Startup founders believe so strongly that something is wrong in the world that they can will an entirely parallel dimension into being: A world that is different from the world we are in today.
From there, it gets more challenging: Founders often put in incredible amounts of resources into their companies. And for many founders, the line starts to blur — it can be hard to know where the person ends and the company begins.
There hasn’t been a ton of research on the prevalence of mental health issues among founders, but what there is speaks loudly. In fact, some of the characteristics that coincide with mental health ailments could, in fact, be beneficial for entrepreneurs. For example, one study suggests that receptor genes that could indicate ADHD have also been associated with sensation seeking, novelty seeking and entrepreneurship. Another study indicates that hyperthymia (a persistent form of mild mania) that often shows up as part of bipolar spectrum disorders can be beneficial for people in high-pressure jobs.
One company that’s looking into this more deeply is Pilea, which was spun out — and is still supported by — a VC fund that was founded with an unusual thesis: What if we put mental health front and center?
“I experienced the problem firsthand. I was a former artist, founder and solo fund manager,” said Howie Diamond, co-founder and managing partner at Pure Ventures. He experienced burnout and started digging into the problem. “I realized that [mental health problems] were pervasive throughout the entire startup ecosystem. I then substantiated it via research and data, and developed a solution.”
Like all entrepreneurs, the team found a problem that needs to be solved. Multiply that problem with the realization that 65% of startups fail due to people-related issues, and the personality profiles associated with founders, and the pieces of the puzzle started to stack up: This isn’t just a personal problem for the startup founders. This was starting to look like a risk to everyone in the startup ecosystem, not least the investors who have a fiduciary responsibility to look after their investments.
“I realized that all my founders were struggling, and we had this beautiful, cathartic moment, where we realized that we’re all in this together,” Diamond said. “At first, I was connecting them to one-off resources in the mental health world that I was kind of vetting on my own.”
The team realized that helping people one-off wasn’t sustainable and decided to build a comprehensive health and wellness platform. That in-house-built solution eventually became Pilea.
“I was coming out of my clinical psychology degree, and had a focus on organizational behavior,” Kari Sulenes, co-founder at Pilea, told TechCrunch+. “I started listening, talking to founders and understanding what was going on. And I was pretty sure that I was going to hear problems with fundraising, or how you set up good systems and processes and the best practices of startups. And what I ended up hearing instead was burnout story after burnout story after burnout story.”
They wanted to build a team of interdisciplinary coaches, therapists and wellness providers. They started working with folks in the VC firm’s portfolio.
The rest of the ecosystem takes notice
The VC world is small, and word spread about a VC firm helping founders in a new way. Other VCs soon started calling Pilea (then called Atlas) asking for help with their own founders.
These days, Pilea describes what it does as “integrative leadership,” rather than health and wellness. “Integrative leadership means that we’re focused on the whole system, including the body and nervous system,” Sulenes said. “We think this is a foundational piece of creating societal change. I think we’re probably closer to heart-based organizational consultants than we are to therapists.”
Heart-based, to Pilea, is the act of bringing your full self — including your emotional landscape and your professional and personal challenges — to the table.
Pilea focuses on startup founders, which is where the company thinks it can have the most impact. “We’re most interested in working in a place that has impact at scale. Startups are one of the most profound examples of that,” Sulenes said. “We say we like to work with jet skis, not cruise liners. We’re interested in groups of people that can nimbly shift, and are also making an outsize impact on the world.”
You don’t have to do it alone
“There is this performative aspect of founders, talking about how great everything is, and how much they’re crushing it and blah, blah, blah,” Diamond said. “But that’s a false reality; the reality is that founders are suffering. I was suffering, and I could not find resources to help me. I had to put on this sort of veil of success and confidence, all the time, particularly to my investors.”
Of course, humans are complex; you can’t always work on the things that happen during work hours.
“Companies [often] mimic the family environment,” Sulenes said. “So we’ll see family patterns play out in the workplace.”
It’s understandable, too, that team members may hesitate to work with a company-provided coach; HR departments aren’t there for the employees, after all. But Pilea’s work with founders is fully confidential and includes some guidelines for companies to follow. “Part of our condition of working with a company is that we don’t take assignments. So if someone’s having a performance problem, we as coaches will not take on their performance problem and report back to their boss,” Sulenes said. “We won’t take anyone who’s mandated. It has to be completely voluntary and 100% confidential.”
In addition to the confidential nature of the relationship between Pilea and the companies it works with, the organization makes the firms sign an NDA.
“As soon as founders start talking about what’s going on, as soon as they realize that having another perspective, having someone to bounce ideas off of, realizing that their leadership team is actually interdependent, rather than hierarchical, [they] see everything shift.”
How are you really?
Pure Ventures pays for Pilea’s services out of its management fees and is working to reduce the stigma associated with mental health.
“We’re effectively giving founders permission to work on themselves, and we’re subsidizing the cost, which has never been done,” Diamond said.