Ask HN: How to be an entrepreneur while mentally ill?

7 points by maximumwage 15 years ago | 6 comments

Hi everyone- I am currently working as a software tester in a big company but am interested in entrepreneurship. I have studied thousands of startups and have some ideas for potential businesses that I could execute on.

Unfortunately, my brain seems to be less resilient to stress and frustration than the average person. I wrote about some of my experiences in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545808

I am currently taking Lexapro, exercising, eating a paleo diet, and practicing mindfulness meditation. However, there are still some constraints on my decision-making capabilities: I am able to understand system administration, database administration, and many other aspects of IT, but coding has been difficult for me to grok the 100+ times I've tried to learn it. Also, I am afraid of people in general, which would have a huge impact on customer development and sales. One approach I have taken is to pretend that other people aren't real - like they are holograms - and as such I'm not worried about them judging me. I'm not sure if that approach is sustainable though.

If you have any advice, experiences, or stories about succeeding in business while having mental problems I would be really interested in hearing them.

gexla 15 years ago |

An entrepreneur can be anything from sending rockets into space to selling things on Ebay. Risk levels are different for all businesses. Selling on Ebay isn't necessarily stressful until you start trying to make a living on it. It's even more stressful when you have decided to live off your business and you start to come short on bills.

My advice. Give it a shot but don't quit your day job until your business is easily paying for itself as well as your personal bills. Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone though.

maximumwage 15 years ago | |

I like your advice. I actually made a living on eBay/Amazon for a while during college by selling used video games. My current living expenses aren't much higher now than they were then, since I'm not raising a family or paying a mortgage.

starkfist 15 years ago |

It's well known that Ted Turner has bipolar disorder. From my anecdotal experience, most other entrepreneurs do, too. ;)

If you aren't good at programming, you don't necessarily have to start a software company. I know many people who left software to start non-software businesses and they are doing all right.

seunosewa 15 years ago | |

But entrepreneurship is inherently stressful, for sure. Moreso than any other profession.

Travis 15 years ago |

It sounds like you have a lot of the abilities and skills to be a back office, background type entrepreneur.

Your efforts to manage your mental illness goes a long way (for me, at least) towards your value. As a potential co-founder, I would appreciate the fact that you aren't a passive victim to your shortcomings -- you address them as best you can.

If your other skills were valuable to me as a co-founder, I would weigh those skills against your "shortcomings" WRT stability. Especially since you work at your shortcomings -- that would make me sympathize a bit. But more importantly, it reveals quite a bit about the quality of your character.

Now, on to the practical part: you still have to be a net positive for the startup. My personal bias is that having a programming co-founder is the single most important skill in a startup. The natural tendency for a coder is to have similar issues that you experience, even if less severe. Even if you're not being unfairly discounted due to your health issues, the problem is that you're unlikely to find a cofounder who can program AND is willing to be the business face.

And startups (in my limited experience) don't generally need IT / sysadmin co-founders. For my company (5 employees), we just use SaaS for any IT needs (dropbox, google apps, salesfoce, 37 signals). Combine that with our Mac setups, and your skillset isn't in great demand.

In conclusion, I first commend you for the efforts you put into combating your health problems. As a theoretical co-founder, I wouldn't be offset by those (it helps that I'm a middle ground type person, not really affected by daily highs and lows of a startup). However, the fact that your skillset is somewhat skewed (technical person who doesn't like approaching people and is also unable to code), I probably wouldn't be able to partner with you. I'm a coder who doesn't really like the face-to-face; it seems in my mind that you need to be one of those two personalities if you're going to fit in a startup with me specifically.

I wish you the best. My advice is that you continue working on your self-improvement, and that you really try to learn some programming. What languages have you attempted? If you can't do direct coding, then familiarize yourself with HTML or JS (frontend) stuff, or become an expert in analytics or email. There are always useful non-coding positions you can find; unfortunately, corporate style IT abilities are down on the list of useful skills.

mmt 15 years ago | |

As a sysadmin who prefers startups, I must, sadly, agree, at least for pure software play early in their growth.

Fortunately, I can't imagine this to be true for a startup that would be doing said SaaS or otherwise competing in an arena where hardware or database knowledge is a significant advantage. Now to see if I can convince investors of this...