對大多數紐約人來說，2002年2月都是個艱難時刻。這座城市尚未擺脫“9.11”恐怖襲擊的陰影，清理工作仍在進行中。

杰瑞·科羅納每天都能感覺到這場悲劇的沉重份量。一天上午，在離開一場在金融區召開的會議后，他覺得自己再也堅持不下去了。他不想工作，什么也不想干。科羅納說：“我走出辦公室，站在世貿中心遺址前，打算自殺。”

他給治療師打了個電話，說自己準備在火車駛來時跳下去。但后者說服了科羅納到她的辦公室去。

彼時，科羅納38歲，已經是一位小有成就的風險投資家。他和弗雷德·威爾森在1996年創立Flatiron Partners——這是紐約市首批風投公司之一。該公司一度很成功，但在互聯網泡沫破裂后開始衰落。Flatiron Partners關門歇業后，科羅納在摩根大通合伙人公司(JP Morgan Partners)找了份工作。就在“9.11”之前，他在感情和職場上都陷入了困境。這次恐怖襲擊過后，科羅納變得一蹶不振。他說：“我把日程排得滿滿的，因為我無法忍受那種孤獨和空虛；然后我又會取消這些安排，因為我沒法去參加。”

2月份的那個上午之后，科羅納走下了傳統的初創公司/風投職業階梯，而且是一去不復返。他仍是一名創業者，但這家創立于2014年，名為Reboot.io的新公司旨在幫助公司創始人和高管管理勞神費力的工作帶來的壓力、焦慮和疲勞。

科羅納說自己并不后悔做出這樣的決定，因為這份工作讓他過上了健康、誠實而且有意義的生活。同時，科羅納在職場上的成功遠遠落后于前合伙人弗雷德·威爾遜。后者又成立了著名風投機構Union Square Ventures，現在是一位貨真價實的億萬富翁和風投權威。就像今年夏天科羅納在布魯克林的一次科技大會上登臺演講時開的玩笑一樣：“《紐約》雜志曾把弗雷德和我稱為‘紐約王子’。現在他成了他娘的國王，我則是個宮廷小丑。”

科羅納知道，許多創業者都不愿做出同樣的選擇。這意味著他們要扮演好自己的角色。特別是在硅谷和紐約城這樣的科技核心區域，信心就是金錢，承認不確定性或者害怕則會導致自信心迅速流失。

然而，最近幾年涌現了另一種相反的言論。風投資本家布拉德·費爾德、Moz公司創始人蘭德·費舍金和Y Combinator總裁山姆·阿爾特曼等知名風投人士和創業者都曾表示，不，他們并不總是覺得自己“所向無敵”；相反，他們都曾經歷過（或者知道其他創業者有過）深深的懷疑和陰郁心理。

這種趨勢開啟了許多創業者的心扉，促使他們更加坦誠地探討自己在創業道路上經歷的情感折磨。畢竟，他們付出全部心血創建的公司，從統計學意義上講，恐怕很難生存下去。但就像對失敗的描述一樣，某種抑郁故事比其他故事更合人們的口味。面對媒體和公眾時，還不像費爾德那樣聲名狼藉的公司創始人，經常把他們的抑郁描述為一段不長的彎路。疲憊、焦慮、甚至是臨床上表現出來的悲傷都很痛苦，但在通向最終勝利的道路上，這些都是可以克服的障礙。

以下這個經典案例源自《Inc》雜志于2013年發表的一篇文章，說的是金融危機過后，一位管理咨詢公司所有者在必須裁員時怎樣陷入了深度抑郁。他遠離家人，而且不再離開自己的住所。但不知怎的，“他自始至終仍在努力，以便開發出新的服務項目。”在文章末尾，他不再抑郁了，他的公司也贏得了“有史以來最大的一份合同”。銷售額增長了50倍。

