Founding a company is hard and mentally taxing. There’s plenty of literature out there about entrepreneurship's emotional toll. Not only are the odds forever stacked against founders, but they deal with a seemingly insurmountable pile of problems: people problems, market problems, product problems, customer problems, etc. There are always fires.
One of the ways I learned to cope with the highs and lows of the roller coaster was to simply become numb to it all. I've had multiple board members share that I never seemed happy when things were going "up and to the right," and that I never seemed fazed when we were facing an existential cataclysmic meltdown. I don't particularly think this is a good thing - it's important to be emotionally present to acknowledge and celebrate wins (although I think I probably did an adequate job here since I was surrounded by people who were good at this). But I do think it's fine when dealing with the lows. I'd rather a steady hand in times of turmoil.
There are two tools I wished I used more frequently to better manage myself and improve as a leader: coaching and therapy. I look at them as two distinct practices, but sometimes one may use a single practitioner for both. I've engaged with a variety of executive coaches, but my favorite has been Jason Gore from Neuberg Gore. I even brought in multiple coaches to work with our leadership team at Fundera which was an excellent investment and something I recommend other founders do if they have the resources.
Founding a company is hard and mentally taxing. There’s plenty of literature out there about entrepreneurship's emotional toll. Not only are the odds forever stacked against founders, but they deal with a seemingly insurmountable pile of problems: people problems, market problems, product problems, customer problems, etc. There are always fires.
One of the ways I learned to cope with the highs and lows of the roller coaster was to simply become numb to it all. I've had multiple board members share that I never seemed happy when things were going "up and to the right," and that I never seemed fazed when we were facing an existential cataclysmic meltdown. I don't particularly think this is a good thing - it's important to be emotionally present to acknowledge and celebrate wins (although I think I probably did an adequate job here since I was surrounded by people who were good at this). But I do think it's fine when dealing with the lows. I'd rather a steady hand in times of turmoil.
There are two tools I wished I used more frequently to better manage myself and improve as a leader: coaching and therapy. I look at them as two distinct practices, but sometimes one may use a single practitioner for both. I've engaged with a variety of executive coaches, but my favorite has been Jason Gore from Neuberg Gore. I even brought in multiple coaches to work with our leadership team at Fundera which was an excellent investment and something I recommend other founders do if they have the resources.
In my experience, what has made coaching work for me, and specifically my relationship with Jason, is focusing on very actionable situations. When I had to prepare for difficult conversations with teammates I'd rehearse them with Jason. When I had to figure out how to customize my management style, or even whether to adapt it to certain people, I'd workshop it with my coach. He equipped me with a variety of super effective tools that made my life easier as a leader and manager. And having that sounding board that could advise me every other week or so while being somewhat embedded in my management/leadership flow and cadence was super helpful. You have to make so many decisions as a founder; it's really comforting and useful to have someone to consistently dig into and help with the most important ones. In retrospect though, what makes for an effective coach, at least for me, is someone who can help me confidently do the things that I like least (i.e. having hard conversations, quickly) while strengthening the things I do well.
I never did therapy while building companies but I wish I had. I started around a year ago after a mentor I deeply admire recommended it. He had been doing it for decades. I asked him why and he said, "So I can understand why I feel the way I do, hone in on what makes me happy, and do more of that." I liked that so I took the plunge. It was really hard for me to get into for the first couple months. But then something clicked and I started to pay attention to my emotions (which I had spent the past decade attempting to suppress in the workplace for the sake of my mental health and operating capabilities). Identifying emotions is difficult, but now I am getting better at being able to do it in the moment. And when I can identify how I feel and why I feel that way, I can better understand my behaviors and proclivities. That alone is an extremely powerful tool to have as an entrepreneur - the ability to recognize how you feel in the moment and how that feeling may influence your behavior. I wish it was one I was able to to consciously use, or at the very least even be aware of, over the course of my early career.
If coaching is about doing, then therapy is about feeling.
