Anyone who has met with or interviewed startup founders will have noticed several traits consistently present among modern-day entrepreneurs. They tend to exhibit high energy, positive energy, creative energy, lateral thinking, a sense of destiny and purpose, and some degree of irritability. However, these traits can also be symptoms of bipolar disorder.
Andy Dunn, the American entrepreneur who co-founded menswear brand Bonobos, knows this all too well. Dunn talked candidly about his experience with bipolar disorder during a fireside chat at From Day One’s September virtual conference on stress and well-being in the workplace. “For better or for worse, at times, this was an illness that served my interests,” said Dunn. “Other times, it tried to undo all those interests. Nine years after building the company, I ended up in the psych ward. I was discharged in handcuffs, and charged with felony and misdemeanor,” said Dunn, who told his story of success and crisis in his book Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, published earlier this year.
Bipolar disorder, a mental illness characterized by mood swings, can bring emotional highs and lows beyond what’s considered typical. One of the most prominent public figures affected by bipolar disorder was Vincent van Gogh, so, culturally, we tend to think of those living with the disorder as swinging between extreme bouts of creative thinking coupled with delusions of grandeur and severe depressive episodes. Of course, that’s a reductive portrayal of the condition. “My experience of it has been really living, not at the extremes of two moods, but with five different mood states, and the potentiality for the extremes,” he said.
For a long time after his diagnosis in 2000, after a manic episode in college, Dunn tried to hide his condition. The menswear company he started with a fellow Stanford graduate student pioneered the direct-to-consumer business model and attracted more than $100 million in venture capital. His episodes of hypomania along the way tended to manifest as company strategy and were not seen as cause of concern in the fast-paced, high-intensity startup world. Dunn was a fountain of ideas: Why not launch a womenswear brand within Bonobos? Why not launch a sister company in California to build better e-commerce software? “Hypomanic state is a dangerous state. I felt capable of more work, but I also felt and sensed I was unhinged at times,” Dunn said. “The line between fantasy and reality can be threadbare. The best of us can walk the line one way, but at times I would veer off that path.”
In 2016, a night of mayhem led to him being arrested and hospitalized, and the six months following that episode were “living hell,” Dunn said. He was trying to reconnect with friends, family, and loved ones, and there were a lot of hard conversations to be had in the company. He had to publicly disclose his diagnosis. “Because of the legal proceedings, because of the potential impact that the table-setting could have had on our company and my colleagues, our investors, in a way, it removed the agony of figuring out whether or not to share something,” he said. “I had an obligation to my colleagues and our shareholders to say, Hey, here’s what happened.”
So he spoke honestly with his executive team and some colleagues. “I now joke to people that no one was that surprised. If you work with someone for years, you might have a better understanding than they do.” When it came to talking with the board of directors, he was also met with empathy and understanding. “We support you to lead the team, and from a board perspective, to continue to run the company,” was the board’s verdict. In 2017, the founders sold Bonobos to Walmart for $310 million in cash; Dunn left the company two years later.
Since then, Dunn has set out to become an advocate for empathy for neurodiverse people, “so we can help each other through challenges that are all too common,” he said. He eventually disclosed his diagnosis to the public earlier this year with a Business Insider story adapted from Burn Rate.
“It’s about being permissive,” he said of his efforts. “By going first, you make space, mostly in the DMs and in messages across social media. There’s a lot of people who’re carrying around secrets, and narratives that they feel like will hold them back.”
Dunn hopes to see the creation of pathways to disclosure in the workplace, and then build a community around it. He has seen organizations that have neurodiversity-focused employee resource groups (ERGs), which are creating a space where workers can share and be supportive of those with similar stories to tell.
Investment by employers, however, is a crucial component, because reimbursement rates for mental health services are typically low. A good start is “having an ecosystem of partners that are on the company payroll, who can help.” When it comes to company-led reimbursement, he points to progressive employers like Salesforce and Microsoft, who step in and pay for what the insurance companies don’t. For more day-to-day actions, Dunn recommends the Canadian organization Jack.org, which partners with Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, whose training resources are condensed yet comprehensive. Dunn makes an important disclaimer, though: “I am not a professional: I am a patient, I don’t have all the answers,” he said.
It has been six years since Dunn started active treatment, meeting twice a day with a physician and taking five types of medications. “I still have bipolar, and I don’t have the same highs and lows,” he said. “I have a lot of days where I am at a 5 out of 10–and that’s good! Often, it used to be an 8 or a 2.” Mostly, though, he doesn't want people to confuse correlation with causation when it comes to entrepreneurial spirit and bipolar disorder. “I would have had an even better journey without the illness,” he said. “It just happens to be the story.”
Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Boston.