類似的事跡不勝枚舉，對此科羅納并不覺得意外。他說：“我們喜歡救贖故事。沒人想提及那個黑洞從未真正消失這一事實。”但對許多跟科羅納打交道的創始人和高管來說，抑郁并非故事的第二章。相反，它隨時都可能給人帶來打擊，造成初創公司倒閉，或者因為公司倒閉而出現。

加州大學舊金山分校精神病專家邁克爾·弗里曼正在研究創業者的性格特征。他說：“大家讀到的許多故事最終都會回到愉快的話題上——曾經出現了問題，我們解決了它，現在萬事大吉。但精神健康問題并不是這樣”，這其中就包括抑郁。弗里曼相信創業者出現抑郁的比例要高于全國平均水平，部分原因可能是性格使然，另一部分原因則是整個創業過程都建立在巨大的風險之上。哈佛商學院經常被引用的一項研究顯示，90%的初創型企業都以倒閉告終。逾50%的美國初創公司都挺不過五年。在那些撐過五年的初創企業中，大多都不是價值10億美元、光鮮亮麗的成功事例，而是苦苦掙扎，以求生存。傾其所有進行創業卻以失敗收場讓人很受傷，這可以理解。

以下兩位創業者是朋友，都住在博爾德，他們的初創公司處于不同的階段——其中一人的公司已經倒閉，目前在別的公司上班；另一個則正在設法為自己的公司進行新一輪融資。他們講述了自己的抑郁經歷。

“公司倒閉就意味著我是個廢物嗎？”

泰勒·麥克勒莫爾31歲，2010年創立自己的公司前，他從來不知道抑郁是什么東西。最初，他的公司只是一些閃亮的期望以及種子輪融資籌集到的50萬美元資金，前景看來很光明。工作繁重，而且作為公司聯合創始人，麥克勒莫爾不是被別人洗腦，而是自行洗了腦。

但挫折接踵而至。作為社交游戲網絡，麥克勒莫爾的初創公司未能獲得足夠的成長動力，進而轉型為基于Facebook的夢幻體育游戲公司。2013年底，也就是加入博爾德的初創公司加速器項目Techstars不久，這家公司就遭遇大客戶欠款問題，資金隨即耗盡。

麥克勒莫爾不得不和創業伙伴一起關閉這家公司，也就是說，他們要辭退幾名員工，并告訴早期出資人他們的投資已經化為烏有。情感上的痛苦經歷就此開始。“公司倒閉就意味著我是個廢物嗎？”麥克勒莫爾記得自己當時的想法，而且這個問題一直困擾著他。在隨后的幾個月里，起床要花費極大的氣力，離開住所的時間也遠少于以往。負面想法在他的腦海中不斷循環往復，他不停地剖析自己身上的不足之處。曾經讓他感到愉快的社交活動也變成了痛苦的磨難，這在很大程度上是因為別人似乎都干得那么好。

理智告訴他，在博爾德聯系緊密的創業者團體中，許多朋友并非“所向披靡”。但麥克勒莫爾說，就算公司實際經營狀況一塌糊涂，展現虛假的信心其實是一種“風險最小的做法”。創業者像打仗一樣爭奪著資金、人才和曝光度，信心則是一種防御機制，也就是說大多數熟人都只會展現光明的樂觀態度。

在妻子、朋友和職場熟人連續幾個月的關懷和鼓勵下，麥克勒莫爾終于能夠去尋找新的職業發展機會了。

2014年初，他開始為一家剛剛起步的初創公司提供咨詢服務，后者的業務是對科技公司進行投資。如今，他是商業運營負責人，也就是說他有了收入，而且再也不用為了給投資者賺錢或者籌集足夠資金來發工資而操心了。

對于是否愿意用目前的相對穩定來換取從頭再來一次的機會，麥克勒莫爾停頓了很長時間。最后，他回答說，愿意。統計數字沒有變化，他的第二次嘗試很可能失敗，而且他認為第二次應付那種羞恥、挫敗和失望的感覺并不會變得更容易。這聽起來是在自討苦吃，但創業真的就是一種心理柔道。麥克勒莫爾說：“這就是創業者悖論。”你得了解這個行業的“死亡率”，然后“必須驅逐這種疑慮，以便開啟自己的事業。”要不然又是為了什么呢？在忙著把這些極高的期盼融入現實的過程中，你自己的身份會和你的公司融為一體，這馬上就會變成最好的動力，但也會帶來情感災難。

