This excerpt comes from Zero to IPO: Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Frederic Kerrest, pp. 164-171, (McGraw Hill, April 2022). Kerrest co-founded Okta – an enterprise identity management company – in 2009 and now serves as its executive vice chairperson and chief operating officer.
I’ve heard plenty of people discuss work-life balance, and I think the idea is well meant, but it misses an important chance. Running a company is incredibly hard. Even when things are going well, it can still be a slog. It’s absolutely important to make room for personal time, but you should also look for ways to bring more of your life into your work. I prefer to call that work-life integration.
Here’s an example. I’m a big ice hockey fan and play late every Tuesday night and early most Sunday mornings in a Bay Area league. I’ve done that throughout the entire time I’ve been building Okta. Skating is how I clear my mind and let off steam. For a few hours, I can set my stress and responsibilities aside.
But I also try to weave hockey into my workday when it fits. For instance, when I travel for sales meetings, I often invite prospects, customers, and investors to join me at a game. I’ve even planned trips around the NHL schedule. There are many benefits. I get to spend time with customers in a fun setting. It sets Okta apart from competitors. And it frequently turns into more business.
I also make a point of protecting family time. I’m home for dinner with my wife and children every night unless I’m away. When I get home, I leave my phone on the foyer table, and it stays there until the kids are asleep. I don’t take work calls on weekends unless there is a true emergency. And I show up for every parent-teacher conference, even if I have to do it by phone from another city.
It’s easy to take family for granted and let yourself be dragged into endless work obligations. It requires discipline to shift focus and give your partner and children your full attention. But work demands will never, ever end. And family time is both precious and brief. My children will never again be the ages they are right now. I enjoy being with them, and I want to help them develop. So I put energy into the upstream work – hiring truly excellent people, setting clear goals, and letting the team have the freedom to carry out the work as they think best. That way, when I get home, I don’t need to fear that the company will fall apart if I step away for a few hours.
People in business and tech talk constantly about fundraising, product-market fit, design thinking, the newest tech, management methods, consumer trends – everything except the need to keep yourself in fighting form. That’s absurd. Building and operating a startup is draining. Every founder needs to build habits to stay fit – mentally, emotionally, and physically. You don’t want your company to fall apart just because you never made time to exercise or sleep.
The demands of startup life are unquestionably hard at the start. Sadly, they stay hard in the middle, and even after you’ve gone public. My company generates more than $1 billion dollars a year in revenue, and I still wake up in the middle of the night worrying about work. In this chapter, I offer advice on how to look after yourself. The main thing is simply recognizing that you need to. These are practices that have worked for me:
- Seek out founder peers who are at your stage, or a little ahead. Build ties with other entrepreneurs who can understand what you’re facing and the issues you need help solving. Friends and family can give you broad emotional support, but none of them will truly understand it the way another founder will. Follow the “oxygen mask” rule. You know the old flight-safety instruction: “Place your mask over your own mouth and nose before assisting others.” You can’t support your company if you can’t perform at your best. Build routines that keep you physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy. Take vacations. You’ll feel like you can’t. But [just like you might need to pause in order to upgrade a system or process], sometimes you need to upgrade yourself, even if that means stepping away from the company (which won’t slow down because you’ve built a well-oiled machine that runs well without you, right?) so you can rest and get recharged for what comes next.
Don’t keep up with the Joneses: Every business is different.
In Okta’s early days, [co-founder] Todd [McKinnon] and I maintained a spreadsheet where we tracked the performance of other startups. The sheet listed: year started, money raised, number of employees, revenue, and next-year forecast. At lunches with friends or industry events, people would often bring up other companies’ numbers for a number of these measures. As soon as I got back to the office, I would add the new information to our sheet. We wanted to judge how Okta was doing compared with other companies.
It was a foolish thing to do.
