Sleep faster; do more; be limitless: the language of start-up culture is meant to be inspiring. But starting a new venture is not all about blue-sky thinking, wearing trainers to work and high-fives over high-protein lunches.
It also requires long hours, difficult decisions and a lot of financial stress. When things aren’t going well, those slogans can seem like millstones, weighing on founders already running at their maximum.
James Routledge started MatchChat, a social networking site for sports fans, with three friends when he was 20 and still at Sheffield University.
“We went on the whole venture capitalist bandwagon and raised a couple of million dollars,” Routledge says, “but we were doing it for the wrong reasons It never had a clear mission, which meant we pivoted and turned until we eventually burned.”
The founders called time on MatchChat, and Routledge went to work for another start-up. While he was shutting down the company, he began to get feelings he could only describe as “weird”.
“At 24, I was used to going for beers and talking about football, not my mental health, so I let it fester. I thought it was just work and I would let it pass. I continued going out and drinking too much on the weekend and living my life. Eventually it began to manifest into anxiety and panic attacks,” Routledge remembers.
After starting MatchChat so young, Routledge found shutting it down was like losing part of his identity. “I was grieving. I was questioning who I was and my values. In the end, I had an identity crisis. The anxiety and the panic attacks were a manifestation of that,” he says.
In February last year, he wrote a post on Medium that changed everything. Called “Mental health in start-ups”, the post set out how Routledge was feeling, including the panic attacks and the pressure. “People do not talk about mental health enough, that’s a fact,” he writes. “So let’s start by talking about it.”
He was staggered by the response. “It felt like it went viral,” he remembers. “I got hundreds of messages from people I knew and from people I’d never met before: investors, founders, employees, the girlfriends of start-up founders, the husbands. It made me realise that mental health isn’t an isolated topic, it transcends every single one of us.”
The response made Routledge realise that compared to some people, he had been lucky. “People were petrified of letting on that maybe they weren’t on top of everything, especially CEOs,” he says.
Suddenly, Routledge became what he calls “Mr Mental Health”, regularly called upon to speak on panels. He discovered that there was demand for a service that would change the perception of mental health issues from something shameful to something more positive.
With George Bettany, one of his best friends and a co-founder of the ill-fated MatchChat, he started Sanctus.
“Our vision is to create the world’s first mental health gym, where people can go and work out their mental health fitness as they would their physical fitness. Right now we are working with businesses to create space within a company for people to take time off and talk to a Sanctus coach,” he explains.
Routledge’s story is not uncommon. Many founders are young and many have barely worked at all before they embark on their own business. “The founders are, understandably, driven by passion and ambition. But they are also under huge pressure,” says Louise Chunn, a former magazine editor and the founder of welldoing.org, a site that helps people find the right therapist.
Difficulty admitting to mental health issues was one of the biggest risks identified by founders, including Routledge and Chunn, at an event hosted by venture capitalist Rory Stirling from BFG Ventures at the end of 2016.
“It can often be lonely as a founder: you can’t necessarily be fully transparent with your investors, board members or advisers, for fear of scaring them off. You can’t talk to your team because you need to motivate them; you can’t talk to your spouse because you are probably not making enough money and don’t want to worry them.
“Too often, you just put your head down and keep hammering away,” Stirling wrote in a Medium post after the event.
Peer networks emerged as one of the most important ways of managing pressure. “Hearing the stories of those who are having similar experiences to you is not only cathartic, it can also be a great way to learn how to deal with issues and a source of deep friendship and support,” says Stirling.
Routledge says Sanctus is creating work environments where people feel more comfortable talking about their problems and asking for help.