So I'm always very proud of the shows. We do here at 20 VC, but I don't think we necessarily always touch on some of the most important and meaningful topics now is very pleased to the episode on alcohol and drinking last month and stare have an incredible group of people to discuss depression and mental well-being such a cool part of the found a journey that I don't think maybe gets enough air time and Spotlight. And so I'm thrilled to welcome to incredible people starting with Brad Feld co-founder and managing director at Foundry group, one of the leading Venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of zing.
Inga Fitbit and sang grid to name a few next we have Tracy Lawns Tracy spent the last eight years as founder and CEO choose the startup that makes it effortless for office managers to order delicious food for their teams Tracy grew the team to over 300 people across four markets and raised millions of dollars in venture capital for ultimately selling the business to foodie and last but by no means least we had Jerry Kelowna CEO of reboot dot IO where he's now the professional coach to some of the world's leading Founders before reboot Joe was the co-founder of flat.
In an early stage Venture fund alongside Fred Wilson, but before we move into the show stay I wouldn't take a moment to mention hellosign a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience hellosign is an effortless e-signatures solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of 16 million dollars in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive 230 million dollars check out. Hello sign.com /to zero VC to join the thousands of
Companies and Founders who value fast secure and simple e-signatures and speaking of beautiful product there with hellosign. I want to talk to you about point card who are dear friends from the show. Jeff Morris. Genius has become his go-to card for every day spend instead of his Chase Sapphire Reserve point card is the first debit card with rewards from bronze. You actually care about with point card. You can earn five acts on subscriptions like Spotify 3x1 ride sharing food delivery outside Postmates and one acts on everything else you're rewarded every time you spend and points are redeemed for cash.
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Scott's Pando dot IO / product - benchmarks, but enough for me and I can waste now dive into this incredible episode.
You have now arrived at your destination first. I do want to thank you for agreeing to come on the show to discuss mental health and depression. It's obviously something very very close to all of our hearts, but I want to sort of stay with maybe a bit of
contact. So think for me
and personal story was it was using kind of not feeling good enough that manifest itself in a very bad form of bulimia for me Tracy if I'm going to start with you when did it become front and center few and why do you think it was then
probably when I was running my second financing
and this point I had a co-founder but I was single and this financing took me probably 11 months to do and it was just one of the most depressing times that I ever went through and it kind of culminated in me sort of having what I call an emotional spiral in the middle of my apartment and really questioning whether or not I should be in Tech questioning myself and my self-worth and I think that was kind of a light up moment for me of like if I continue to not address
My mental health I can't continue doing like living out the big Vision that I want in the world that kind of entering and it wasn't clinical depression. But I mean it was pretty close and I went through many versions of this. I think that was probably my first like wake-up call to
it. Did you have anyone to talk to you in that period because it is a very lonely period especially on that fundraise alone as a solo founder. Did you have anyone to talk to well, I
was single in terms of relationship status by did have a co-founder. So luckily my co-founder who I kind of call an end. Jerry knows him.
One of my spiritual sage and he as much as we were business partners. We were also good friends and he was sort of the first person to tell me. Oh, you know, it's okay to cry. It's okay to feel sadness. Whereas Me growing up with my Chinese Jewish parents. We didn't talk about her feelings and to be able to express feelings in a healthy way. He completely blew open the doors on that for me and I was like, oh you could you could actually talk about these things and they're real. They're not just imagined in my head. They're not just something to kind of suck in and ignore.
Or so he was probably the main and probably only person that I felt I could talk to at that time. I did have some friends that I could speak to but I sort of felt like I retreated into a shell and that was a self-created and self-declared shell of other people can't understand me outside of me building a company because this is uniquely difficult or challenging which also isn't true as I know now, but I think it was just more of a feeling of Shame than anything else
Jerry you'll that person that many speak to you stay in terms of having that extra person outside of that.
Team speak to you when they kind of mental health and wellness become so prominent for you. Well, it's been a challenge for me all of my life. I grew up in a household where my mother was mentally ill. My father was an alcoholic and so it's kind of hard to pinpoint a time when it became an important issue of mine. I think it became something that I no longer ran away from first after a suicide attempt at 18. I entered therapy and then later again as I've shared a number of times.
