Start up series part five: identity as a founder
Failing, keeping my sanity and why I still want to do it.
“Sabina, being a good founder is also knowing when to fold a business”. It was early January and I was on a call with Kim Scott when she said that to me. I remember nodding, but the rest of the conversation is erased from memory because there was another voice, in my head, that kept saying “I’m not ready to”. How did that conversation even come about? If you read my previous posts in the startup series, you already know that since launching kahla we’ve struggled to find product market fit, we failed to raise money, we got rejected by Y Combinator, and we’ve self-funded the development of our app for over two years. Any rational person would challenge me to question whether it was time to move on.
I had asked Kim to have a chat with me because I was starting to doubt myself after a long stretch of unsuccessful attempts at figuring out how to make our business work. The beginning of this year was the lowest I’d actually been in a long time. Not only was I depressed and with my anxiety through the roof, but I was also feeling very burned out. Both Emi and I had gone through gruesome fundraising journeys that lasted many months, throughout which I had kept my energy super high and mindset focused on getting it done. I was insanely happy when the Ezra round closed, but I never took a moment to also feel sad about kahla. But then sadness came rushing in.
From January to around the beginning of March I would wake up in the morning, sit at my desk and go through the motions. Plow through emails and to-dos, work on product, get on zoom calls with people. But I would also constantly check the time and count how many hours I had left until I could go to sleep. Except for when I had to, I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want to leave my house or see anyone. I just wanted to stay quiet and crawl in bed, imagine that I could disappear. As my therapist would kindly remind me every other week, this is called depression.
Tech founders talk all the time about product breakthroughs, growth, achieving the impossible, often they’ll even tell you stories about those moments when everything was on the brink of collapse and how they managed to pull though. They’ll talk about crisis situations, having to part with co-founders, fighting with their boards or firing half their company. But even though this hero’s journey narrative is something we all long to hear, admire and applaud, rarely do we also hear about these people’s emotions. Emotional health is messier, “uncool”, and it doesn’t really offer lessons that can be neatly contained within a thread on X. Failure is part of the vernacular, a badge of honor, even. Depression, anxiety, burn out - not so much.
Not being afraid to fail is essential in business and in life. The way many tech founders romanticize failure, however, can be a slippery slope in more than one way. First, becoming disconnected from your emotions does not breed strength or focus, it only creates an illusory sense of control that will eventually crumble. Second, it blurs the lines between failure in building something and failure of being something. To an extent, this is inevitable, but if your entire identity is wrapped up in what you do, you are making it much harder for yourself to find contentment or peace.
If, like me, you graduated college sometime in the early 2010s, you know that being an entrepreneur - or tech entrepreneur to be precise - was the “hottest” thing. To this day, I know people who are consumed by the idea of being entrepreneurs. It’s a human tendency to infuse meaning or certain values that we might deem important into virtually anything. And so it’s easy to see how for some, becoming an entrepreneur can hold not just a sort of fascination, but also the ticket to being “better”, belonging to some group they imagine is superior to, say, advertising executives. It isn’t until you start a company, however, that you realize how important it is to not give an actual damn about being a founder or entrepreneur.
That voice that told me to keep going, the thing that helped me through my darkest moments, was not in the slightest my attachment to being a founder. It was having found something I care about so deeply that I don’t see how I could ever stop. I want to help people be healthier. That’s it. I love the feeling when someone tells me the app we built helped them revert their insulin resistance. Or when someone started eating better because I gave them some tips on how to think about nutrition. Truth is, I don’t need to be a founder to help people be healthier. I could just as easily be a coach or work for a great company that makes health products.
More important than “embracing failure”, “never stopping” and other clichés you’ll hear ad nauseam among entrepreneurs is to cultivate a desire for creating value. I don’t think the world needs more founders because creating companies is intrinsically such a worthwhile pursuit, but I do believe we need more people who understand that you can - and should - create value in any role. So much of how we measure professional success comes down to status and identity, but the real, long-lasting merit lies in the giving, not the gaining.
The struggle and pain are inescapable, but even outside entrepreneurship, the more you are able to separate your identity and labels (founder, VP, CEO, assistant, etc.) from creating value, the better chances you’ll have at finding fulfillment. And when depression (or anxiety, or burnout) hits, you will have to first take care of yourself and replenish that emotional void, but ultimately have an easier time regaining confidence and excitement when you remember it’s not about you.
As for kahla, today I feel more motivated and excited to continue building than ever. We’ve gone back to the drawing board, dreaming up new ways to help people live healthier lives. It might takes us more failed iterations, many more attempts to find product market fit, and lots of rejections. But as Winston Churchill once said, "it is not enough that we do our best, sometimes we must do what is required.” And what is required for me, is not to fold, but rather, keep feeding that feeling I got from our first happy customer.