Ask YC: Experiences with founder burnout?

One of the reasons I've started using this forum is because I'm burnt out. I've been in a product development startup in China for the past 10 months (as in the design and engineering of real, physical products to ship back to Canada/the US) and it's been the most exciting and learning-intensive time of my life, but I've hit a wall and now it looks like this means the end for all of us here. We were undertaking a pretty ambitious project (though we only learned of its true difficulty along-the-way), and it's still technically possible and definitely marketable -- but requires a lot more money and time than can be committed given my pretty-much-incapacitated state.

Burnout feels incredibly illogical, because you can't do what you tell yourself you want to do. You can have a conversation with someone and get right fired up about an idea in-the-moment, but when you try to execute, a blanket of fog comes over your brain and you sit there like a deer in headlights. You can hardly perform at the level of a 10-year-old, no matter how much you tell myself that you want to continue. You try to explain this state to someone else and you get a blank stare; how could you be so "disabled" when you still look reasonably healthy and vivid in conversation? It's tough for them to see this as anything other than a conscious choice, on your part, to quit. But, you know that you keep getting up and trying to hack away at things -- and you keep hitting the same wall. Thankfully, my partners and investor are being very understanding, and they are the ones with the most to lose.

This is really, really tough -- my amazing and talented staff, my dreams and plans, all the relationships we've built, my reputation -- all of it is now at the mercy of the buzzing of my neurons and the chemicals shooting through my veins, caused by the way I've handled myself over the past 10 months ("full steam ahead, I'm 24 and invincible!").

Has anyone here burnt out before, or seen it happen? Has YC learned of any warning signs?

I would guess that being a part of YC itself would help prevent this, because of the opportunity for social support -- it can be really tough not having friends who know what it's like to be where you are, doing what you are.

As for me, I am pretty confident that eventually I'll be able to put myself back together and start something new again -- but I won't be operating anywhere near 100% any time soon, even though I certainly can't sit still as there's still rent to pay and I'm dead broke from having no salary all year.

The fact that you can write such an articulate article tells me that you are much LESS burnout than you think you are. Give it some time and take care of the other two legs of your three-legged stool first (take care of your health and your family which I suspect are also in need of some repair). If you don't have your health and you don't have the support of your family, you don't have a fighting chance to re-start your career. Also, you cannot look at your career one job at a time, it is a piece-wise continuous journey that happens to have multiple rest stops. The following is my experience, hope it helps.

Why Startups Fail and Why Gigamon Should've Too http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/09/why-startups-fa.html

--Denny--

A little hypothesis:

Burnout is your subconscious's way of telling you that you're on the wrong track.

I've found that every time I've felt burned out - whether in writing, coding, startup, life - it's because I was working on something that ultimately was going nowhere. I needed to revisit my assumptions, yet my conscious mind didn't know that. Burnout was a way for my subconscious to say "This isn't going to work, you're not working on the important stuff, take a step back and look at the big picture."

When writer's blocked, I delete the last 3 paragraphs I've written and take the story in another direction. This has almost always cured my writer's block; when it doesn't I delete the last page and take the story in another direction.

When coder's blocked, I revert to my last svn commit and start again, usually with a smaller task. I've thrown away up to a week's worth of work this way, which is another lesson: commit early and often. Commits should be an hourly or minutely process, not something you do after a whole bunch of work.

When blocked in general, I think about the last design decision I made and revisit. Oftentimes, if I'm blocked entirely and can't even get started on implementing a feature, it's because the feature is ill-conceived and needs to be redone. Maybe it's done with incorrect assumptions about how users will use the problem, or maybe it just doesn't serve any purpose. Revisit whether you need the feature at all.

If you find you can't work on your startup at all, maybe it's a sign that your startup is on the wrong track. Revisit your idea. I'm actually at that stage with mine: we scrambled to get a demo ready for YC, but now that I want to procrastinate and avoid work (our market is people who want to procrastinate and avoid work), I find that I don't want to use our product. But I've got some ideas about how to backup and try a different approach, and now I want to try them out and see if they can get me procrastinating with the startup itself.

I wonder how many other hackers are cyclists? I think it's the perfect hacker sport - there's lots of tech, you can go alone if needs be, but it can also be fun to join a team, or participate in events like races.

There are things I don't care for here in Innsbruck, but I have some nice trails about 5 minutes away from home, and plenty of tall mountains to ride up.

Wow, cycling in the Austrian Alps! It is so ridiculously beautiful in Austria - and beyond category climbs are easy to find. :) The best cycling I've done to date was in Colorado along the Continental Divide in the Boulder area. But I haven't gone riding in Austria yet (just skiing and visiting) and would love to some day.