The cognitive dissonance of founding with depression
You can face mental health challenges and you can do great things.
Hello all, I’m Claire! This is an adapted version of a Medium article I wrote in 2020, called “I’m Tired of Not Talking About This: Founding with Depression.” I’ve updated a few details to introduce my story to the Decelerate community.
Heads up: brief mentions of disordered eating, self-harm
I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression when I was 13 years old. When I entered puberty, I started to have horrible depressive episodes, spiraling through thoughts about how I wasn’t good enough, and began to take extreme control of my food and exercise. Noticing that I wasn’t okay, my mom took me to a nutritionist, concerned that I had an eating disorder. We were instead directed to a psychologist who told us this was a symptom of mental health challenges. So I received my diagnosis before I entered 9th grade.
In the 23 years since, I struggled with self-hatred, self-harm, disordered eating habits, mental self-flagellation, paralyzing anxiety, and extreme, terrifying shame. I have had to go to the hospital. I have been on medication. I have scared loved ones, hurt relationships, and had panic attacks in public. At times, my friends have had to take me into their homes or make appointments for me when I felt too helpless. After one scary crash, I called my mom and asked her to come be with me to make sure I would make it out of danger. I lived 8,000 miles and three continents away. The flight cost more than $2,000, and she came the next day.
In those same 23 years, I finished high school, graduated from university, launched a career in social impact startups, ran a startup to profitability, earned a full-tuition scholarship to earn an MBA at Oxford, graduated with distinction, and started a new career in VC in the UK. After undergrad, I moved to India and was motivated by the work of communities in the low-cost private school sector. I then moved to Kenya and launched an edtech social enterprise, M-Shule, to deliver personalized learning to the offline mass market over SMS (I now say we were doing conversational AI for learning before it was cool). As of today, my company has impacted more than 400,000 learners across East Africa with learning and training tools, is profitable, and is fully Kenyan-run.
I had to leave daily operations of my startup in 2021 because I was too burnt out, and I simply couldn’t do it anymore. It’s something for which I still feel a not-insignificant amount of guilt - despite the fact that my co-founder was incredibly supportive, my team understood and rose to the opportunity, and the company is now unequivocally successful, impact-wise and financially. That’s depression for you.
One of the hardest things about being an entrepreneur with depression and anxiety is having to be two people at once, and not being able to talk about it. Especially during the lowest times, when you most need help.
Startup life, by its very nature, is brutal, terrifying, lonely, confusing, physically exhausting, and mind-breaking. As you fundraise, earn users’ trust, start to make money, the pressure within you builds to make sure that your idea works, that you make the difference you promised you would make, and that you don’t let anyone down. You work longer hours, forego sleep, forget to eat, say no to friends, put off exercising, don’t visit your family - damaging your health, most especially and painfully in your mind.
That’s not the image an entrepreneur is expected to portray. At the beginning, your company is nothing. You are your brand. When you walk into investor meetings with nothing but a dream and a barely-functioning prototype, they say, “That’s fine! What we’re really interested in is how resilient you are. If we can take a bet on you. If you’re the person who’s going to persist and never give up and make this dream into a unicorn.”
When you hire your first team members, you need them to believe in your leadership and trust that you’ll do right by their careers. When you pitch your first clients, you need to convince them that you’ll do everything it takes to give them the product that they want. (And this pressure is exponentially higher for women).
So when the future of your company is reliant on this image of an unflappable you - this brilliant, brave, hotshot entrepreneur who’s going to change the world - you’ll do whatever it takes to avoid showing weakness. Weakness is too much of a risk. And for some reason, we’re still being told that dealing with a chronic illness - despite rising above it, and doing great things through it - is a weakness.
I, personally, think that this is bullshit.
Above everything, entrepreneurship is such a fantastically human endeavor. It is so human to come up with an idea, to think “I am the one who can make this idea a reality!”, to realize that trying it would be terrifying, and to decide to be courageous and try it anyway. To be sick and sad, sometimes, and to ask for help from your community to get through it, is part of this being fantastically human.
We need our entrepreneurs, tech heroes, innovators, and changemakers to be human. We need our leaders to have empathy. We need to build self-reflection and support into the startup toolkits we give ourselves, because above everything else, your company is only okay if you are okay.
Depression’s superpowers are in telling you that you’re not enough, that you’re alone, and that nothing will change. These things aren’t true, however much they feel like it. You can face mental health challenges and you can do great things.