In my late 30s when the depression came back and I would argue that it was only the time when I was in my thirties that I began to get at the roots of what it was that was behind that phenomena for me behind the depression. Can I ask Jerry? Sorry. This is a little bit off schedule. But in terms if there's an earlier years in terms of kind of psychological challenges in the alcoholism that you mentioned. I think the hardest thing I find for me with my mother's that mass is becoming a carrot so much earlier than I thought that I
Wood as a child back when I was how did you deal with adopting that responsibility so much earlier than you thought you would well to answer your question directly. I'll go back to you for a moment and just acknowledge what you just said because I think that that's incredibly important add a much earlier age. Perhaps then you were prepared for you were thrust into a position of being a parent taking care being a caregiver and that's an important statement you just made because well, it's not the only root cause of mental.
Illnesses such as depression or anxiety. It can be a contributing factor because you experienced and Tracy will recognize this because our of our mutual friend call it halim. My partner likes to call it early promotion you experience this phenomena being thrust into early onset adulthood when your emotional body may not have been prepared for it. The positive attribute of that. Is that at a very young age you experienced grown up success if you will for me.
Phenomenal is very similar in the sense that each of my siblings and I were responsible for each other and for ourselves the way it expressed itself for me was that I started stepping out of the household at about age 13 and spending a lot more time out in the World At Large and so we each respond to the pressure of growing up early and being responsible for our parents differently and it can contribute.
To the loss of a sense of self as a consequence, right? I do want to touch on your experience. Is it going to personal contest? How does it become so prominent for you? And how did that kind of manifest itself?
I had my first major depressive episode when I was running my first company in my mid-20s and it was triggered by three things happening at the same time.
The first was I ended up getting divorced from my first wife relationship blew up. The second was I got kicked out of a Ph.D program. I was good at running my company, but I was a terrible
PhD student and the third was that I was very bored running my company was successful, but I was doing the same thing over and over again. I wasn't very stimulated by that depressive episode lasted two years. I learned a lot. I had a probably four or five years therapeutic experience that was profound and impactful and how I approach life and I had several other depressive episodes that were major ones subsequent. Lots of smaller ones on the reflection things shifted for me when I was forty seven Two thousand thirteen again, I had a very major depressive episode that
Lasted six months and this was triggered by what I would call among other things physiological exhaustion that was triggered by a whole year sort of nine months worth of things that had cumulative effect on how I felt. I started therapy again. Also at this time several entrepreneurs had relatively recently committed suicide and there was some discussion about it, but not much I decided to be very open about my struggles as I was depressed. And as I was going through this depression not just a struggles but also,
To the things I did. I was already blogging about everything that was going on in my world. So why not this and I came through that also with a lot of help from Jerry in terms of our own conversations and realize that there was an incredible stigma around issues of mental health in our society broadly, but especially in the context of Entrepreneurship and that stigma that existed actually made things much much worse for somebody who was depressed and that one of my goals and desires would be to try to help eliminate the
sigma because my view was that mental health and mental Wellness is just a part of our character as humans and not something to be ashamed of not something to be unduly burdened by in a way where you create this negative reinforcing Loop that becomes a personal Doom Loop when you're in a depressive State and trying to be an entrepreneur or a leader and running a
company. I absolutely agree and I think kind of having these discussions is Keith kind of removing that statement. I do want to start on a statement that we often hear in this ecosystem and Industry with regards to kind of company building.
Is that that crushing it and Jerry you said before that? No one is crushing it. So I'd love to start on this crushing it statement. And how do you think about this statement Jerry and how do you interpret it and invite others to almost ingest it when they hear it. Well, I bring your attention back to something that Tracy was seeing when she was sharing her story Tracy when you were feeling what you are feeling and before your co-founder said to you was okay to cry. What was the challenge for you that you felt like it was not okay.