Coaching and therapy are expensive, but I think the combination of the two is a powerful one for entrepreneurs. It's cliche to say you have to invest in yourself, but you really do. You just cannot do the job for an extended period of time without having a sound mind (and ideally a sound body, too), you will simply wither away and grow to resent the things that make life and building things beautiful and enjoyable. I'm grateful for having the opportunity to use these practices day to day. I think they make me better at what I do, happier, and a better person.
I recently started reading Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil. The book begins describing the first forager civilizations. Being a forager sucked. You went around hunting with your tribe for food. If you killed an animal or caught some fish, you could eat and live another day to do it all over again. If you didn't, you'd die. As I was reading this section, I went to the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. It's amazing. If you haven't been to Mexico City or the Museum of Anthropology, you should absolutely go if you can. In it, there was an exhibit that chronicled the evolution of Mexican civilization from foragers to an agrarian one. It reconfirmed my suspicion that being a forager totally sucked.
For all the right reasons, public sentiment towards crypto is spiraling. Scammers, ponzi schemes and the like are being exposed daily, and unfortunately it's coming at a real monetary cost to unassuming ecosystem participants. Alas, it is easy to be a critic when things are so painfully awry. I am by no means a crypto-absolutist, nor am I an outspoken skeptic. I think the most prevalent use case for crypto today is speculation in the form of a global casino that operates 24/7. There are a few other use cases and projects that cross the chasm and provide real value to network participants like Helium, but they're the exception, not the rule. But I still want crypto to succeed and remain long-term bullish and optimistic.
Crypto is a potentially very important innovation within the technological revolution that is the information age. It's important because it has the potential to deliver a rather utopian end state to the proliferation of software as it continues to eat the world and infiltrate our daily existence. I want it to succeed because I would like to see the following ideals exist and believe that crypto is well-suited to support them:
A structurally sound alternative to incumbent control: Azeem Azhar does a good job illustrating the problem in his book The Exponential Age(read my review here). The gist is that a handful of executives at tech companies control a majority of our data that's lodged in silos and influence our daily lives significantly more than most of us would like to acknowledge. Crypto is a logical and viable way to decentralize that consolidated power. If the history of business is the bundling and unbundling of services, crypto can be a force for unbundling (or disaggregating). Here's a good Albert Wenger article on why this is important.
Users are owners: Today's incumbents have created some of the most impressive businesses in history on the back's of their users (who received and continue to receive impressive value from them). One of the things I love most about crypto is the notion that network participants can become owners of the networks they help build through token incentives. To date these token incentives have had a rather perverse impact on most projects (i.e. participants game projects early on to earn tokens in the hopes of selling them off without really caring much for the longevity of the service itself), but the idea is powerful and wonderful. Here's a nice piece by Fred Wilson about token business model innovation.
Democratized governance as a coordination experiment: In addition to being user owned, most crypto projects have a stated end goal of being governed by their users. This is a fundamental premise of DAOs, and some projects have done a nice job handing off the reigns to their users. There's something fascinating about this. There are a lot of obvious downsides, but the notion of democratic governance for the most important internet protocols and services is a fascinating experiment. If you want to dive deeper here's a great podcast featuring Joel Monegro.
Transparency and composability can accelerate the pace of innovation: Crypto is open source by design, and it's composable so I can mix and mash existing applications however I'd like. Imagine if you could take the pieces of Google, Twitter, etc. that you love most, combine them and then build something new that you'd like to use on top of them. Being able to assemble internet applications like legos is a powerful tool for rapidly building and testing new applications. Here's a deeper dive by Linda Xie.
There are other aspects of crypto that I like (namely that it's fun and that DeFi can create a more inclusive global financial ecosystem), but these are the ideals that I value most and would like to see flourish in the real world. Crypto is the most viable foundation for them. I don't know if it will happen. For all the capital and time that has been deployed in the space by brilliant builders and investors, it certainly has not fulfilled its promise. But the future is still there for the taking, and I remain optimistic.
