Loneliness

When a volleyball becomes your best friend, you might be in a bad place. That was the situation Tom Hanks faced in the movie Castaway when his plane crashed and he washed ashore a deserted island. It seems absurd that he would befriend a sporting good, but it is also hard to understand the mental and emotional toll of physical isolation.

Most of us have never had to deal with such isolation. Then a global pandemic shut off physical contact with others and forced us to hunker down in our homes. If you lived by yourself without family or roommates, then your only human interaction was over video calls. Instead of talking to a volleyball, we were talking to pixels on screens.

The pandemic gave us a taste of isolation. We experienced the lack of human contact as a loss of our own sanity and humanity. There were many stories of extroverts and introverts alike giving up habits and routines as despair set in. Most of us were simply going through the motions of life without experiencing the joy of living.

Coming out of COVID though, another trend emerged. At least in the US, people were experiencing greater rates of loneliness. The Surgeon General Advisory report published in 2023 declared loneliness was an epidemic experienced by 58% of Americans. Even though we had emerged from physical isolation and could once again connect with anyone at any time in person, we were lonelier than at any point in modern history.

The loneliness epidemic has significant consequences. That same report stated that the mortality impact of loneliness is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Studies have shown that loneliness increases the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32%, and dementia by 50%. Loneliness also does not discriminate: the risks are evenly distributed across age, gender, economic, and racial groups.

What exactly is loneliness, though? It is a state of mental distress from perceived isolation or inadequate meaningful connections. Isolation can happen even when surrounded by people or being highly connected across social media. Loneliness comes from feeling an acute lack of connectedness to others, leading to a sense of not being valued or worthy.

Fifteen years ago, this was exactly what I was facing. I had been working on my startup for a couple of years and had become increasingly short-tempered, impatient, and angry. What I did not realize at the time was that the overwhelmingly negative feelings clouding my mind were due to a crushing sense of loneliness.

When I jumped into startup life as a founder, I never thought I would be lonely. I had a big professional network, plenty of friends, and family nearby. The difference however is when you are a founder, you're surrounded by people who can no longer relate to what you're doing or why.

My emotional isolation emerged gradually. Former colleagues would invite me for drinks, but stopped because I often canceled. Friends stopped calling because all I seemed interested in talking about was my startup. Family would ask when I'd get a real job. I found this annoying, so I stopped visiting or answering their calls.

Of the hundreds of founders I have spoken with as a mentor, advisor, and advocate during my time at AWS, they all experienced bouts of loneliness at some point. Research from UCSF and UC Berkeley found that 72% of entrepreneurs reported mental health struggles, with loneliness and isolation being major contributing factors. Founders were 30% more likely to suffer from depression and 11% more likely to experience bipolar disorder than the general population.

Solo founders have it especially rough. Without co-founders to share the burden, every decision becomes an internal monologue. There is no one else to share the workload, bounce ideas off of, be inspired by, or get support from. You glory in all the wins, but you also shoulder 100% of the mistakes and losses. Running a startup as a solo founder was the top reason Paul Graham shared as to why startups fail.

Even when you have a co-founding team that is tight-knit and supportive, you can still feel isolated. Loneliness isn't a bug in the founder experience, it's a feature. Building something from nothing requires an obsessive level of dedication. You become deeply entwined with your product, market, and customers in a way that few others understand. Your challenges, priorities, and schedule seem insane to outsiders.

You do not have to tackle these feelings of loneliness alone! In fact, at the first sign you may be experiencing loneliness and depression, you absolutely need to reach to those that care about you for support and advice. Below are some strategies and resources you may want to explore to tackle founder loneliness:

• Join founder-specific communities – Avoid generic tech groups filled with people that do not share the founder experience. Find communities curated for founders. These can be online like Indie Hackers or in-person groups. When I launched my first startup, I would organize small gatherings at different bars every month with a dozen other founders that we called Third Thursdays, to talk through our struggles and celebrate our wins.

• Create accountability partners – Find another founder at a similar stage and schedule regular in-person or virtual check-ins. It can even be two or three others, but keep the group small so you can build up trust and more openly share ideas, bounce ideas off of, and provide help on specific challenges and questions.

• Use structured social time – Block calendar time for human connection like you would for investor meetings. This is something I admire about Basecamp founder Jason Fried who maintains strict boundaries with no work talk at family meals and scheduling time to meet with friends on weekends. Create habits that force you to escape work.

• Get professional support – There is not enough talk about the importance therapy can play in helping founders. That is something well-known VC Brad Feld has discussed in the past as a way to handle his own struggles. There are also executive coaches who specialize in working with founders and understand their unique pressures. Online services like BetterUp or Sondermind can also be helpful in finding the right help.

• Build in public (to a point) – Sharing your journey can be part catharsis and part generating goodwill. Many founders have been public about their journey like Gumroad's Sahil Lavingia who candidly shares his experiences over Twitter. Whether through blogs, podcasts, or social media, vulnerability fosters connections. In a way, I am doing that with my newsletter Founders in a Cloud. Just be careful about how open you are so that what you share does not negatively impact your business potential or exposes confidential (or sensitive) information.

• Join peer groups – Being part of a structured group environment can help if you are not able to find other accountability partners. Groups like EO (Entrepreneurs' Organization), YPO (Young Presidents Organization), or Endeavor organize small groups of founders to meet regularly and provide programming and opportunities, but these groups are usually for more established companies. For early stage founders, seek out organizations like South Park Commons that are more geared for the founders from the idea stage to MVP.

• Schedule regular off-sites – Founders can benefit with a mental reset every so often. Travel out of your city, rent a house, bring a journal, and reflect. Spend some time on fun non-work activities with your founding team. This helps release much of the pent up emotional baggage that can lead to exhaustion, arguments, and burnout.

• Build your own support network – Use your own network and identify people that are most supportive of your work. These are the people that cheer your successes, support you during your struggles, and have done something tangible to help you. I did this recently with a group that I call The Fifty. Already the group has been incredibly helpful and I plan to build this out as a community so we can all meet and help each other.

In the process of building something that connects people and solves problems for many, it is the founders that often become the most disconnected from people. We sacrifice our social lives and mental well-being to pour everything into building our vision so that we can change the world. We downplay that sustainable success requires sustainable humans.

I have definitely experienced many periods of loneliness as a founder, both during my first startup and now with my current startup. At the moment, I am building by myself, but that is not the end goal. I am seeking a technical co-founder to join me, one who is a passionate problem solver that deeply cares about the craft of coding, appreciates the details, and loves communities as an active community builder. If you are interested, email me or message me on LinkedIn.

Have you wrestled with founder loneliness? What have you found to help you fight through the isolation and stay connected with other people?

Mark Birch

Last week, I landed back in Taiwan and attended the All-Chambers Taipei Connect, an event that brings all the major Chambers of Commerce in Taipei together. It was great to meet old friends and make many new connections among the diverse group of attendees from all over the world in Taipei to expand their businesses or launch new ones. If you are just getting started in a new country, local Chambers of Commerce can be a good starting point for building out your network with local business and government agencies.

Thanks to my friend Elias Ek, whose company Enspyre was hosting the event, for sharing the event with me. Kudos to the Swedish Chamber of Commerce Taipei and Pojanath Bhatanacharoen for leading the effort to organize an excellent event!

I am in Taiwan the rest of the week before doing a quick pitstop in NYC and heading over to Europe to give a talk in Poland at the Venture Café Warsaw (with a delegation from Startup Terrace Taiwan also attending) and then joining the 42Geeks Northeast Europe tour in Finland and Estonia. If you happen to be in any of these places while I am in town, let’s meet up!