A to cry and you made reference to growing up with Jewish and Chinese parents, but can you say more and I'm curious if the impact of the industry that Brad was just noting was having on
you. Yeah. I mean, this was actually the moment that brought me also to meeting you Jerry and it was when we were six months away from the end of Runway and going out to raise I think our series a and I just I had a complete fear spiral and I was in the office.
In San Francisco and my co-founder sort of saw it on my face. We had a team of maybe 12 and he's like, let's go for a walk and I get up and we go for a walk and I go two blocks away and I sit on a stoop and I just start sobbing and I share with him how devastated I would be not to work with this team and just to be a failure because we had come to this kind of Holy Land of Silicon Valley to start this company and we would fail before we even felt like we had a running start and that's when he gently
Lee told me that it was actually a really beautiful sentiment and that I could share it with the team to which I told him that he was crazy and that the team would leave because they needed quote unquote strong leadership and you would never want to show that kind of weakness and I think part of it was certainly their mental models of leaders out there who they seem literally Fearless they seem literally without fear and I think what I've learned from you and from other leaders and living it. Is that the
The reason you have courage is actually as a response to fear because you actually do feel fear but there's something even more noble and overcoming that and still moving towards a goal but it is not without fear. And so I think a lot of that contributed to where I was in that
moment. Thank you Tracy. So Harry would I note in Tracy's story is a release that comes from her co-founder allowing her giving her the space to say. Yeah, not only is this normal but it's actually beautiful and it's connective and it was a powerful.
Powerful moment. So now if you go back to your question about this notion of everybody's crushing it or the nonsense of that and what I often say is nobody's crushing it what's important about that isn't just the sort of deflating of the stultifying and crucifying image that we're all supposed to be crushing it but it's also the notion that we're not alone. So you Tracy sitting on that park bench in that moment terrified that she's going to fail and creating a story that goes along with that which is that she's going to somehow
All that team. Well that fear of failure is almost a universal phenomena and rather than seeing it as a means of actually empathetically connecting with other people in the industry. We inadvertently and because of the shame producing phenomena use it to isolate ourselves even further making what is the typical normal roller coaster struggle into a depression. This is when we think about kind of transparency by Tracy, you said that with the team and being open?
With them a lot of what would prevent me talking about depression lenient before honestly is actually LP reactions Howard LP's feel and on the founder side. I guess it's how it my VC's feel helped my board members feel. How do you guys think about that fear of transparency with these stakeholders who fund a lot of what we do in many
respects. Let's start from the premise that every single human being on the planet is flawed and we're all flawed in different ways. We're all imperfect and this idealized state that are
Culture has created where you have to carry yourself and present yourself in a certain way is actually a massive inhibitor of people being effective and successful on top of it. And I think Jerry said it really well all of those pressures create endless negative feedback loops, which just makes it harder to be successful or effective or whatever adjective you want to fill in the blank with as part of it this notion that you have to
to present yourself a certain way because everybody else is presenting themselves a certain way then creates this recurring feedback loop of loneliness of isolation. It actually goes the other direction where you become more and more disconnected from everybody else because you know, you're sort of true sense, but you're pretending are you behaving in a way to try to look like everybody else who are also pretending in a certain way because they're not being their true selves and on and on it goes that doesn't mean
There is a way to be I think that from my frame of reference. Everybody should be however they want to be and the challenge is this notion that there is a certain way to be rather than to allow yourself to blossom into evolved the way you are and from my perspective as an investor. I think entrepreneurs who I encounter and work with who allow that to happen and allow themselves to evolve and grow their own way regardless of the outcome of the particular business.
At any point in time end up being over a long period of time much more successful at what they do as humans and for me personally, I've sort of reflected back the other direction. I think the ability to process that stuff in a way that is comfortable for me makes me a much more effective
investor AB see a career that and I guess he said it kind of about the elements of success and achieving that success one that I love to ask to the group itself is like I
always attribute happiness to Milestones in
Past I have done
is legit not being incredibly happy at all where you say? Hey when I get the funding round, I'll be happy when I get the fund. I'll be happy when I get the axe. I'll be happy and I never get to that level of Happiness when I reach that Milestone, I guess like how do you think about the attachment of Happiness to Milestones? And what would be your advice and perspective given many different experiences that you've had
I so want Jerry to answer this because I know as answer and it's awesome.