但麥克勒莫爾說，第二次他會采取不同的做法。最重要的是，他會更早地尋求朋友們的幫助。他們也許不會公開地講，但其中大多數人都經歷過失敗以及自信的最低谷。其他人的同情很有用。

他的建議是：依靠你的支持體系，并尋求周圍其他創業者的幫助，其中許多人可能都有過類似的情感經歷。

“當你去籌集資金時，人們都視你為支柱。但不能保證一年后你的公司依然存在。”

49歲的大衛·曼德爾一直都是個相當憂郁的人。他說：“我天生如此。我們都有一個設定值，有些人設定在快樂的那一側，有些在不快樂的那一側，我的設定值則是慢慢接近抑郁。”不過，盡管他從高中開始就情緒多變，但那些通常都被列為自我反省和內向。

當他以不那么驕人的業績離開自己的第一家公司時，情況有了變化。和許多核心人物一樣，曼德爾在兩年之后已經不再信任這家和別人共同建立的公司。這在很大程度上是因為來自董事會的“鞭策”（這家初創公司起初是一個社交媒體平臺，隨后重塑品牌，成為實時搜索引擎，最后則轉型為實時廣告交易平臺）。員工隊伍變得龐大起來，但曼德爾痛恨企業文化的改變。他說：“它不友好了。出現了許多‘閉嘴、去干活’的現象。好人都離開了，因為他們不快樂。壞人都留了下來，因為他們不在乎。”

因此，他在2008年秋天辭了職。那是一個黑暗的時刻。他無法阻止自己創立的公司變成一個讓自己毫無自豪感的東西，這讓他覺得一敗涂地。他的腦海中不斷重復著一段可憎的話語：“我籌集了大量資金，投資者卻不再信任我。我聘請了一大批好人，他們卻再也不會和我共事。我要養家糊口，但我不知道以后怎么賺錢。”

他最初的想法是退出，并且不想跟別人打交道。他甚至不想離開家。他難以走出無邊無際的失敗感。曼德爾說：“我妻子對我不滿意。經常出現‘我們現在到底該怎么辦’的對話。”

他一直沒能擺脫自我封閉狀態，直到大衛·科恩找上門來。曼德爾和科恩在Techstars擔任導師時相識，后者問他是否愿意給一家進入這個加速器項目的初創公司當顧問。這正是曼德爾需要的救生索；雖然沒有這樣的感覺，但他的經驗和技能仍有些價值。這足以讓他從家里走出來。曼德爾開始覺得好了起來。

2011年，曼德爾和一位朋友聊了聊天，后者為自己的公司租了辦公場地，但那家公司還不夠大，并未充分利用租下的辦公室，這給曼德爾帶來了靈感。這個意外收獲隨后變成了轉租網站PivotDesk，初創公司可以通過它把閑置辦公空間租給自由職業者和更小的公司。和WeWork不同，PivotDesk名下沒有任何房地產，但它可以解決短期租賃這個令人頭疼的問題。

現在，PivotDesk已經進入了30個市場，包括舊金山、紐約市和波士頓，并已融資近700萬美元。但它的資金即將耗盡，曼德爾的新一輪融資也已接近尾聲。他對公司的前景很樂觀。曼德爾說：“我覺得這個行業已經有了重大變化。顯然，很多公司現在都愿意嘗試我們提供的解決方案。”但他也意識到，任何一家初創公司都沒有十足的勝算。員工向他提出對未來的擔憂時，他的態度很明確——他覺得很有希望，但無法做出任何承諾。

