Dharmesh Shah has hosted informal "founder therapy dinners" for 15 years, bringing entrepreneurs together to discuss challenges and realize they're not alone. Loneliness is the biggest problem founders face at every stage, and most struggles come from people dynamics, not product or market issues.
Chapters
The one thing I've been doing though, I've been doing it for 15 plus years now. I do these informal dinners with people that I know I've met online. And some people I know, some people I don't know. Every city I travel into all these kind of random ad hoc dinners. And I have a couple of hacks, as you might expect, for these dinners. One is I never plan them in advance. I send the email the day of and say, oh, by the way, I'm in town, my schedule's changed. Are you open for dinner? Question number two is, do you know anyone else that you've been wanting to meet or you think I should meet? And we'll have dinners from anywhere from two people to 30 people, any given thing. And the overall, and I don't label it as this, but it's what I call, and I've done this now, semi officially I call it the founder therapy dinner. Right? And this is super important. And as I was going through it and I try to get round tables instead of square tables, there's a bunch of weirdness that goes into how I pick venues and stuff. I sound for solve for acoustics because you want to have a conversation. And it's funny because what ends up happening is that the same dynamics that exist in group therapy actually apply here. And 50% of problem that founders go through, which is a 50% problem that any kind of issue you're dealing with is this kind of belief that you're alone. Like I am the only one living this thing wherever there's something wrong with me. And that's why I'm having these problems. If I were a better founder, I would not be having these issues. And I have found overwhelming evidence that all founders have almost the same issues. Same issues. Most of them are people issues, as it turns out, but they have the issues. And maybe they may be time shifted and based on stage, they've either lived them, but they're living something. I have not met a single founder, including ones that are multi billion dollar companies now, that says, oh yeah, it was a really tough ride those first three or four years, but boy, is it easy now. Like I don't have any. Like, no, it doesn't happen, right? So I strongly encourage you as you're going through this because a find a co founder or multiple co founders, because startup life is super lonely. Like super super lonely. And if you misguidedly don't get a co founder, find, find a peer group that you can kind of talk to on a regular basis and kind of vent and share and kind of live the journey, at least with someone else.