You'll have to repeat the question. I got lost.
First he was he was taking a nap. I'm happy to answer it to there is no correlation zero between happiness and achieving a milestone. Sometimes you are and sometimes you aren't and one of the biggest challenges as a human is often after you achieve a milestone you're exhausted and as a result, it's not even that you're not happy. It's that you have it in a massive emotional down cycle because you're exhausted and in some ways.
Much of the quote happiness of achieving a milestone is so temporal that you continue to search for more Milestones to keep you happy and at the essence of it, this is what I want Jerry to answer it. It's all Buddhists and it's all about striving and it's all about meaning Dairy. That's your setup.
Thank you for that. So there's two or three ways to sort of come at this question. So, how are you pointed out that the Milestone driven phenomena was
An important contributor to some of the challenges that you have I would actually first all bring your attention to the linkage between outcome output Milestone driven ways of being and perfectionism and they're actually kissing cousins. They're very related because we derive our sense of self-worth and self-esteem from external forces from external achievement and William James and I'll paraphrase him William James the Great
American psychologist said that it is not failure that annihilates us but it's when we attach our sense of self-worth and self-esteem to accomplishment of a goal and then fail to achieve the goal that we are annihilated. Now. This distinction is really important because we start to see that external sources getting your company to an IPO status selling your company getting funding raising a new round of investment. We can understand why we believe that that's going to actually
Make all of our anxiety go away because that's the thing that we're worried about. The problem is that we achieve that goal and then all of a sudden the anxieties come back larger. There's a phenomena that often occurs in our boot camps Where We Gather a bunch of entrepreneurs together to mostly to sit around in a circle and cry. It's the best it's the best but one of the phenomena is people will start to explain that they raise Thirty million dollars and they feel worse because they don't understand what's going on. It's because what we've
Done is we've raised the stakes the emotional Stakes the Buddhist response to this has to do with the notion of attachment and Detachment can be misunderstood. But let's talk about attachment just briefly when I attach my sense of worthiness to something outside my inherent being I am subject to the nauseating phenomena of writing an emotional roller coaster of up and down up and down up and down.
And yeah, I achieved accomplishment. I achieved a milestone. Oh, I lost that Milestone. I bought a new car it got scratched right up and down up and down. And so the Buddhist response is to try to live in this non-dual non-attached state. Now soon as I say that is at least one person listening to the podcast who says but I can't live without goals. I can't live without an objective and let's be clear. We're not saying that you don't live without goals what we're saying is you want to
Have those goals because having goals and achieving Milestones is a good thing. The problem is not having goals or not having goals the problem goes back to and my worthy or not. Am I worthy of Love or as I say in my book worthy of Love safety and belonging if I achieve the goals or not, and that's where we start to get into trouble and to be clear. We are socialized to attach our sense of self-worth to external phenomena from
our earliest days as children because that's one of the ways as a society we make sure that children are compliant. You'll get an A and feel good about yourself. As long as you give the correct answer not the most creative
answer. Can I add to that too? Because when I was building the company, I remember a direct correlation between my happiness and my Revenue line and it was absolutely amazing and the revenue line of an early.
Stage startup is everywhere and it would destroy me because my identity was in the revenue line and to be very real and transparent. I just sold my company earlier this year and my inner hyper achiever is still searching for the next thing it's still generating unhappiness and unworthiness and it's just taken what was the startup and using that as identity and it's moved it to the next thing which for me I love surfing and I focused a lot of
Jion, getting much better and much more athletic. But now if I have a bad day surfing all of a sudden I am no longer worthy or I'm no longer happy. And if I don't deal with the underlying hyper achiever in the feelings around it, then I'm not actually going to ever solve for this idea of happiness. In fact, I just fuel it when I say hey, I had a great day surfing with us. I am worthy. And so I actually I think about this a lot and I think it's important to recognize it and try to address it while or before you start a company.
