Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship No One Talks About

9 May 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:14

In this monologue, Cameron Herold argues that true entrepreneurship is far rarer than the current cultural hype suggests, noting that only about 3% of the population—those with bipolar or ADHD traits—align with the entrepreneurial mindset. He critiques the way entrepreneurship has become a trendy, Instagram‑friendly brand, while the genuine, gritty challenges are hidden. Herold explains that founders rarely discuss the painful realities—such as theft, embezzlement, firing friends, missed payroll, and nightly anxiety—because revealing them could damage their brand, team morale, or investor confidence. Instead, they showcase curated images of success, creating a social‑media façade that masks the day‑to‑day hardships and mental‑health strain that many entrepreneurs endure.

Chapters

There's only 3% of the population are bipolar. Only 3% of the population are traditionally ADHD, and it correlates very closely with the 3% that are actually entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship in my mind has become too trendy and too fashionable and too like cool, and people are trying to be an entrepreneur. Maybe they should be entrepreneurial, but the people that actually have the DNA and then the skill sets to match, to really be an entrepreneur, to really be a company, is much less than has become trendy. The other thing is no entrepreneur that I've ever met will tell the truth about how hard it is while it's happening. We'll talk about it a year or two later, But we can't talk about the real dirty, hard, crappy stuff because it can hurt our brand, it can hurt our team, it can hurt our company's confidence. So we tend to live in that little silent shelter, or we have— maybe we only tell a couple of our friends, or we tell our coach, or maybe a mastermind that we're in. But no one talks about the theft or the embezzlement or having to fire a friend or not being able to meet payroll or the worry that we have at night. So we live in this kind of silent compression bubble, which amplifies the stress and the depression we go through. But we do tend to share the, oh, here's 'Beautiful life I've got.' And 'Here I am flying private.' And 'Here I am on all my vacations.' So we share the good stuff, and everybody on social media only sees the good stuff. It's kind of like nobody shows how hard our normal day is at home either.