Startup Founders: You Were Born for This Pandemic

Some say that successful leaders are the ones who can handle the most heat. The global upheaval of COVID-19 is freaking out many founders, testing their heat tolerance. I’m hearing stories of 90% of customers evaporating overnight, sales halting, layoffs, pay cuts, investors breathing down founder necks or wanting to change deal terms, teams working remotely while homeschooling kids and caregiving elderly parents, employees losing motivation just as founders need all hands on deck, founders’ existential crises and paralyzing fears of a tanking economy, and companies folding. Not to mention founders (or their employees or family members) actually catching the coronavirus.

These are completely uncharted waters for everyone. Uncertainty and complexity are now cranked to nearly their highest volume, putting most everyone on edge. COVID-19 is like the ultimate Chaos Monkey* for business.

I bet you’re feeling it too.

But here’s the thing: You are one of the few people in the world – the rarified cohort of startup founders – who actually thrive on a gamble. You manage uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, extreme risk, high-stakes pressure, criticism and rejection simultaneously in non-pandemic times – and more effectively than 99% of the rest of the world. You are able to hold the epic statistical unlikeliness of building a successful company from scratch every single day for years. Hell, you even invited these stressors into your life when you gave up your secure corporate job to take this road less traveled! Face it: You’re a freak of nature who isn’t intimidated by the things normal people are. In fact, you’ve made a fetish of it. 

YOU WERE BORN FOR THIS PANDEMIC. 

That’s sweet of you to say (you might be muttering under your breath), but this is different – it’s a global pandemic! Orders of magnitude beyond anything else we’ve ever been through!

Sure, you undoubtedly have some intense fears and doubts right now about the future of your startup, the economy, your team, your family, your customers, yourself as a leader, and so on. And those may not all be irrational and should be dealt with appropriately. But you’ve been preparing for something like this all your life. You’ve risen to many difficult challenges before, and you’ve broken through “impossible” walls over and over, remember? You’ve proved them wrong before, haven’t you? That’s practically your personal brand! 

What you need to do now is disrupt your panic mode and get a grip on your emotions so you can make the most effective decisions possible, one at a time. Otherwise, trying to navigate through what could be months of tumult with your hair on fire, you’re far more likely to drive a self-fulfilling prophecy of your worst fear. 

Novelist E.L. Doctorow said “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Same with getting your company through COVID. 

I’ve got your back. I work with venture-backed startup founders every day helping them  manage their reactions most productively so they can access their best judgment, get along with their co-founders and lead their teams successfully. With this post, I am launching my new blog, “Coach-in-Residence”, where I’ll be documenting inspirational stories of startup founders’ amazing resourcefulness, creativity, generosity, courage, empathy and innovation already being birthed from this fiasco. I’ll unpack the issues you all are grappling with and share my tools, skills and insights I share with my clients. I’ll show you how to calm yourself down fast, transform your sense of powerlessness, make better decisions, care for and motivate your remote team, assuage your investors, use your time most wisely, be an inspirational leader, and much more. (Sign up here to receive my blog in your inbox and let me know what you’d most like me to cover.)

Look, if you can get your startup through this pandemic and economic downturn – and I believe you can – there’s probably nothing you can’t do.

You can handle this kind of heat. 

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* Chaos Monkey is a tool Netflix invented in 2011 to test how robust it's IT infrastructure is by purposely disabling some of its computers, challenging its IT managers to design the system for resilience.