Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the builder seat, working on an in-person social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he learned from his Bonobos released at $310 million have less to do with entrepreneurship and more to do with staying sane.

When Dunn was in college, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but did not receive adequate treatment until 2016, when he was hospitalized for the second time during a manic episode.

“The manic state is just a disaster – it’s like being in a psychosis, you know, messianic delusions. … You can’t accomplish anything in this state,” Dunn said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. The incident was enough of a wake-up call that 16 years after his initial diagnosis, he finally took his condition seriously and started going to therapy, taking medication. , and monitor his sleep.

Dunn wrote a book called “Burn Rate: launching a startup and losing your mind», documenting the parallel processes of constructing Bonobos and determining how to accept and then manage his bipolar disorder. But the book’s lessons are applicable to entrepreneurs beyond those with Dunn’s diagnosis.

“We all have mental health, don’t we? You don’t have to have a diagnosis to suffer or struggle,” he said.

However, entrepreneurs tend to report a higher incidence mental health problems throughout their lives than the average person.

“There is definitely a correlation between neurodivergence and creativity,” he said. “I don’t know if entrepreneurship attracts neurodivergent people or if it makes them more neurodivergent, but there’s definitely a kind of virtuous and sometimes non-virtuous cycle.”

This interplay between mental illness and entrepreneurship is even more palpable for Dunn, who says the state of hypomania — the peak of bipolar disorder, as opposed to overwhelming depressive periods — could be conducive to running a startup.

“Here are the DSM criteria for (hypomania): rapid speech, increased ideation, grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, ability to be more creative… pretty much the central traits of an entrepreneur having a good day,” he declared. “I was able to benefit from it, but the price I paid was ultimately too high. I was depressed with suicidal thoughts for two to three months out of the year, and then eventually the mania and psychosis returned, which was catastrophic.

But even in a surprisingly productive hypomanic state, Dunn doesn’t think he was the best boss or colleague. He said one of the side effects of hypomania is becoming irritable when people disagree with you, which is key to running a collaborative business. Now, as leader of Pie, Dunn welcomes this debate.

“When we disagree, let’s go ahead and disagree even more, because then we can make a better decision,” he said.

While discussions about mental health have become more common, founders still worry about the stigma of revealing a diagnosis to colleagues and investors. Dunn is an advisor to the Founder’s Commitment to Mental Healthwhich asks investors to defend the mental health of the founders in whom they invest. But he’s not naive that the stigma is still there: When founders ask him for advice on when to disclose a mental health issue to investors, he says to wait six hours. weeks until the conclusion of the transaction.

“We raised $125 million in Bonobos. Would you give $125 million to someone who may be psychotic or catatonically depressed? » said Dunn. “But also, you shouldn’t do what I did and hide it, because then, you know, when there’s a crisis, it’s a surprise.”

Dunn’s discussion of his experience with bipolar disorder, however, does not appear to have harmed his fundraising ability – Pie just raised a $11.5 million, Series A. As public as he is about the severity of bipolar disorder, he is also open about how his treatment regimen and medications have helped him live a stable life.

“I consider bipolar my Olympic diet. For Simone Biles, it’s about how to sail and win gold,” he said. “For me, the gold medal means dying of something else, right? Because the horrible thing about bipolar is the suicide rate.

Now the next test for Dunn is to do the work necessary to make Pie a success without sacrificing his stability.

“Here’s the challenge,” Dunn said. “We want to have good mental health and we want our teams to have mental health balance, and yet a 40-hour work week is not enough. You can’t change the world with a group of people working 40 hours a week. »

One way Dunn walks that fine line is to be open with candidates about what the job will entail, as well as how it will support them with the company’s benefits package.

“I have a new pitch I’m giving during recruiting, which is that it’s a 50-60 hour a week job, and in return you’ll get two awesome things. First, you will learn more, grow more, and develop more. Second, you have equity,” he said.

Like any startup leader, Dunn wants his team to work hard, but he believes there’s a way to do that without it backfiring. Describing his time at Bonobos in “Burn Rate,” Dunn writes: “I came to the classic erroneous conclusion of an immature startup founder: If the company isn’t working, then we must not be working hard enough. »

There’s no denying that founders have to work hard, but taking care of yourself is part of that hard work.