Neva probably while you do it but it's never going to be the Milestone that solves it at least I haven't found that in my experience
Tracy is sentencing. He said that kind of about your identity being so tied up in the company in the revenue line and then I'm really interested. You know, you mentioned selling the company and like I haven't been on holiday for five years because the company is such a part of me that the idea of going in lying on a beach and not being accompanied. I don't know who I am without the company if that makes sense. Like how do you feel now with the company being sold and
Congratulations for that but with it being such a cool part of your identity now no longer part of you. I
mean, I started the company when I was 19 and sold it at 30. So it effectively was my career to date right? It was my 20s and really even deeper and more insidiously. It was me. So the company was called choose and my mom is Chinese and my dad is Jewish and my friends called me Jewish and so I called the company choose and it's these like funny little ways of kind of how the company
Game happened or the mission happened that actually we're all part of me. And actually Jerry helped me uncover this at the CEO boot camp where we were talking about being bullied and I shared my experience when I was young and I had been bullied so badly I used to eat lunch alone in the bathroom and he kind of looked at me and it was that Jerry moment where he looks at me and I was like what's going to happen? And he says he's like, what does your company do and I was like, oh we make sure that nobody eats alone because my company was
Is dedicated to authentic connection over meals at offices? It was corporate catering and kind of in that moment. I realized that so much of this company was actually me trying to heal my younger self. And anybody that goes through loneliness and bullying and so the beauty of that in the light of that is that it really fueled sort of a beautiful culture and a beautiful Mission and I think a lot of connection during the time that we served millions of meals, but the other
Ed was that if it failed then I felt like I had failed I had failed on the mission in my younger self and so fast forward to today without the company. I mean, I will admit that I was very relieved to sell it especially as covid-19 Ting and nobody wanted anything to do with offices let alone shared meals, but I am looking for purpose and I actually am trying to enjoy that feeling of purposelessness right now and try to Center in
worthiness and Center in what does it mean for me to just sit with me and be okay in that state without achieving anything without externalizing it's very difficult for me. I'll admit and I'm in the midst of it right now. I want to add on to this one Tracy because I think that's powerful and I'm going to link it back Harry to your comment about you and your identity and your company and how you can't even imagine taking a week of vacation because the two things are so intertwined. I'll time travel back to when I was your age.
I'm going to describe you as in your early, but moving towards mid 20s. How's
that? That's a very graceful.
Absolutely and when I was in my early moving towards my mid-20s, I was running a company and the words you just said could have come out of my mouth and back to Tracy's naming. I'll take Tracy one up. My company was named felled Technologies. How fucked up is that and I would joke that I named it after my dad. But of course my identity was
lately tied up in my company because every single minute of every single day the name of my company my name what I read what I wrote and what I overlapped with and what I thought about was entertaining gold when I sold that company when I was 28, it took me a long time to become liberated from that and liberated from my identity being tied up with my company when I reflect back on it.
Day, I understand the path that I was on but I also understand how much that inhibited me in that moment from actually really understanding myself because I allowed my entire identity to be linked to my business and to my work and it wasn't really until my mid-30s when I had a moment with my wife Amy and it's the moment that I start the book I wrote startup life. Amy and I wrote a book 2014 about surviving and thriving
thriving with an entrepreneur and you know, it's Memoir ish and a little biographical autobiographical but it's a lot of our Lessons Learned in our stories and the moment that It Came Crashing Down on Me was in the middle of the collapse of the internet bubble with the person I was put on this planet to be with she basically asked me for a divorce and I was stunned and it wasn't because she didn't love me it wasn't because she didn't really want to be with me it was because literally
My words which I would say things like you're the most important person in the world to me didn't line up with my actions where no matter what I did no matter what we were doing no matter where I was I prioritized the next random phone call or one more email or one more meeting over basically everything we did together and it was in that moment the iota of the moment, but that began from that point forward now 20 years later. I think a pretty intense exploration.
Even as a couple of what meaning is and more importantly when I reflect back on my early 20s. I wish I had not linked my entire identity to my work linking some of my identity my work totally healthy, but my entire identity not healthy for me at
all. There are also brought into interested in terms of kind of linking actions and words that I find that my mother had a really bad read apps the other week in terms of her and ass and I used her as an excuse to continue working.
