Austin Startup Week

Founding a company is a notoriously difficult and isolated experience. Mental health and wellness are critical for the Founder/CEOs to manage their companies effectively and limit burnout for themselves and their teams. Too often founders sacrifice their own health, both mentally and physically, leading to burnout, depression, and potentially major health complications. Examples: Kate Spade, Steve Jobs

There is a fallacy that founders need to live up to and encourage aggressive and stoic archetypes that 'crush it relentlessly' (see: Gary Vee), bottling up the emotions and compartmentalizing the stresses that managing a startup creates. People that care for the founder yet aren't involved with or empathetic to the startup experience will question their career choices, further compounding the isolation and emotional strain. Without a basic peer-supported network of fellow founders and a community that empathizes with them, we risk continuing this behavior and risk losing more great leaders due to depression and more. As accelerator ecosystem leaders, mentors, investors, and fellow startup founders and CEOs, we need to take responsibility for this culture of burnout and not let the next generation suffer the same systemic mental health problems that are pervasive in our community today.

If founders allow themselves to be more open to these common problems during the early company building stages and support their fellow founder peers in a systematic way, we can help relieve some of the stress through peer support, improving the performance of the community as a whole. This panel aims to breakdown these fallacies and replace them with a basic framework that can be applied in our daily company building routines today.

This curated panel includes experts in psychiatry, technology, entrepreneurship, music, events and much more. If you're a first time founder or looking to build, invest, and support a community of creatives and entrepreneurs, this is a panel you cannot afford to miss.