**Sometimes I like to revisit these articles that helped me understand how important crypto can be:
In my experience, what has made coaching work for me, and specifically my relationship with Jason, is focusing on very actionable situations. When I had to prepare for difficult conversations with teammates I'd rehearse them with Jason. When I had to figure out how to customize my management style, or even whether to adapt it to certain people, I'd workshop it with my coach. He equipped me with a variety of super effective tools that made my life easier as a leader and manager. And having that sounding board that could advise me every other week or so while being somewhat embedded in my management/leadership flow and cadence was super helpful. You have to make so many decisions as a founder; it's really comforting and useful to have someone to consistently dig into and help with the most important ones. In retrospect though, what makes for an effective coach, at least for me, is someone who can help me confidently do the things that I like least (i.e. having hard conversations, quickly) while strengthening the things I do well.
I never did therapy while building companies but I wish I had. I started around a year ago after a mentor I deeply admire recommended it. He had been doing it for decades. I asked him why and he said, "So I can understand why I feel the way I do, hone in on what makes me happy, and do more of that." I liked that so I took the plunge. It was really hard for me to get into for the first couple months. But then something clicked and I started to pay attention to my emotions (which I had spent the past decade attempting to suppress in the workplace for the sake of my mental health and operating capabilities). Identifying emotions is difficult, but now I am getting better at being able to do it in the moment. And when I can identify how I feel and why I feel that way, I can better understand my behaviors and proclivities. That alone is an extremely powerful tool to have as an entrepreneur - the ability to recognize how you feel in the moment and how that feeling may influence your behavior. I wish it was one I was able to to consciously use, or at the very least even be aware of, over the course of my early career.
If coaching is about doing, then therapy is about feeling.
Coaching and therapy are expensive, but I think the combination of the two is a powerful one for entrepreneurs. It's cliche to say you have to invest in yourself, but you really do. You just cannot do the job for an extended period of time without having a sound mind (and ideally a sound body, too), you will simply wither away and grow to resent the things that make life and building things beautiful and enjoyable. I'm grateful for having the opportunity to use these practices day to day. I think they make me better at what I do, happier, and a better person.
I recently started reading Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil. The book begins describing the first forager civilizations. Being a forager sucked. You went around hunting with your tribe for food. If you killed an animal or caught some fish, you could eat and live another day to do it all over again. If you didn't, you'd die. As I was reading this section, I went to the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. It's amazing. If you haven't been to Mexico City or the Museum of Anthropology, you should absolutely go if you can. In it, there was an exhibit that chronicled the evolution of Mexican civilization from foragers to an agrarian one. It reconfirmed my suspicion that being a forager totally sucked.
For all the right reasons, public sentiment towards crypto is spiraling. Scammers, ponzi schemes and the like are being exposed daily, and unfortunately it's coming at a real monetary cost to unassuming ecosystem participants. Alas, it is easy to be a critic when things are so painfully awry. I am by no means a crypto-absolutist, nor am I an outspoken skeptic. I think the most prevalent use case for crypto today is speculation in the form of a global casino that operates 24/7. There are a few other use cases and projects that cross the chasm and provide real value to network participants like Helium, but they're the exception, not the rule. But I still want crypto to succeed and remain long-term bullish and optimistic.
Crypto is a potentially very important innovation within the technological revolution that is the information age. It's important because it has the potential to deliver a rather utopian end state to the proliferation of software as it continues to eat the world and infiltrate our daily existence. I want it to succeed because I would like to see the following ideals exist and believe that crypto is well-suited to support them:
A structurally sound alternative to incumbent control: Azeem Azhar does a good job illustrating the problem in his book The Exponential Age(read my review here). The gist is that a handful of executives at tech companies control a majority of our data that's lodged in silos and influence our daily lives significantly more than most of us would like to acknowledge. Crypto is a logical and viable way to decentralize that consolidated power. If the history of business is the bundling and unbundling of services, crypto can be a force for unbundling (or disaggregating). Here's a good Albert Wenger article on why this is important.