Harder, something makes sense. It's like I'm
doing it for you. I'm doing the work
to pay the bills and it's like, you know what? I mean, you kind of rationality in your head as a reasonable thing because you're doing it for someone. I love Amy and so I'm working so hard so we can have this lovely
life. Do you know what I mean?
How do you escape that kind of excuse every framework in your had almost of oh, I'm doing it for them though. I ask you a
couple questions. If you took a day off completely from your work. Could you still pay the bills? Yes.
Yes, if you spent that entire day with your mother doing whatever the two of you love to do together, and you were fully present for her for that day. Would that enrich her life more than that extra days worth of work would have yes at the end of that day. Would your life and would you be more enriched than if you had spent the entire day working? I hope so and so my response is on the 3rd, which is
I hope so. Try
it. Let me jump in here the challenge with Harry trying it bread is that he would have to go against his programming from childhood? See the Harry gave us the Insight earlier with his question about being early promoted into adulthood by being a carer. And so Harry you're programming says that a it's your mission to take care of your mother and B. There's only one way to take care of your mother and that is to sacrifice yourself. Sure.
Sure, and the result of that is actually a loss of your center of you as a person and so I'm sorry to interrupt like this bread but this is like an inevitable coaching moment for me. So it's like it's my program
the best interruptions in the world or the self-referential ones or Jerry's programming takes over but I get the last week
of programming takes over so go so Harry if we look at the programming the programming is my job is to take care of Mom.
Any means necessary including sacrificing it's been five years since I took a holiday a so I'm going to do something really Affair. He's here. Okay, I want you to step into your mother's body for a moment and look at her son down there. Yeah. Okay. What does Mom want her son to do with his life to what degree? Does she want her son to live his life solely and only for her care as you would hate that right.
And so we're going to do the reprogramming right now the more you sacrifice your life your personal life and work hard and hard the more you're going against what your mother wants for you. If you see that I did know ID totally and my question to you is like may be arrogant and egotistical but it's like what if you feel like, you know best and that she doesn't and that actually you're doing it for the right read, you know what I mean? And that as you're the one with the full picture and so that's a fine view point to
Have but actually realism has to take place and I actually know what's best. So you've been a parent for a very very long time. Haven't you? Yeah, good 15 years. Yeah, so I have your life or more animal. And so there's what she knows best and there's what she wants and one of the things that we want to start doing is to prioritize her happiness and not just her safety. Yeah because you are right when you were called.
At 10 years old that you were programmed to keep her safe, but there's more to safety than just physical safety. There's mental well-being. There's happiness. Yeah, there is
last word Harry. I chose my phrase carefully when I said try it I didn't say do it. And the reason I said try it was I think and Jerry you can tell me if you agree. I think it was reflective of what Jerry just said one of the things that I've done to break out of my own programming.
Identify that I'm repeating cycles that might or might not be good. They might or might not be I don't know and especially in moments where I have historically thought they were good, but they might not be healthy for me. And as I've gotten older I learn what they Trigger or I learned the response from other people and the
response I listen to the most is probably from a
me but there's a few other
people in my life while I listen to their
response when I realize I'm playing out patterns that are
maybe not good for me
is I tried different things and the experiments
Many of them fail. I try something. I'm like nah, I didn't like that. Hey Mom. I actually didn't like spending the whole day with you. You don't have to tell her that but you can say say in your head, you know, I don't actually like spending the whole day this way, but I could spend an hour this way and that our might really have impact on her happiness on me on how I feel if I was really fully present for an hour and not thinking about in Jerry's language taking care of her and you know on and on and on right that try at that experiment with your own sense of self, I mean
Tie it back to what Tracy set right the state that you're in now. I have a friend that calls it a liminal state right in between state, right you finished a thing. You haven't started the next thing you're in between you're letting yourself sort of exist and explore and try Jerry and I have a phrase We like to bounce back and forth, which is the phrase striving stopping striving is pretty enlightening because our programming as people as entrepreneurs especially is that you must constantly be striving to achieve the next go
Goal or the next outcome what a load of bullshit and the words themselves kind of make me shrivel up like no that's not the essence of it. That's the thing we're programmed to do and if you decide to do that totally fine, but if you just follow the program that's what leads to at least in my case real real struggle.
