This Week at YC

December 15th, 2023

Founders and therapy

A few weeks ago YC President Garry Tan gave a talk at Stanford as part of the school's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series — a series, Garry notes, that he sat in on as a student back in 2003.

The talk is great. It’s a super candid crash course on his journey through startup land and what he’s learned so far, and it’s full of wild stories (like how a potential gig as a hip-hop editorial photographer played a role in him getting involved with YC.)

There’s one part in particular that has stuck with me even weeks later, perhaps because it’s on a topic startup folks don’t talk about enough. Around the nine minute mark Garry opens up about therapy, the impact it's had on him, and why he recommends founders embrace it sooner than later:

“It took me years of both therapy and coaching to get to a point where I felt like I could actually approach conflict in a healthy way. I’m still a work in progress, but it really changed my life.

Part of the reason my startup Posterous didn’t work out was because I had not dealt with this stuff early enough; once I was having to run teams and make hard decisions all the time, that was almost a little bit too late. […]

You’ve all probably heard: startups end up taking on the personality of their founders. If you have all of these unexamined demons inside of you, what happens to your startup? That’s what happened to my startup.

So get therapy early. It sounds really expensive; especially when I was a student and I didn’t have any money, I was like ‘how much do I have to pay?!’ But it’s actually cheap. […] People spend ten, a hundred, a thousand times more on things that will not fill that hole in their heart when all they needed to do was talk to someone and get help.”

Check out the whole talk here.

- Greg

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