As capital continues to flood the startup market, I keep thinking about the activation energy needed to not only start a company, but remain in charge of one. This type of scaling strategy looks more human than a check — after all, venture doesn’t fix all things — in fact, it can even complicate the growth of a startup.
Today, I want to talk about activation energy and the various resources it takes for founders to begin moving toward a goal: time, community and mental health.
Bear with me; today’s topic is a more elusive concept than helping startups with content marketing or their sales pitches, but I’d argue it is necessary to help any humans, especially those in charge of others’ livelihoods, scale themselves alongside their companies.
This week, I wrote about Z Fellows, an accelerator that pays people $10,000 to take a week-long break from their day job and flirt with finally building their startup idea. The average age for a Z Fellow is 20 to 25 years old, meaning that the program has successfully convinced would-be first-time founders to take a jump. Founder Cory Levy attributes the interest to the program’s prerequisite: you only have to take one week off from work.
“The best programs out there, whether that’s Y Combinator or the Thiel Fellowship, require this high commitment, big life decisions” – think dropping out of school or going full-time on an idea, Levy said. “Don’t do that; just kind of simulate what life would be like for a couple of days or a week: If you like it, great, if you don’t, no harm, no foul.”
Is it idealistic to believe that seven days can change someone’s life and truly give them a realistic window into the life of an entrepreneur? To an extent, definitely: Every day – heck, every hour – brings a different fire forward for founders, and it’s unlikely you’ll create conflagration-level sparks during just a week. So, it’s impossible to know what you are getting yourself into after a single fellowship.
But I wouldn’t discount the opportunity entirely as there is a chance for an aspiring founder to finally experience the “aha” moment it takes to bet on themselves. Activation energy needs to be seeded somewhere, and it appears that Levy thinks that begins with bringing down the level of commitment it takes to start in the first place.
As I wrote in the early innings of 2021, “community isn’t a single Slack group or event or newsletter. It’s an aggregation of all of these touch points, and includes … customers, eventual customers and one-time users.” I’ll add an asterisk to that “aggregation” and say that community is also the unmistakable feeling of being heard and understood by a group of people.
Startups’ focus on community will need to grow beyond the business context next year. It’s not enough to have group chats built around interests; they need to be built around intimacy (and transparency).
Gen Z VCs, a community built by Lerer Hippeau’s Meagan Loyst, does a good job with making space for this, with Slack rooms dedicated to accessibility, comment and critique, and congratulations. These rooms, though, are only as active as the people who buy into them and feel empowered to be transparent. That’s why I’m personally a fan of joining bigger groups to find your tribe, and then getting into smaller chats to be truly unfiltered.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s one that has lost awareness as startups get fueled with millions of dollars overnight. After the check comes the hardest part: actually spending it, and delivering on the outcomes and vision that you raised it off of. With that context, it’s important for founders to be proactive about the communities they build, focusing not just on partnerships or investors, but parallel entrepreneurs in similar spots as them. It will help with the daily fires – and yearly identity crises.
Finally, as the boom in executive coaching has shown us, mental health support continues to be a massive focus for entrepreneurs navigating the pressures of their jobs.
This year, employee coaching services platform BetterUp landed a $1.73 billion valuation, and then months later, announced a new, $4.7 billion valuation. Additionally, behavioral health company Ginger got acquired by meditation app Headspace, showing the importance of a breadth of options in therapy. Integrative, holistic efforts were made by employers, who now are pressured to make mental health support a benefit for fatigued, burnt-out employees.
If there’s one lesson learned amid the pandemic, it’s that we can’t take anything for granted — whether it’s continued growth or another flood of funding. Whether you’re building something new or scaling something on the back of VC dollars, a persistent focus on time, community and mental health support will be good for everyone at a startup, from the CEO on down.
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