Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the building game, personally developing a new media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he learned from his $310 million exit from Bonobos aren’t so much about entrepreneurship as they are about maintaining balance.
When Dunn was in college, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he didn’t receive proper treatment until 2016, when he was hospitalized during a “manic” episode for the second time. “The manic state is just a catastrophe; it’s like being in psychosis, you know, with messianic delusions… You can’t accomplish anything in that state,” Dunn said. The incident was enough of a wake-up call for him, and 16 years after his initial diagnosis, he finally took his condition seriously and began therapy, taking the necessary medication.
Dunn wrote a book called Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, documenting the parallel processes of building Bonobos and learning how to accept and manage his bipolar disorder. But the lessons in the book are applicable to entrepreneurs beyond those with Dunn’s diagnosis. “We all have mental health, right? You don’t need a diagnosis to suffer or struggle,” he said.
However, entrepreneurs tend to report a higher incidence of mental health issues throughout their lives than the average person. “There is definitely a correlation between neurodivergence and creativity. I don’t know if entrepreneurship attracts neurodivergent people or makes them more neurodivergent, but there is certainly a kind of virtuous—and sometimes non-virtuous—cycle there,” he said.
This interaction between mental illness and entrepreneurship is even more pronounced for Dunn, who says that the hypomanic state, a high-level phase of bipolar disorder, compared to the crushing periods of depression, can be advantageous when running a startup. “Here are the DSM criteria for hypomania: rapid speech, increased ideation, grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, ability to be more creative… pretty much the key traits of an entrepreneur having a good day,” he said. “I was able to capitalize on this, but the price I paid was ultimately too high. I was in depression with suicidal ideation for two to three months a year, and then, in the end, mania and full-blown psychosis came back powerfully, which was catastrophic,” he added.
“When we disagree, let’s not just disagree more, because we’ll be able to make a better decision from it,” he said. While discussions about mental health have become more common, founders still worry about the stigma of disclosing a diagnosis to colleagues and investors. Dunn is an advisor to the Founder Mental Health Pledge, which asks investors to protect the mental health of the founders they invest in.
“I treat my bipolar as my Olympic regimen. For Simone Biles, it’s how you flip and win the gold medal,” he said. “For me, the gold medal is dying from something else, right? Because the terrible thing about bipolar is the suicide rate.”
Now, Dunn’s next test is to do the work necessary to make Pie a success without sacrificing his stability.
“Here’s the challenge,” said Dunn. “We want to have good mental health, and we want our teams to have balance in mental health, yet a 40-hour workweek doesn’t reduce that. You can’t change the world with a group of people working 40 hours a week.”
One way Dunn has navigated this fine line is by being transparent with job candidates about what the job entails and how he will support them with company benefits. “I have a new idea I give when recruiting, which is, this is a 50-60 hour per week job, and in exchange, you’ll get two wonderful things. One, you will learn more, grow more, and develop more. Two, you have your own capital,” he said.
Like any startup leader, Dunn wants his team to work hard, but he believes there’s a way to do this without burning out. In describing his time at Bonobos in Burn Rate, Dunn writes, “I came to the classic wrong conclusion of an immature founder: if the business isn’t working, then we must not be working hard enough.”
It’s undeniable that founders must work hard, but taking care of oneself is part of that hard work.
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