I think one thing that I can think to you immediately that it can finally maybe before we play five and it's like I found in the past already dangerous things like for striving prevention, which is like, how can I
Pete me escape myself from this world be it the pressures of family but the practice of work whatever that may be and it's always been drinking and I was speaking about kind of drinking before and escapism from this world to a completely other world where you can kind of be anything and be a
normal 23 year old and
just at the way you want to act and just be very real and you I guess my thoughts like how do you think about that forced removal of yourself from striving and maybe the dangers of it and how you think about that?
I'll be super crispy.
On my last statement. My last statement is not an advocacy to strive or to not strive its to disconnect from the programming to use Jerry's words and to recognize when you are simply reacting to what other people think you should do or want you to do or what has been sort of ingrained in you and how that's impacting how you feel emotionally at any moment in time and we have in Tech and we've had for a long time in Tech.
So systemic problems and
challenges some of them in the last four or five years have finally come to the fore around gender Equity racial Equity there has long been a drug and alcohol problem and Tech not
just in Tech, but in lots of different parts of business and
Society acknowledging it and then understanding what's at the root cause of it and then some set of people deciding to change change their behavior and change their interaction with it. So it's not that it's good or bad. It's not that there's a specific.
Of judgment when you say you know, what I'm going to disconnect from my professional work image now and I'm going to go be a normal 23 year old. I'm not sure what a normal 23 year-old means anymore. I'm not sure there's such a thing as a normal 23 year old, but I'm ready to be hairy not with my professional armor on and not behaving as a professional. I think that is degrees that if you allow yourself to experiment and explore in those Dimensions earlier in your life rather than later in your life or suppress it forever.
You'll start to find the configurations of things that bring you fulfillment joy happiness, whatever word you want to use and I lob it over to Jerry to put a better framing around that last rant, but that's how I want to be precise about the last thing I
said. Yeah. The only thing I would build upon that is just a quote from Carl June that I really adore which he says until you make the unconscious conscious. It will direct your life and you will call it fate the issue behind all of this is our Yukon
conscious of what's actually going on are you conscious of the effect that the programming and once you have Consciousness then you have choice and if you choose to never take a vacation Harry do so consciously if you choose to derive all of your self-worth and meaning from your job do so consciously and fully conscious of the cost and benefits of doing that for your relationships for your internal happiness, if you think back to Tracy's
Ernie so much of what Tracy has been through in the last 11 years has been this is my projection Tracy is somewhat your older brother is just raising your awareness about who you are and what motivates you and I think that that creates the ability to respond from a mentally healthy place
and like this is one of the things that reboot taught me which is if there is light and Shadow in you you have to own the Shadow and I think for
Or me so much of my shadow has been around guilt. And so hairy when I think about if you want to take a day take a week take a vacation one thing I found because I felt guilty when I wanted to take time off because guilt is my operating system. And what I started to do was to instead of shy away from it and let it fester in a basement. I brought it out to light and I started to tell people and I said, hey, I'm taking a vacation. I just raised a big round. I'm exhausted.
And I need some rest time. I would even start to own the shadow of the fact that I would go to therapy and coaching. I had a block on my calendar every week and when people asked I tell them I was going to therapy and it was something that people actually were very supportive once I owned it. But if I didn't own it, then my mind warped the perception is it was something shameful. So I think owning the shadow whatever it may be and talking about it with people starting at least with the people that we feel the most safe with
with and then realizing it's totally okay. In fact, it's wonderful and it gives other people around you permission to take a vacation or to go to therapy. That was probably one of my biggest
lessons. I love that in terms of owning the light and the shadow and I think I've taken it to a whole new level talking to the people. I'm most comfortable with on a live podcast. I think that's that kind of extreme
pushing the boundaries, but definitely
absolutely I do want to move that into Quick fire round, which is incredibly tough given the topic but let's go for it anyway.
