Entrepreneurship and Abuse
The Friday Finance Break
(For anyone just tuning in, every Friday we take a break from the CFO content and talk about founder mental health. If you're just here for the CFO stuff, we'll see you Monday!)
Steve Blank -Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and a person credited as the father of modern entrepreneurship- said something the other day that blew my mind.
In an interview with the In Depth Podcast, the host asked Steve what he thought were the predictive qualities of an outlier founder, the kind capable of outsized success.
His theory?
Growing up in a dysfunctional family. Because, according to Steve, it confers advantages such as:
Ability to operate in chaos and uncertainty
Being anti-social and not caring about people
Tendency to work irrationally long hours
Survival mentality
Here's the thing:
I first heard this podcast 2 months ago and I think I'm STILL processing it.
It was an insight offered so nonchalantly by Steve
But it sent my brain completely spinning.
My top thoughts swirling around:
What data is this assertion based on? We've all heard stories about Jobs and Elon, but is that really the norm? I found this study which seems to be what most experts and articles reference when making this point. It explores the relationship between childhood adversity and entrepreneurial skills. My reading so far? It sounds like Steve is exaggerating. There's a trend here, but the correlation is nuanced.
The exploitative relationship between young entrepreneurs and investors is very real. Investors give you money, and in return, they expect years of hustling like your life depends on it. If savvy investors have a bias towards investing in entrepreneurs with a history of family dysfunction (because they, like Steve and his late mentor Katherine Gould, think that that's what makes a good founder), is the VC/founder relationship essentially just recreating a well-worn pattern of abuse for many founders?
And finally, if the Father of the Lean Startup Methodology (aka. The modern playbook we basically ALL use to grow startups these days) believes that you need a history of abuse to numb your empathy, drive you to work insane hours, and put you in a constant state of survival mode in order to thrive as a startup founder, MAYBE we should be questioning this whole modern startup methodology??
I'm still not done thinking about this interview.
But here's what I know for sure:
The journey of being a founder is intense.
The emotional toll it can take is real.
What it "means to be a founder" is constantly evolving,
And isn't up to one dude or study to define.
And
We all owe it to ourselves,
No matter what our origin story was,
To take care of ourselves
And each other.
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