Startup founders tend to be competitive. Naturally, they want to know where they stand. But there is no single path to success. Every company is different. Consumer companies differ from enterprise companies. Startups that sell to small businesses grow differently than those selling to the Fortune 100. It’s pointless to gather the information we were tracking. It may make you think you’re putting together something useful. But you’re not. It’s a waste of time – time you don’t have to waste.
In competitive auto racing, drivers are taught to “focus on the road, not the wall.” Stare at the wall and you’ll crash. To win, you have to keep your eyes on where you want the car to go. I tell new founders the same thing: Don’t worry about what anyone else is doing or how they’re performing. Just stay focused on your own road, your own race.
Depression among founders: It’s more common than you think.
Founders have been shown to experience depression at higher rates than the average person. That doesn’t mean every founder will become depressed. But when it does happen, a founder should understand that it is not especially unusual. In a study led by Dr. Michael Freeman of the University of California, San Francisco, about a third of entrepreneurs said they had suffered from depression, roughly twice the rate in the comparison group. Other studies have examined the same issue as well. Their results differ on whether entrepreneurs have significantly more depression than the general public – but, Dr. Freeman says, none has found that they have less.
There isn’t one simple explanation for this pattern, says Dr. Freeman. Although many people, whatever their line of work, may have a genetic tendency toward depression, it never turns into a problem because they never end up in the kinds of situations that could flip the depression switch. It’s like some people having a genetic inclination toward diabetes, but as long as they eat well and keep a healthy weight, the diabetes may never show up. So if you place someone with a prior vulnerability to depression into the pressure cooker of startup life, it can be set off. “A lot of people get overextended,” Dr. Freeman says. “They don’t get enough sleep. They eat junk food. They get socially isolated because they’re spending so much time at work. They might have conflicts with their cofounders. They might get slapped with a lawsuit or get pushed out by their board. At a certain point, you cross over the tipping point.”
Part of this is just the normal result of the distinctive hits you take in entrepreneurial life. “When you’re trying to disrupt the status quo, there are a lot of forces that don’t want to be disrupted. So you run into pushback, and the frustrations involved can be demoralizing,” Dr. Freeman explains. There is also the constant rejection, especially early on. “Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of believing that their identity and their value as a person are the same as the success of their business,” he adds.
When they pitch venture capitalists and are turned down again and again, it is crushing. “If you can’t see that the investors are rejecting the concept or the technology, and you personalize it, that can lead to demoralization, low self-esteem, and, ultimately, depression.”
I’m not raising this to frighten you. Quite the reverse. This may never touch you, aside from perhaps isolated episodes tied to specific setbacks. If so, you will probably bounce back without any lasting damage. But if this does sound familiar, know that you’re not by yourself. Look at the successful founders you see at conferences, on TV, or in magazine profiles. You can be sure that a portion of them deal with mental health challenges. It still isn’t talked about much in the industry, unfortunately, but it is normal. As such, it’s not a barrier. Just something to manage.
Miss a deadline every now and then: The case for (sometimes) letting things slide.
You’ll constantly feel as if you need to go full speed. You’re going to set deadlines and milestones that you’ll convince yourself are nonnegotiable. Because your money has a fuse on it . . . because nothing happens until somebody sells something . . . because you have to keep the main thing the main thing, and the main thing is growing this business – fast.
But sometimes, it’s fine to slow down. Suppose a release is set to go out tomorrow. But it really can’t be finished without everyone working insane hours, after weeks of already working insane hours. Would it truly matter if you pushed it to next week? If it means you and your team get a short break, and you can take your head and body out of the game for a little while to recharge somewhere else, then why not? If the release date was arbitrary, and changing it isn’t going to make a huge difference, go ahead and move it back.
Building a startup really is a marathon. A trade-off now in favor of everyone’s physical and mental health will pay off later. Don’t do this with the big things: the numbers you have to hit for the year, the money you have to raise in the next round, the international office you have to open in three months. But the smaller stuff ? Every so often, give yourself permission to let things slide.