Find Your Room

A few months ago, Brad walked into my office, and I knew before he sat down that something was different. It was the way he carried himself coming through the door, like he'd been holding something heavy for a very long time and had simply gotten used to the weight.

I've known Brad (not his real name) for years. He has one of those jobs that looks really good from the outside. Important title. Serious work. He's the kind of person other people point to when they talk about what this industry can produce.

We talked for a while about work, about his team, about his kids, about what was coming next. He gave all the right answers, but without really connecting with them. He seemed to be performing the conversation.

Most of the founder and CEO friends I've made over 15 years in this work have shown up this way at least once. They're usually going through something. Anxiety that shows up as irritability or insomnia, or the inability to make a simple decision. Depression that looks like distraction, or silence, or working 18 hours a day because slowing down feels more dangerous than exhaustion. They're building extraordinary things while coming apart at the seams, usually while keeping that collapse to themselves.

That collapse shows up as a disconnect from their bodies and a performance rather than authenticity and connection with their thoughts and emotions.

Many readers will recognize this. You're leading an accelerator, studio, or hub. You've seen it in the founders you work with.

We're often wrestling with the same pressure points. We coach founders through hard seasons. We sit across from them when the numbers aren't moving and guide them toward a way forward. We're good at holding space for their uncertainty while swallowing our own. Their problems are our problems, too. We meet their needs first, without always worrying about ours.

For many of us, founders and leaders included, we aren't talking to a therapist. We're not in a peer group. We've got a partner at home who's exhausted by it all and investors who only want good news. So we carry it alone.

Isolation isn't just uncomfortable. It's causal. Lonely individuals are more than twice as likely to develop depression as those who aren't, with longitudinal studies increasingly showing that the former causes the latter. Harvard Business Review has covered CEO loneliness for more than a decade. Roughly half of surveyed CEOs report feelings of isolation, and most believe it's affecting their performance. One in three startup CEOs says he or she has no one to talk to about the hardest parts of their job.

If isolation is the disease, the cure is peer connection. Specifically, in our case, being in a room with people who understand the stakes without needing them explained. A Norwegian study on CEO loneliness found that every executive cited a sparring partner as essential to their clarity. YPO and EO have known this for 75 years. Their forum model, small groups meeting regularly and honestly under confidentiality, has more than 70,000 members for one reason: It works.

Those of us who run accelerators, studios, and hubs already do everything we can to provide this for founders. We have cohorts. Rooms full of founders living the same experience at the same time. But we can do more.

We can open the session differently. Ask how your founders are doing, not how their companies are doing. Give the room twenty minutes when the company isn't allowed to come up. Let people say the real thing.

If we know that founders need this and that the kind of strain they’re under has a measurable impact on mental health (and the research is unambiguous that it does), then we, the people who support founders, are likely in the same boat. And for the most part, we manage it alone.

There's the old story about the cobbler who is so busy making shoes for everyone else that his own children go barefoot. Some of us are that cobbler.

I think about Brad a lot. I've reminded him more than once that he's not alone, and we've spent real time together since that day in my office.

For the last two and a half years, we've brought that same thing to the leaders inside GVN. Small groups of operators, accelerator directors, studio founders, hub managers, meeting regularly with people who understand the stakes without needing them explained. No agenda except honesty. That's the whole model. And it's the most valuable thing we do.

It's my same hope for everyone in and around the Global Venture Network. That every person who has walked into a room lately carrying that weight on their shoulders knows there is a place for them.

So, find your room. I'll be here in mine.

With love and trust, Pat

1. Earlier this week, an old colleague of mine, Regan Smith, sent me a piece about joy. Specifically, about how keeping joy is difficult to do.

It reminded me of something Henri Nouwen wrote. Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest and one of the most honest writers on interior life I've come across. He said, "Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day."

Choosing it isn't enough on its own, though. For me, joy hasn't just shown up because I intended it to. It comes through practices. Through the people I let close enough to actually see me. Through support, including the kind you have to ask for. Sometimes through professional help. It comes from the kind of community and honesty that most of us in this work have been too busy, or too proud, to build. Regan sent the article as I was thinking my way through the post above. Perfect timing.

2. I'm in a new office, which I love. It’s different because it allows me to engage with others repeatedly and frequently.

I now have connections at my coffee shop with the baristas. Run into acquaintances on the street. Meet for lunch with old friends. Which reminded me of sociologist Ray Oldenburg's work on the Third Place: the spaces outside home and work where people gather and where community coalesces without hierarchy or agenda. A cafe. A forum. Wherever people come together for no reason other than honest connection.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The loneliness epidemic isn't just about people lacking friends. It's also about the disappearance of the spaces where connection used to happen by accident. Another reminder for all of us to find our room.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that since the pandemic, college-educated fathers with young children have cut their time at work by six hours a week and increased time on housework by four. The headline frames it as a sacrifice. I read it as a sign of something quietly shifting.

After my last newsletter, a reader sent me this piece from Endeavor. The argument is one most of us already know but rarely say out loud: Founder mental health is still treated as a personal problem rather than an ecosystem one. For founders, more than half say talking openly about mental health still feels like a liability, like admitting it will cost them something they can't get back.

This is more of an inspiration than something I've tried. A group of 20- and 30-somethings in Washington DC swapped their smartphones for flip phones last March and went a month without them. One participant said he kept reaching into his pocket for his phone, only to remember there was nothing on it. By the end, he felt liberated. "I was bored sometimes," he said, "and that's okay." Another woman saw her anxiety improve, decided she wanted to quit her job, and kept the flip phone after the challenge ended. The organizer added an important caveat: Ditching the phone isn't enough. "In order to actually break that reliance, you have to provide an enriching, communal, social life." That last line resonates with me after writing this month's newsletter. I'd be curious to know if anyone reading has tried it. I'd like to give it a try myself.

Thanks for reading. Hit reply if something lands.

Pat

President & CEO, Global Venture Network

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