這家初創公司倒閉了該怎么辦？首先，他說現在自己能更好地應付由此產生的影響。但他也主動表示，自己有一系列的顧慮——他不能讓PivotDesk倒閉，因為“我不能讓這些人失望，我不能讓員工失望，不能讓投資者失望，不能讓客戶失望。”詭異的是，這番話聽起來似曾相識。

曼德爾說，如果公司真的倒閉了，他會試著讓自己接受他為別的創業者提供的建議，那就是“你沒有失敗，你的公司沒能成功。你白手起家，承擔了幾乎沒人承擔過的風險，而且學到了很多東西。”鑒于他和抑郁的“淵源”，曼德爾成了一批公司創始人的導師，他經常采用的邏輯是“你的價值并不等同于公司的價值”。

但說實在的，他知道這會把自己擊倒在地。曼德爾說，公司倒閉時，“根本沒辦法將其拋諸腦后，這是一個令人悲傷的過程。”

他的建議：不要逃避自己的情緒，但要告訴自己，公司倒閉和人生失敗是兩碼事。“你很有價值，可以為別人做很多事，沒人知道接下來你會做什么，但你會去做一些有意義的事。”他覺得，陷入困境的創業者應該多聽聽這樣的話。（財富中文網）

譯者：Charlie

審校：詹妮

February 2002 was a difficult time for most New Yorkers. The city was reeling from the attacks of September 11th. The cleanup effort was still underway.

Jerry Colonna felt the weight of the tragedy every day.One morning, after leaving a meeting in the financial district, he decided he couldn’t do it anymore. Not the job, not any of it. “I stepped outside the office and stood in front of Ground Zero and wanted to kill myself,” he says.

He called his therapist and told her he was going to jump in front of a train. She convinced him to come to her office instead.

Thirty-eight at the time, Colonna had found early success as a venture capitalist. Along with Fred Wilson, he launched Flatiron Partners in 1996, one of New York City’s first VC firms. It was a success until, following the dotcom crash, it wasn’t. When the firm shut down, Colonna took a job at JP Morgan Partners.Just before September 11, Colonna was struggling emotionally and professionally. After the attacks, he was a mess. “I was filling my calendar because I couldn’t bear the loneliness and emptiness, and then canceling them because I couldn’t bear to go,” he says.

Following that morning in February, Colonna got off the traditional startup/VC career ladder — for good. He’s still an entrepreneur, but his venture, Reboot.io, which he started in 2014, is devoted to helping founders and C-suite executives manage the stress, anxiety, burnout and other byproducts that come with a demanding job.

He says he doesn’t regret the decision — it’s allowed him to live a healthy, honest and meaningful life. At the same time, Colonna is far less professionally successful than his former partner Fred Wilson, who went on to launch Union Square Ventures and is now a bonafide billionaire VC guru. As Colonna joked onstage at a tech conference in Brooklyn this summer, “New York Magazine had called Fred and I the ‘princes of New York.’ He’s now a f**king king, and I’m a court jester.”

He understands that many entrepreneurs aren’t willing to make the same trade, which means they need to act the part. Particularly in the tech enclaves like Silicon Valley and New York City, confidence is currency and admitting uncertainty or fear quickly drains the bank.

And yet, over the past few years, a counter narrative has emerged. High-profile venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, including venture capitalist Brad Feld, Moz’s Rand Fishkin and Y Combinator president Sam Altman, have declared that no, they don’t always feel like they’re “crushing it,” and yes, they have (or know entrepreneurs who have) experienced feelings of intense doubt and darkness.

It’s a trend that’s opened the door for more honest discussions about the emotional toil of pouring everything into a company that, statistically, won’t make it. But as with the failure narrative, certain types of depression stories are more palatable than others. To the press and public, founders who have yet to reach Feld-level notoriety often portray their depression as a contained arc. Burnout, anxiety and even clinical sadness are painful but ultimately surmountable bumps on the road to eventual success.