So I say short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts and say brand if we start with you contemporary mentors, what does that mean to you?
I have been talking about and advocating and developing and working with mentors for a very long time
and I would say the essence
of the foundation of techstars and how we've evolved. It is all around the idea of mentorship in my
experience. The best Mentor ship relationships are ones that I call peer mentors. So when you have a mentor-mentee relationship
Relationship but over time you both become mentors to each other. So it's not a mentor-mentee but you're each each other's mentors
and in many relationships, they
evolve that way and
I use Jerry as an example. I think Jerry would say the same. I think we each learn enormous amounts from each other and have over a long period of time now over 25 years and so Jerry is a mentor of mine and I'm a mentor of his and the Contemporary Mentor relationship is that
Especially reinforced when it's of the same generation. Although it doesn't have to be it could be an older person a younger person. But especially when you have that sort of shared time-based experience
Tracy is hustle really healthy as an
approach. I would say that we should disrupt the hustle and the way I've been thinking about it now that I'm on contracts and and a little distance from what I was doing at choose is I try to take five minute meditations three
as a day and five push-ups and five situps just to get out of the hustle Mode work as everything mode. And I almost imagine myself as a barnacle sort of attached to this like rock of work and this whole concept of hustles. So I'd say try to disrupt it try to create a little bit of space between it throughout the day. I don't think it's healthy on The Daily
Jerry. What's the biggest misconception around mental health and Tech you think well, I think it's mental health in general and I think it's that Brad said it well before.
Just somehow that there's this achievable state where everyone feels great and happy all the time. And that is the biggest myth and it actually exacerbates our search for mental well-being Bronte. What are you doing to make it second half of 2028 not as bad as the first half of 2020 blunt me a couple of things one
is I accepted that we're living in the middle of a remarkable moment in time and rather than try to fight or control.
The things I'm existing within it second. I realized that as much effort as I put into taking care of myself or think I put into taking care of myself. I wasn't really doing a very good job of taking care of myself to last 3 months because I felt that there were so many things. I had to be involved in to try to help to address various versions of the covid crisis. And while I'm still engaged in many things whether it's for portfolio companies or for the state of Colorado or four different groups of people that I met
All dinner different initiatives I'm involved in is reprioritizing myself in the context of that. And the last is I had a framework that I've been operating under for the last year and a half or so conceptual framework for how I wanted to organize all the different pieces of my work life. And I realized it was not serving me well, and so I tore it up and threw it away about 30 days ago and I'm just approaching things
differently Tracy penultimate one. How could fundraising and VC be made less damaging maybe to mental health Foundation.
is when raising it,
I think for VCS, they should check in on the human behind the pitch and probably start by being very vulnerable and case in point for me was when I pitched Foundry and we were sitting around a table for lunch and the first 15 minutes we talked about a wide range of things everything from like politics to their relationship as friends to Jason's recent wedding and I got to see them as friends and as humans and then when they
Turn the spotlight to me. I was able to be real and so I think actually being vulnerable starting that way and then checking in on the founder on the other side and saying how are you actually doing taking the five to ten minutes to do it means
everything? Yeah, I totally agree in terms of showing the human behind the logo. So to speak Jerry final one, you helped so many of the world's best Founders today. What's the biggest challenge for you in your old coaching these incredible Founders think the hardest thing for me is staying mindful that I
can't fix everything or everyone that's part of my old programming from childhood and it's something I work with every day. And so I encounter broken hearts struggling Hearts, especially in these times every day and I have to remind myself at the end of the day that the most important gift that I can give. Someone is the full presence of my heart. I absolutely love that and what a way to finish I want to say again a huge. Thank you to everyone because really there's well meant a lot to me. So thank you so much for joining me today and it's been fantastic to have this.
Relation. Well, can we say thank you to you Harry for pulling the three of us together. This was not easy and these are some of my favorite people in the world and you're now part of that group that is very very kind of is that I only had stood and so Tracy Brad Jerry like it really means a lot.
Thank you Harry. They are you thank you.
I have to say I really am thrilled that we got a chance to do that such an incredible group of people there and very very proud of that episode. If you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes you can on
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