A startup founder explains why therapists trained for corporate workers often miss the unique pressures founders face. When a therapist suggests quitting, they don't account for the half million dollars invested or the fact that you are the company's public face. The founder of anti-addiction startup Onward appeared on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper, making personal failure feel like public failure.
I think one of the challenges is finding a therapist who can appreciate, you know, the challenges of running a startup. This is a real— it's really different from being a corporate employee, as many of you on this call understand, right? Like when you decide you're working some job at, you know, whatever it is, like Chase, you're working some job at Chase and you decide that you're not happy at your job, your boss is making you miserable, you know, you go to see a therapist, you say, I'm feeling miserable, they ask you about your mom, you finally get to the point where it's like you figured all that out, What's the advice you're gonna get? Quit your job. Okay, now if it's your own startup and you've thrown half a million dollars of your own money and your family's money into it, and you've gone out and become this like really public face for this idea, like this, you know, the anti-addiction startup Onward that I referenced earlier. I was on 60 Minutes in 2020, like with, I was on with Anderson Cooper, like pitching, you know, talking about my company. So it's a very public, very public project that I really put a lot of my personal credibility into. And I think it can be difficult for laypeople to really understand that. I think if you're not, if you don't personally perform at that level of exposure, if you're not constantly exposed to the world and exposed to failure, I think it can be hard to appreciate how serious it is.