Here’s a classic example, courtesy of a 2013 Inc. article, which describes how the owner of a management consulting firm fell into a crippling depression when, following the financial crisis, he had to lay off employees. He withdrew from his family and stopped leaving the house. And yet, somehow “through it all, he kept working to develop new services.” At the article’s close, he is no longer depressed and his company “scored its biggest-ever contract.” Sales are up 5,000%.

There are a lot of accounts like this, which doesn’t surprise Colonna. “We love stories of redemption,” he says. “No one wants to talk about the fact that the black hole never really goes away.” But for many of the founders and executives he’s worked with, depression isn’t a story’s second act. Instead, it can strike at anytime and contribute to a startup’s failure, or spawn from its collapse.

“In a lot of stories you read, it regresses back to happy talk at the end — there was a problem, we solved it and now it’s all fixed,” says Michael Freeman, a psychiatrist who is studying the personality traits of entrepreneurs at University of California, San Francisco. “But that’s not the case with mental health issues,” including depression, which he believes affects entrepreneurs at a higher rate than the general population. That’s likely partially due to personality type, partially because the entire proposition is built on outsized risk — according to a frequently cited Harvard Business School study,nine out of 10 startups fail. More than 50% of U.S. startups don’t make it past the five–year mark, andmost that do aren’t flashy, billion–dollar success stories, but companies fighting to keep the lights on. Pouring everything you have into a venture that goes belly up understandably hurts.

Below two entrepreneurs, friends living in Boulder who are at different stages in the startup cycle — one is working at another company after his own venture failed, and the other is trying to raise a new round of funding for his business — share their experiences with depression.

“If this business was a failure, does that mean I’m a failure?”

Before Taylor McLemore, 31, started his own company in 2010, he’d never experienced anything close to depression. And in the beginning, when it was nothing but shiny expectations and $500,000 in seed funding, the future looked bright. The workload was heavy but as the company’s co-founder, McLemore hadn’t just drunk the Kool Aid — he’d mixed it himself.

But then came the setbacks. After failing to gain enough traction as a social gaming network, his startup pivoted to become a Facebook-based fantasy sports company. At the end of 2013, shortly after joining the startup accelerator Techstars in Boulder, one of its largest clients failed to make a payment and the startup ran out of capital.

Along with his co-founder, McLemore had to shut the company down, which meant letting go of a handful of employees and telling early backers their investment was effectively worthless. That’s when the emotional anguish set in. “If this business was a failure, does that mean I’m a failure?” he remembers thinking. The question wouldn’t leave him alone. For months getting out of bed, much less leaving his house, took enormous effort. In looping cycles, pernicious thoughts dissecting each one of his many inadequacies ran through his brain; once pleasurable social activities became painful ordeals, in large part because everyone else seemed to be doing so well.

On an intellectual level, he knew many of his friends in Boulder’s tight-knit entrepreneurial community weren’t “crushing it.” But engaging in feigned, projected confidence even when things fall to pieces is “the lowest risk move,” says McLemore. Entrepreneurs are at war for cash, talent, exposure — confidence is a defense mechanism, which meant most acquaintances projected only sunny optimism.

Only after months of persistent outreach, from his wife, friends and professional connections, was he able to seek out new career opportunities.

In early 2014, he began consulting for an early stage startup that invests in technology companies. Today, he’s the director of business operations, which means he gets a paycheck and no longer has to worry about making money for investors or raising enough capital to pay his employees.

When asked if he would trade this relative stability to try it all again, he pauses for a long time. His answer, ultimately, is yes. The statistics haven’t changed — his second attempt would likely fail, and he doesn’t think the feelings of shame, defeat and disappoint will be easier to handle the second time around. It sounds masochistic, but really it’s just that starting a business is a game of mental jujitsu. “That’s the paradox of being an entrepreneur,” he says. You need be informed about the industry’s mortality rate and then “you have to expel that disbelief to start something.” Otherwise, McLemore says, what’s the point? In the race to merge these outsized expectations with reality, you conflate your own identity with that of your company’s, which is at once the best motivator and a recipe for emotional disaster.

