Forget Crushing It — Startup Founders Open Up About Mental Health Problems

Forbes Daily Cover, October 25, 2023, by Jeff Kauflin. Standfirst: “From therapy and peer groups to vulnerability and psychedelic drugs, entrepreneurs open up about their strategies for dealing with mental health challenges.”

Forbes 403s every scripted fetch; recovered from an August 2026 Wayback snapshot.

The numbers

• 72% of founders say the job has affected their mental health — April 2023 survey by the research organisation Startup Snapshot.
• 38% have experienced depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD or substance abuse — 2022 study by researchers including Richard Hunt (Virginia Tech) and Michael Freeman, a psychiatrist who has coached entrepreneurs since 2000.
• Freeman adds that across the prior five years, several studies found entrepreneurs have significantly more mental-health conditions than comparison groups.

The two passages that carry the argument

Jason Gardner, founder/CEO of Marqeta, on a 2016 depression while the company was weeks from running out of cash — he and his wife had maxed their credit cards and were paying the mortgage with credit-card checks:

“I could barely get out of bed and couldn’t smile. I felt like things were crumbling around me, but I had to find the wherewithal to continue to raise money and build the company.”

He took Marqeta public and stepped down as CEO in January 2023.

Ryan Caldbeck, founder and former CEO of CircleUp, on being asked by VCs to counsel struggling CEOs:

“I go to coffee with the CEO — and I remember this on two or three occasions — and the CEO would just talk about how their company was crushing it, even though the VC just told me they were in a lot of trouble. That is Silicon Valley in a nutshell, putting up this facade.”

Connections

• The anchor source for The Bravest Psychopaths. The Caldbeck anecdote is the sharpest thing in it: the founders were performing for someone who already knew the truth, which means the facade is not deception so much as an involuntary reflex the environment trains.
• Reads directly against the Motivation material. Josh Wolfe’s “chips on shoulders put chips in pockets” says disaffection is the fuel; Brian Armstrong on The Diary of a CEO (E161) says it expires and burnout is the bill. These numbers are the bill, quantified — and they are the strongest available argument that selecting founders for grievance is not a neutral act.
• The draft’s title question — whether the traits that make great founders overlap with pathology — is not what this article claims. It measures consequence, not disposition, and the draft should be careful not to read causation into it.