Suffering From Depression? Don't Do That Start-up

If you really want to be helpful with startsup and depression, encourage people to get some mental health treatment. No one ever has to fight alone nor is it a battle that can be won without support.

First, I'm going to make a blanket statement. People with depression are, as a group, better people. Sure, there are bad people with depression and good people without it but, in the aggregate, people who have suffered through it tend to be more empathetic and less mean-spirited. You're not likely to kick those who are down if you've been down. If you've had a 3-month spell in which everything took a massive amount of effort, you're not likely to inject annual "low performer" witch hunts into a company (cf. Enron, Google) for shits and giggles. So, it might get good for VC-istan to be more accepting of neuro-diversity. People with mild depression are also less prone to the absurd optimistic bias that plagues the ecosystem (depressive realism). People like that shouldn't be excluded just because they're the first to crack in this absurd brogrammer pressure-cooker that actually results in an extremely low quality of work across the board.

Finally, business formation doesn't have to be an all-consuming, destroys-your-life-if-it-doesn't-work-out-and-merely-ruins-it-if-it-does, affair. Our natural tendency, as humans, is to examine and improve things. For many of us, that includes abstract processes. That's kind of what business formation is... or at least where it starts. It's too natural and important of a process for it to exclude people who can't lay down a 5000-hour work year. It's a 90-hour-per-week, all-consuming affair in VC-istan, but maybe the problem is that ecosystem and not business formation (a millennia-old, natural process) itself.

On the other hand, there is currently no way for most people to start businesses that isn't unhealthy. Bank loans expect personal liability. VC-istan's problems are well-documented; VC's can ruin your reputation and make you unemployable and unfundable, so they hold all the cards. Using personal savings isn't a good idea in a world where full-time employment is taxing enough to exclude almost everyone over 65. Using friends-and-family money is even worse, because it can interfere with the personal relationships people need to be healthy. Then, in the U.S., there is the evil of private health insurance.

Obviously, I'm not saying that business formation should be entirely risk-less, but right now, there's no healthy way for most people to do it. Most people don't have the capital, relationships, and leeway.

I wish there were a healthy way for people who are inclined toward business formation to do it, and maybe that's the real problem we should be out solving.

I don't think suffering from depression alone is enough to rule anybody out of any particular field. There are ways of managing depression with the right support structures, therapy, medication, etc.

Good luck diagnosing depression when the person being questioned knows it's the difference between his company getting investment or not - here's an e.g. form typical of the assessment you get (in the UK) - http://www.sabp.nhs.uk/Documents/D1.3d2.pdf

How do you think the candidate is going to answer to a question like 'I feel like life is not worth living?' in this situation?

And you didn't respond to my points about marriage, and drug-taking kids. I don't see why they can't be assessed if we permit assessment of mental health as a potential cause of harm to investee/investor.

Perhaps we could look into a candidate's sex life to see if he or his partner are performing satisfactorily? Sexual frustration might take a toll on a startup. Perhaps check to see if there's an ill relative who might die during the life of the startup?

Additionally, I think there's a question of how much you can really assess this stuff.

I knew a person who lost a grandparent + split up with his girlfriend + subsequently failed his degree as a consequence despite a lot of assistance, where I myself experienced considerably worse circumstances with no assistance from the university whatsoever - how would you differentiate between us? Some assessment as to our resilience perhaps?

Not to sound cliched, but this really is a slippery slope situation, even if we could reasonably expect to achieve an accurate assessment.

Raising money at least gives you a little cushion, a little breathing room to experiment and fail and try again. Bootstrapping, the "you don't sell, you don't eat" bootstraping, is constant, unending stress and fear. One single mistake, one bad hire or mismanaged advertising buy can kill the business, and the stress and pressure to stay alive is constant- the sword is always hanging over your head, and at any moment you think it's going to drop.

And that's what bootstrapping a successful, highly profitable business was like. I can't imagine what sinking all your time and savings into a failure would feel like. The sheer carefree bliss of never again having to decide whether you should buy AdWords ads or eat meat this week is worth whatever equity stake you give up.