with job seekers about what the job entails and how the company's benefits support them.
“The new thing I want to say when hiring is that this is a 50-60 hour per week job, and you get two great things in return. “Learn more, grow more, develop more. The second thing is, you have the capital,” he said.
Like other startup leaders, Dan wants his team to work hard, but he believes there are ways to do it without it backfiring. Dunn writes about his time at Bonobos in Burn Rate, “I came to the typical flawed conclusion of an inexperienced startup founder: If the business isn't working, then our efforts aren't working.'' There must be a shortage of them.”
There's no denying that founders need to work hard, but taking care of yourself is part of that hard work.