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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Hey, we survived a couple of years on these kind of investments. It was a fulltime job for one founder; he burned out. But it kept us going.

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It's weird to see you casually describing and justifying the deteriorating mental health of a person who was important to you.

I don't think you'd do the same for, for example, RSI. "Hey, we survived a couple of years with a bad keyboard desk combination. Typing on that was a full time job for someone; they got RSI. But it kept us going".

How do you want me to describe founder burnout? Like it was my call? He was the founder, not me. Heck, I'd like to know the stats on how many founders DONT burn out.

Startups are hard. Very very hard. Every step. Every day. Rewarding but hard. Building, funding, traction, revenue - each one more impossible to attain than the previous. Burnout of the founder is the norm.

Hence my anger at the parasites who waste the time we already don't have.

I don't think it's a topic we need to tiptoe around. This is one of the few places where it should be normal to write about it casually. Describing it as 'deteriorating mental health' makes it sound like something to be ashamed of. Like burning out means you've gone bonkers. That attitude probably deters many founders from wanting to talk about it.

Maybe deteriorating mental health shouldn't be equated to "going bonkers", and then we won't be discouraging people from talking about something so common.

I agree that burnout is serious. That's why I think it's weird to see it so casually dismissed - this guy burntout but that's okay because we got some cash and we were able to keep going.

I don't think it's okay to allow people to burnout; and if their job is causing burnout something about the job needs to change.

It's odd that you call for people to discuss their mental health problems while simultaneously using deeply stigmatising language.

Wow you guys read a lot into a few words. Lets reset. He burned out on pitching several times a day, took a break of a few weeks, moved up the food chain to more qualified investors (> $200K) so he didn't have to pitch but once or twice a day. Doing fine now.

Lots of people burn out on lots of things. Its not always a complete mental meltdown. Sometimes its just "I can't do this any more; lets find a new way"

Seems to me we have some conflation of the term "burnout" versus the verb "to burn out". The other people in this subthread were talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnout_%28psychology%29

i disagree, sometimes burnout just happens, its not the job, its the person. maybe they just don't want that much stress or aren't cut from the right cloth... don't auto-blame the job.

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