Still, next time around he says he’ll do things differently. Most importantly, he’ll reach out to friends earlier. They may not advertise it, but most have their own experience with failure and basement-level self-confidence. Commiserating helps.

His advice: Lean on your support system and reach out to other entrepreneurs in your community — many of them have likely experienced similar emotions.

“When you are out raising money, people are counting on you. But there are no guarantees you’ll have a business a year from now.”

David Mandell, 49, has always been a pretty melancholy guy. “It’s been my whole life. We all have a set point — some people’s set points are on the happy side, some people’s set points are on the not as happy side. My set point is edged towards the depression side,” he says. But while he had moody tendencies from high school onwards, it typically registered as introspection and introversion.

When he left his first business on not-so-great terms, that changed. After two years — and just as many pivots — Mandell no longer believed in the company he’d co-founded. In large part, this was due to board-incited whiplash (the startup began as a social media platform, rebranded as a real-time search engine, and finally morphed into a real-time ad exchange platform). Employee count had blossomed, but Mandell hated what the culture had become. “It wasn’t friendly,” he says. “There was a lot of just ‘shut up and do it.’ The good people were leaving because they were unhappy, and the bad people were staying because they didn’t care.”

And so in the fall of 2008, he left. It was a dark time. His inability to stop his startup from turning into something he wasn’t proud of made him feel like a complete failure. An ugly mantra ran through his head on repeat: “I had raised a bunch of money from people and they aren’t going to have any faith in my any more. I hired a bunch of good people and they’ll never work with me again. I have a family and I don’t know how I’m going to make money.”

His initial recourse was to retreat. He didn’t want to socialize. He didn’t even want to leave the house. The sense of failure was all-encompassing. “My wife was not happy with me,” Mandell says. “There were a lot of ‘what the hell are we doing to do now’ conversations.”

He didn’t shake the claustrophobic self-image until David Cohen, whom he’d met when they both were mentors at Techstars, asked if he’d be an advisor to one of the the startups cycling through the accelerator program. The request was the lifeline he needed; while it didn’t feel like it, his experience and skills were worth something. It was enough to get him out of the house. He started to feel better.

In 2011, after speaking to a friend who had rented space for his company but had yet to grow enough to fill it, Mandell had an idea. That revelation would become PivotDesk, which enables startups with extra square footage to rent out space to freelancers and smaller companies. Unlike WeWork it doesn’t own any property, but manages the headache of facilitating short-term leases.

The company is now in 30 markets, including San Francisco, New York City, and Boston. To date, it’s raised nearly $7 million. But PivotDesk is running out of cash; Mandell is in the process of closing a new round of funding. He’s bullish on the company’s prospects — “I think we’ve seen a big shift in the industry…the willingness to try and accept what we’re doing as a real solution is more significant now,” he says — but also recognizes that a startup is never a sure thing. When employees approach him with concerns about the future, he’s transparent: he’s hopeful, but can’t make any promises.

What if the startup fails? At first, he says he’ll be better equipped to handle the fallout this time. But unprovoked, he runs through a list of concerns: He can’t let PivotDesk fail because, “I can’t let these people down, I can’t let my employees down, I can’t let my investors down, I can’t let my customers down.” It sounds eerily familiar.

If things do fall apart, he says he’ll try to internalize the advice he tells other entrepreneurs: “You didn’t fail, your business didn’t succeed. You started something from nothing, took a risk few people ever take, and learned a lot.” Since his bout with depression, he has become something of a mentor to a network of founders, and ‘your value is not the same as your company’s’ is a line of logic he employs often.

But realistically, he knows it it would crush him. When a company fails, “there’s no way to brush that off,” he says. “It’s a mourning process.”

His advice: Don’t run from your emotions, but remind yourself that failing at a business is different from failing at life. “You are valuable, you have a lot to offer, who knows what you will do next, but you’ll do something good” are things he doesn’t think struggling entrepreneurs hear enough.