Give First Week: The Founder Mask, and What's Underneath It

In 2016, Erik Severinghaus stood on stage in Chicago accepting an award for the city's best software entrepreneur. Behind the scenes at his company, Simple Relevance, employees weren't working out, he'd become aware of fraud within the business, and its biggest customer wasn't renewing. Severinghaus, now co-founder and co-CEO of Bloomfilter, told Techstars Managing Director Tim Grace that the gap between how things looked and how they felt became his identity, and eventually became dangerous. As the company's decline reached its end, he started fantasizing about ending the journey in a way that would let him avoid dealing with the fallout. When people asked how he was doing, he told them he was fine.

Severinghaus later climbed Mount Everest and wrote a book about it, "Scale Your Everest," but he was candid that no mountain compared to what he went through with Simple Relevance. Founders, he noted, face roughly three times the addiction rate and twice the suicidality rate of the general population.

What pulled him out, eventually, was recognizing a contradiction. Everything Everest guides taught about survival — go slow, rest, recover, manage your emotions — was the opposite of what entrepreneurs are usually told: grind harder, hustle more, don't stop. He started journaling through his fear at night, found stillness had to counterbalance activity rather than more exercise piled on top of more exercise, and came to see sleep as a physiological requirement for good decision-making, not an indulgence.

The core idea he returned to again and again: founders need to separate their identity from their company. He described a friend who'd just been fired from his own company and told Severinghaus he was the happiest he'd been in years, more time with his family, an actual paycheck. Whether an exit is worth nine figures or zero, he said, your personhood isn't your company.

Severinghaus pushed back on the mythology around relentless grinding, comparing founders to Navy SEALs and fighter pilots, professions that build in rest and breathing techniques not for comfort but because rested people make better decisions under pressure. He was blunt that a lot of hustle-culture biography is, in his words, "PR hype machine and bullshit."

He also had a direct message for mentors, investors, and others who work with founders: be thoughtful about the advice you give, since founders often listen to it uncritically, and remember that even portfolio companies unlikely to drive fund returns are still run by people giving everything they have. Caring about the person, not just the outcome, matters, and he argued it improves outcomes too.

Asked how people could reach him, Severinghaus was upfront that he's mid-fundraise with limited bandwidth, but pointed people to his book and podcast, and said he'd send a free copy to anyone who emailed and couldn't afford it. His goal, he said, is a future where no one graduates from an accelerator or founder program without some grounding in mental resilience, the same way the standard has become for other high-stress professions.

Give First doesn't end when the week does. Catch up on every public Techstars Give First Week session. Watch the full playlist.