Sunday, November 3, 2024

Building a startup without sacrificing your mental health

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Sunday, November 3, 2024

Image Credits: Barak Shrama/Slava Blazer Photography

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 ended just a few days ago, which means we're still catching up on all the eye-opening conversations and impressive startups that filled its stages and booths.

Let's start with Bonobos founder Andy Dunn's comments about being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in college. As reported by Amanda Silberling, Dunn acknowledged that as an entrepreneur, he benefited from hypomania (the high state of bipolar disorder), but "the price that I paid was ultimately too high."

Now Dunn is hoping to build his new startup, an in-person social media platform called Pie, without sacrificing his hard-earned stability. And that's a worthy goal for any founder, even if they don't have a mental health diagnosis. As Dunn put it, "It doesn't take a diagnosis to suffer or struggle."

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch is covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Barak Shrama / Slava Bazer Photography

How startups should think about government contracts: Rebecca Bellan recaps a panel about the boom in "national interest" startups, where Dcode Capital managing partner Rebecca Gevalt said that if a startup wants to work with the government, it needs to focus on getting repeatable revenue, not just grants. And if you're wondering where to start, Gevalt said the Department of Defense is "flush with money." Read more

Find your co-founder with CoffeeSpace: This Startup Battlefield company built a social networking app that matches up entrepreneurs who are looking for co-founders. CEO Hazim Mohamad told Aisha Malik that the goal is to "change the nature of how people can find business partners," just as Tinder changed the nature of dating. Read more

Wesley Chan goes unicorn shopping: Investor and early Googler Wesley Chan told Matt Rosoff that there aren't many commonalities between the founders he backs, except that they usually remind him of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and they focus on building a great product first. Read more

What else we're reading 📗

Steampunk — that subset of science fiction focused on combining futuristic tech with a 19th-century aesthetic — might seem pretty far removed from our 21st-century reality, but a recent New Yorker article argues that the genre is more relevant than ever. Specifically, as we face the lure of automation and AI, it can be valuable to hold on to the steampunk vision of the world as "an aging contraption hurtling into the future." Read more

Also, Paul Graham writes about how generative AI might eventually divide the population into "the writes and the write-nots." Read more