Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors

3 Dealing with Your Demons as a Startup Founder

Alisa Cohn

Alisa Cohn, named “Top Startup Coach in the World” at the Thinkers50/Marshall Goldsmith Global Coaches Awards, has coached startup founders into world-class CEOs for 20 years. Author of From Start-up to Grown-up. She was named the number one Global Guru for Startups in 2021 and has worked with Venmo, Etsy, DraftKings, Mack Weldon, and Tory Burch.

Max, the founder and CEO of an AI data company located in Miami, came into one of our coaching sessions obviously upset. Now, Max is a pretty high-strung guy to begin with, and I had gotten used to his ups and downs, but this was even more pronounced than usual.

He got straight to the point: Sri, his brilliant CTO, had quit, and Marianne, the hot shot Chief Marketing Officer he had been trying to recruit, had declined the offer. All within the last 24 hrs.

This happens in startups – that’s why the classic image of startups is a roller coaster.

But, when the downs of the roller coaster are happening to you, the founder, with all the other relentless pressure on you, it can feel like this is the end of all your dreams and hard work.

Even worse, these difficult moments can leak into your psyche, and you may wonder about your own capabilities, like Max did. In our session that day, he didn’t want to talk about how he was going to replace Sri. He didn’t want to strategize about how he would re-invigorate the search process for the CMO. He couldn’t get over the difficult thought: ...