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How To Avoid Entrepreneurial Burnout: Be Awesome

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This article is more than 9 years old.

When I started my company, almost 25 years ago, everyone I knew was worried about me.  I had two small kids, I was the primary breadwinner in my family, and we had just moved half-way across the country. My friends and family assumed, I'm sure, that I'd blow myself (and maybe my family) up and be left smoldering on the junk heap of burned out ex-entrepreneurs.  Because, after all, everybody knows that starting a company means crazy hours, no sleep, a white-knuckled focus on doing whatever it takes to get the thing off the ground...

Fortunately, as I discovered, it didn't have to be that way for me.  And I just had a fascinating conversation with a guy named Matthew Bellows who's proving the point on a much bigger scale.  Matthew is the founder of Yesware, a company he started in 2010 to create a Gmail plugin designed to help salespeople close more deals, and he's defying the accepted wisdom about start-ups.

Bellows is creating Yesware to be very different from the frenetic, sleep-on-the-floor-amongst-the fast-food-wrappers environment that prevails in most fledgling digital companies. He calls Yesware a "monastic start-up," and he's trying to make it both a place that builds successful and innovative software, and the best job his employees have ever had.  As he reflected on his meditation practice, on his own previous experiences in other start-ups, and his observations of the best software designers he knew, he realized that people do their best work when they have an environment that supports uninterrupted concentration and focus, and when they see their job as a vehicle for personal growth.

So, over the past four years, Matthew and his colleagues have focused on making those two things happen at Yesware. In the service of supporting focused concentration, they've created a physical environment that's quiet, warm, friendly, light and open. They also have informal rules about how to interact with each other that prioritize focus over immediacy.  For instance, when employees need to ask each other questions or share information, unless it’s an emergency they use Hipchat, an instant messaging protocol, rather than phoning or going to see the person. That gives the recipient the option to decide whether to stop working and respond or to keep going until there’s a natural break point.  It automatically makes being able to focus on the work the most important element of the interaction.

And they’ve built in many ways to make working at Yesware a way to grow personally, too. First, they “bake” it into their interviewing and hiring process. As Bellows says, they sort for “diverse people with a common attitude toward personal growth.”  They look for employees who don’t see work as something that you do simply to make money or build a resume – but rather for those who “see their job as an integral part of who they are and who they want to become.”  During the hiring process, they also probe for openness to feedback, ability to resolve conflict, and a willingness to take responsibility for actions; they’re looking for people who are not only philosophically aligned with the idea of personal growth, but who can carry it through in their dealings with colleagues.

And to provide organizational support for this attitude, they make executive coaching available to all their employees, and they have a large open space they call the “Hall of Contemplative Arts,”  where employees can practice yoga, tai chi, or other meditative disciplines.

Bellows notes that all this effort is in support of a novel idea; “People here know that their main job is to  be awesome. We firmly believe that if people are better human beings, they can be better workers – so the company benefits from supporting their growth.” And the numbers seem to be proving him right: in 2013, the company had 14x revenue growth and 3x user growth, and is experiencing significant growth in 2014. They also have some pretty impressive people who seem excited by the idea: their backers include  Google Ventures, Battery Ventures and the Foundry Group.

I'm rooting for Mathew and his colleagues - if they can pull this off, it could help shift our assumptions about being an entrepreneur from "it's great if you can survive it" to "it can be the best thing that ever happened for you."  And that would be great for the economy, great for innovation - and great for any of us who want to walk down the entrepreneurial path, either as owners or employees.

And how about you - do you have a start-up that's not burning people out? Please let us know how you're doing it...

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What did Erika start almost 25 years ago? Find out about Proteus and leader readiness here.