[derefr]

> For some reason start-ups are a magnet for people that suffer from depression.

I posit: it's hard to hold a steady job while suffering from untreated depression. (Or ADD. Or social anxiety. Or any number of other things.)

Between your (inevitably short) periods of employment, you tinker. Tinkering leads to projects, projects become startups, and--if you're good at what you do--before you know it, you're under a ton of stress.

I don't know what the solution is, but just telling people who have mental illnesses not to start start-ups isn't it. Frequently, a startup is their option of last resort--since the working world has already failed them.

[pyalot2]

That, exactly that. There can be nothing wrong with you, and you're just a bit outside the norm when it comes to your emotions. Yet you're miserable beyond relief in any number of jobs, so you start to look for alternatives.

Telling somebody who is not your 0815 always positive standup startup posterboy/girl "dude, you better not do that, you'll just hurt yourself, listen to me." Is like saying: "Dude, you just can't try to find happyness, give up now, trust me, I've no clue what I'm advising you to do because I've got no clue what your problem is."

[jacquesm]

> Frequently, a startup is their option of last resort--since the working world has already failed them.

That's an excellent observation and I had not taken this into account. This may be one of the reasons why start-ups are so attractive to people with issues in some area, it affords them the freedom to write their own ticket.

The problem with that is that start-ups aren't really a solution for the problem, it will most likely just end up making things (much) worse. Treatment is.

Life-style level businesses might be a good choice, you get to write your own ticket and yet don't have to deal with extreme stress (normally speaking, of course even then this could happen, you can't rule it out, you probably can't rule it out in any situation but doing a sink-or-swim start-up pretty much guarantees it).

[pyalot2]

You know that the line between a startup and a life-style business is pretty much non existent of course. Oh, and before we go into that "it's all immense stress, don't do it" thing, ever noticed how a ton of startups/founders are very fond of balancing this to be a lifestyle choice?

Anyhow, stress/failure isn't the only contributing factor to a balanced mental life. Even somebody with a more varied emotional makeup can deal with stress and failure. There are a host of other factors that have to work as well, and sorry, holding a job for some people just doesn't deliver them.

[jacquesm]

There is a huge difference between a life-style business and a start-up. Though the one could grow into the other the chances of that happening are fairly remote.

Most life-style businesses have built in limits to scale, most start-ups consider not scaling up and out a failure of sorts. As soon as compound growth is involved you're out of lifestyle business levels.

A typical life-style business is < 5 people, is in business-to-business, has a limited number of customers and does not aim to change that.

A typical start-up is one that is started by < 5 people, aims to achieve significant growth and is basically never going to be satisfied with the amount of reach they've got.

Start-ups will take outside investors, life-style businesses will not.

[pyalot2]

That's one of several definitions of a startup, and it's not the only one, or even an accurate one.

- There are any number of companies that started without outside investors.

- There are any number of startups that take outside investment but never scale.

- There are lifestyle businesses that turned out to scale at some point or another.

- To interpret compounding only in terms of taking investment and throwing away your life is a very narrow minded point of view.

[jacquesm]

That's the HN general use of the word start-up as per PG's definition. I agree there are others but it helps if we all use the terms the same way.

See here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4556838

[pyalot2]

Sure, I don't disagree with Startup == Growth. I disagree that it means anything but (such as outside investment, winning the startup/facebook lottery, compounding, putting insane life crushing hours, etc.)

There's a reason PG formulated it thus simply. It would be odd if for instance in the case of Viaweb (a startup without outside funding) PG would disqualify himself from having done a startup, but then went on to define startups...

[paul_f]

If we're gonna go there, lifestyle businesses solve real customer needs, usually for other businesses. Startups collect lyrics for hip-hop music. :-)

[saalweachter]

I posit: everyone is depressed, all the time. Start-ups are not unusual.

In the US, 9% of people report being depressed at least occasionally, and 3.4% are majorly depressed. An estimated 26% suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a calendar year (shout out to anxiety disorders!).

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-coun...

[Spooky23]

I think it depends on the person.

Some people can leverage extreme stress / being busy to suppress whatever issues they have. (At least for awhile -- suppressing things usually results in an explosion later.) Other people's depression manifests as an inability to make effective decisions or motivate.

Either way, it's a ticking time bomb, unless that person has well-developed coping mechanisms and a support network. I wouldn't want to invest in or work for a founder without that.

I think the risk of battling severe depression while operating a fledgling company is that by its nature, you're kind of on your own. Anyone -- even someone NOT suffering from depression, needs to have super strong support networks.

[benologist]

Maybe pysch-evals should be part of due diligence by investors?

[singular]

Why not check on the state of their marriage/chances of their kids dying from a drug overdose too? Those would affect the investment too!

Ugh. Come on, there has been a line of privacy somewhere.

[benologist]

The results don't need to be shared necessarily, it could be as simple as mandatory evaluation + unbeknownst to the investor, treatment if that's what is recommended.

