If you’ve been in the startup ecosystem for more than a minute, then you’ve probably heard (or said yourself) something like this:
Being a startup founder is: very hard, very stressful, and very lonely.
The 95% failure rate might be all you need to know to understand that being a founder is hard. But that stat doesn’t come close to capturing what it’s like to be on the receiving end of 95% and what it feels like to wake up every day and confront the myriad challenges that make that number real. It’s not just hard. It’s ridiculously hard.
The hardness alone accounts for much of the stress. But it’s more than just that. The weight of everything is on the founders’ shoulders and there is a lot at stake — for the founder, the team, the investors… and sometimes for the founders’ families as well. And nothing can prepare a founder for this stress. There is no other job they have had where they worked out a way to deal with it. There is no college degree or training course for it. There are only hard knocks. And they knock hard.
There is plenty of sincere and helpful sympathy and some empathy out there. But unless you have lived it, you really can’t fully understand it. And founders are unlikely to want to really ask for help. Except from another founder. Other founders get it.
I have seen this A LOT over the past 18 years of bringing founders together in a quiet space where everyone in the room “gets it.” When a founder is with other founders, they act differently. They are more open, more vulnerable, more helpful. The comradery, trust, and report are almost instantaneous. And it’s contagious.
I imagine that other professions share a similar dynamic when they connect “in the wild,” i.e. outside of their day-to-day work: police officers, firefighters, military, doctors, lawyers, etc. The difference is that those professionals have built-in, purpose-built, at-the-ready access to various professional organizations and associations dedicated to connecting them within their respective affinity groups, in settings where it is just them. Founders mostly don’t have this.
But despite the lack of opportunities to gather in a quiet place among only fellow founders, there is still an implicit fellowship. Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not — if you are a venture-scale startup founder, you are a member of a fellowship of other founders. If you doubt me, just pay attention next time you meet a serious/experienced venture-scale founder. I suspect you will feel a natural, but inexplicable, affinity almost immediately.
My mission with Startup Haven is to be the quiet place where venture-scale founders can be with other venture-scale founders. And, yeah, we let investors come sometimes too — they are the “venture” part of venture scale.