Users are owners: Today's incumbents have created some of the most impressive businesses in history on the back's of their users (who received and continue to receive impressive value from them). One of the things I love most about crypto is the notion that network participants can become owners of the networks they help build through token incentives. To date these token incentives have had a rather perverse impact on most projects (i.e. participants game projects early on to earn tokens in the hopes of selling them off without really caring much for the longevity of the service itself), but the idea is powerful and wonderful. Here's a nice piece by Fred Wilson about token business model innovation.
Democratized governance as a coordination experiment: In addition to being user owned, most crypto projects have a stated end goal of being governed by their users. This is a fundamental premise of DAOs, and some projects have done a nice job handing off the reigns to their users. There's something fascinating about this. There are a lot of obvious downsides, but the notion of democratic governance for the most important internet protocols and services is a fascinating experiment. If you want to dive deeper here's a great podcast featuring Joel Monegro.
Transparency and composability can accelerate the pace of innovation: Crypto is open source by design, and it's composable so I can mix and mash existing applications however I'd like. Imagine if you could take the pieces of Google, Twitter, etc. that you love most, combine them and then build something new that you'd like to use on top of them. Being able to assemble internet applications like legos is a powerful tool for rapidly building and testing new applications. Here's a deeper dive by Linda Xie.
There are other aspects of crypto that I like (namely that it's fun and that DeFi can create a more inclusive global financial ecosystem), but these are the ideals that I value most and would like to see flourish in the real world. Crypto is the most viable foundation for them. I don't know if it will happen. For all the capital and time that has been deployed in the space by brilliant builders and investors, it certainly has not fulfilled its promise. But the future is still there for the taking, and I remain optimistic.
**Sometimes I like to revisit these articles that helped me understand how important crypto can be:
Life got better as humans developed the skills necessary to stay put and farm land. And then it proceeded to get even better as we found new ways to adapt to the world (or adapt the world to us) over time. We invented things - tools, medicines, technologies, governance, and more - and through centuries of trial and error as we accumulated knowledge these things interacted with one another, compounding to make life even better, faster.
Every day we are surrounded by chaos and proclamations that the world is heading towards irreversible catastrophe. There's a lot to be upset and despondent over, but lately I've been forcing myself to zoom out and appreciate just how blessed we are to be alive right now. We've come unfathomably far over such a short period of time in the grand scheme of human history. It's an absolute miracle and testament to the ingenuity and perseverance of humans. So while we face very real risks both presently and in the future, I believe they are surmountable, and that at the end of the day we will find a way to continue to progress.
Life is hard and can be unpleasant when you're constantly reacting to the bombardment of "Everything is Fucked!" It is so much more pleasant and productive when appreciating and acknowledging our collective and continuous progress. The climate crisis, pandemics, the erosion of democracy - all of these things are very real threats to our existence and our ability to make progress - but we are well equipped to tackle them and continue on our trajectory of constantly doing spectacular things.
Life got better as humans developed the skills necessary to stay put and farm land. And then it proceeded to get even better as we found new ways to adapt to the world (or adapt the world to us) over time. We invented things - tools, medicines, technologies, governance, and more - and through centuries of trial and error as we accumulated knowledge these things interacted with one another, compounding to make life even better, faster.
Every day we are surrounded by chaos and proclamations that the world is heading towards irreversible catastrophe. There's a lot to be upset and despondent over, but lately I've been forcing myself to zoom out and appreciate just how blessed we are to be alive right now. We've come unfathomably far over such a short period of time in the grand scheme of human history. It's an absolute miracle and testament to the ingenuity and perseverance of humans. So while we face very real risks both presently and in the future, I believe they are surmountable, and that at the end of the day we will find a way to continue to progress.
Life is hard and can be unpleasant when you're constantly reacting to the bombardment of "Everything is Fucked!" It is so much more pleasant and productive when appreciating and acknowledging our collective and continuous progress. The climate crisis, pandemics, the erosion of democracy - all of these things are very real threats to our existence and our ability to make progress - but we are well equipped to tackle them and continue on our trajectory of constantly doing spectacular things.