[singular]

You talk about treatment, but you mention that this would form part of due diligence - presumably a treatment recommendation would cause the investors to pull out?

Good luck diagnosing depression when the person being questioned knows it's the difference between his company getting investment or not - here's an e.g. form typical of the assessment you get (in the UK) - http://www.sabp.nhs.uk/Documents/D1.3d2.pdf

How do you think the candidate is going to answer to a question like 'I feel like life is not worth living?' in this situation?

And you didn't respond to my points about marriage, and drug-taking kids. I don't see why they can't be assessed if we permit assessment of mental health as a potential cause of harm to investee/investor.

Perhaps we could look into a candidate's sex life to see if he or his partner are performing satisfactorily? Sexual frustration might take a toll on a startup. Perhaps check to see if there's an ill relative who might die during the life of the startup?

Additionally, I think there's a question of how much you can really assess this stuff.

I knew a person who lost a grandparent + split up with his girlfriend + subsequently failed his degree as a consequence despite a lot of assistance, where I myself experienced considerably worse circumstances with no assistance from the university whatsoever - how would you differentiate between us? Some assessment as to our resilience perhaps?

Not to sound cliched, but this really is a slippery slope situation, even if we could reasonably expect to achieve an accurate assessment.

[benologist]

All the investors need to know is you cooperated, they don't need to know what that means. Maybe that means you went and were fine, maybe that means you went and got recommended for some additional therapy.

Education, stigma etc are massive parts of the problem. Being forced to confront it and forcing an industry to confront it head on sounds good to me. When you wait for a depressed person to realize they need help and decide to take action and actually do it you wait too long.

I have no point of reference for marriage and drug-taking kids. I don't know if well adjusted people can leave their problems at home but depressed people cannot, and I do have some experience with that including seeing it take a life.

[singular]

I'm very sorry to hear that you had to see it take somebody's life, that really is a terrible thing, and my heart goes out to you.

I am a depressive myself so have some experience, and dislike any idea that somebody might avoid employing me/feel leery about my advancing in the workplace because of it (even posting about it here makes me feel uncomfortable because of this stigma.)

Though I applaud the idea that people become more aware of the risks esp. in the computing industry/startups, I think the idea of assessing it being part of due diligence would simply encourage more stigma about it - 'who wants a 'crazy person' in charge of our money?' many will think, sadly.

Anyway, on the subject of depression I have a lot of experience so if you want to talk about that if it'd be of any benefit, feel free to email me (see my profile) :-)

[bayesianhorse]

That should be illegal. It probably is, at least in the EU. And it's counterproductive.

Imagine Robbin Williams being turned down by every major record label: "Sorry, Mr. Williams, you suffer from bipolar disorder, we can't take the risk."

[benologist]

Why do you assume it would be a negative signal? History is full of counter-examples.

[michaelochurch]

Everything in the working world fails people with mental illness, even at low levels that aren't especially problematic under less pressure. There are very few organizations that actually promote based on excellence. Most set up a war of attrition based on shared suffering and the mountain of pointless work generated by bike-shedding executives. People with depression (or anxiety, ADD, panic, etc.) are not intentionally excluded; they're just the first to crack. Ugly fact: it's how the system is supposed to work. Competition-on-suffering exists to filter out "the weak" and "the slackers". It's a millennia-old (wrong) mentality of work and only over the past 50 years have we understood the biological causes (not personal weakness) that actually make people drop.

The idea is to assess character by generating artificial stress, but the result is that mild (usually treatable) biological problems are misinterpreted as character flaws. Depression is read as lassitude. (It's not.) Panic is seen as "not handling pressure well." (Actually, a panic attack is 3-20 minutes of hell but the disorder does not impair judgment.) Overwork-induced social ineptitude is interpreted as selfishness. Et cetera.

This setup is sad, stupid, wrong, and counterproductive because the modern economy doesn't need pointless effort and tolerance of suffering. Slackers are no more harmful than misdirected hard workers (which is most, because the people providing direction in most organizations are clueless yes-men). What the world needs, now, are creativity, insight, and excellence, which turn out to be positively correlated with the propensity to depression.

The conformist idiocy and pointless sacrifice of corporate life are unhealthy for normal people and debilitating for many with depression. VC-istan, a very volatile form of corporate life that looks meritocratic, is worse... because people work too hard and personalize their failures.

What I'd like to see over the next 15 years is more of an ability for smart, capable people to start lifestyle businesses. Right now, it's not unreasonably hard to found a get-big-or-die VC-istan company if you have the connections, but there's a whole world of smaller businesses that's not being explored because the market to connect the resources with the talent doesn't exist yet. (Kickstarter is a step in the right direction.)

[porker]

michael, I agree with most of what you write, but I'm unsure what you would term a lifestyle business? Life coaching is what I'd term a lifestyle business, and I can't think depressed people would be great at it. Could you give some examples?