The social and personal trade-offs of building a startup
May 22, 2021
I never planned to start a company. There was no lemonade stand, no entrepreneurship club. Simply, I became obsessed with an idea, and the only way to work on that idea was to start my own company. So here we are.
Since then, I’ve completely fallen in love with the art of building and growing a company (thankfully)! While I genuinely enjoy the process, interesting unintended effects have emerged in parallel. I’m sharing here some of my observations of how this experience has affected me psychologically, personally, and socially.*
I can only speak to my experience and I am still very early on in the process, so please do not interpret this as prescriptive or declarative! I’ve focused on the less favorable consequences as I think those are more interesting to dig into - and because the positives have been written about many times already.
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It throws your personal life off balance. You hire and fire friends, you lack the time to invest in relationships, you become unreliable and flakey, you are tired. Work mode will blend into personal mode. People will be weird to you. In general, your personal life suffers.
Less time to invest in yourself. My personal growth rate has slowed to a crawl since I started my company. I presumably have a set amount of growth bandwidth per day, and all of mine goes towards my professional half at the expense of my personal half.
You have to be chronically aware of your flaws to have any hope of growing at the rate necessary to scale a company. It is futile to attempt to firewall this to just your professional side, so you face your personal flaws too. The catch is that you won’t be able to work on all, so you’ll triage, simultaneously constantly aware of yet unable to act on many suboptimal facets of yourself.
You constantly make mistakes. You will make mistakes, and then reap the consequences of those mistakes, over and over again for years. Per the previous point, you have to be painfully cognizant of your mistakes (and probably post-mortem them).
Compensatory mechanisms. You have to be independent professionally, so personally you crave security and care. You have to be tempered and ultra-mature professionally, so personally you are quicker to emotion. This has been one of my bigger challenges.
Your ego will be tempted. Even worse, people will play to your ego to get you to do things they want. Succumbing to this is so tempting (it feels way better than most other aspects of company building) but can be severely damaging.
You will be the bad guy. If you do your job right, you will give people painful feedback, fire them, be the person they complain about to their friends. You will ruin many other peoples’ days and weeks.
You become apathetic. The highs don’t feel as high anymore, and the lows become just part of the process. It’s not that I don’t care (I really do), it just is easier to keep on chugging forward at a consistent rate instead of slowing down to react.
You are always looking around the corner. This is crucial to preempt mistakes and circumvent potholes in the path, but induces baseline anxiety that never really goes away.
Your personality will be simplified into one plane. You are your company.
People become transactional. Consciously or subconsciously, people often want something from you. It is difficult to differentiate who cares about you for you, versus what you might be able to do for them.
Your performance significantly affects the future quality of life of your team. This really got to me in the early days. Success doesn’t just mean a big exit, it means that a subset of people who you grow to care about personally and professionally have a meaningfully improved quality of life. Failure means they lose that opportunity. That is a heavy burden to bear.
*I am sharing these mostly to reflect, and possibly reassure others that feel similarly.