A decade ago, I quit my job at Goldman Sachs to become a tech founder. A group of my colleagues and friends spent a weekend together in Munich to discuss the seeds of an idea about making investment more accessible and transparent. The next week, we all handed in our notices and decided to make Scalable Capital a reality.
Now, Scalable Capital is a unicorn that employs more than 600 people and has raised investment from some of the biggest VCs in the world.
I stayed at Scalable for seven years before becoming a VC investor myself. When I look back at those seven years, they were incredibly exciting and rewarding, but they demanded hard work, sacrifices and were often very lonely.
We don’t talk about the unglamorous side of being a tech founder enough. As someone who has played a role in building a tech unicorn, I know that the most successful founders are not just those with the biggest ideas and ambition levels, but those who find ways to navigate loneliness, burnout and stress.
Let’s start with the obvious – being a founder is hard and takes a toll on your mental health. Balderton Capital’s latest study on this topic found that two thirds of tech founders think burnout due to stress is a significant problem across the industry.
Sharing this burden with co-founders is a good way of navigating this issue. As well as providing complementary skills, this is one of the reasons why, on average, most unicorns have two or three co-founders.
However, the co-founder relationship brings its own bizarre nuances and complications. It’s a very unique relationship where you quickly discover the best and worst attributes of each other. A recent study from Carta shows that 25% of startups have lost a co-founder by Year 4, and within Antler’s portfolio we have seen founders even enter couples therapy to try and save fractious co-founder bonds. So you can’t always rely on your co-founders to get you through.
For me, what struck me the most was the alienation and loneliness from my friends. When you become a tech founder, you are stepping away from the accepted pathways that society lays out for us. I had studied at the London School of Economics and was building a career at Goldman Sachs. As one of the few tech founders in the UK from a state school background, those two chapters meant I had undeniably made it.
I know my decision to risk all of that to build a tech startup caused a few raised eyebrows amongst my colleagues and friends.
Becoming a tech founder is one of the riskiest decisions you can make. But you do it because you believe in what you’re building, and you believe in your co-founders and the team around you.
Looking back, I realise that this decision causes such a polarised reaction because it forces people to reflect on their own career choices. But the result was that I was suddenly disconnected from what had previously been a very strong support network of friends, family and colleagues.
So what do tech founders do to overcome this loneliness and stress? I think it is all about community and the network of like-minded founders that you build around you.
Every year at Antler we bring some of the best founders from our European portfolio to London for two days of workshops, events and networking. 85% of them tell us that meeting with other founders is the most valuable part of that experience.
No one else understands the strange mix of exhilaration and alienation that being a founder brings as well as other founders.
I was lucky to tap into the alumni network of the LSE, which includes many founders of interesting tech companies. And London has a very healthy network of fintech founders and experts that I was able to access.
My advice to founders is to accept that the journey is going to be hard, and to prepare for it. Investing time in your network and community brings a host of commercial benefits, but the support network is vital in being a great founder. In cities across the UK and Europe there are now great founder communities, Whatsapp groups and networking events. Seek them out, ask to join and they will welcome you with open arms.
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