- The video discusses how founders can prevent setbacks and recover from them in their startups.
- It compares preventative measures to healthcare, emphasizing the importance of setting up infrastructure and planning ahead.
- The video suggests that founders may need to "adult harder" than others and make sacrifices in their lifestyle to succeed.
- It emphasizes the importance of factors like sleep, diet, exercise, and social media habits in maintaining mental well-being and resilience.
- The video also mentions the impact of salary on a founder's lifestyle and suggests that a modest increase can make a significant difference.

- The ideal startup salary varies for different founders and depends on individual circumstances
- It is important to pay yourself enough to avoid debt and stay motivated
- There is no one-size-fits-all formula for determining salary and equity
- Hard conversations with co-founders are necessary and it is important to understand different communication styles
- Prevention involves expectation setting and understanding the realistic timeline of startup success
- When faced with a setback, it is important to take a step back and assess the situation before taking action

- The best founders often use the strategy of taking no action, which can be effective in certain situations.
- It is important for founders to take time off and prioritize their mental health, as it can have a positive impact on their performance.
- Surrounding oneself with supportive and positive people during difficult times is crucial, as it can influence how one handles setbacks.
- Seeking therapy and medication for mental health issues is important and should not be stigmatized.
- It is necessary to evaluate the facts objectively and determine when it may be time to give up on a failing venture, in order to avoid causing harm to oneself and others.
- Sacrificing personal relationships, financial stability, and well-being is not always necessary for success, and founders should be cautious of those who may take advantage of their situation.

- There are many people who will try to sell services or promise to connect you with investors in the startup world.
- Non-technical founders are particularly vulnerable to being taken advantage of by development shops.
- It is important to remember that a failed startup does not mean personal failure, and the experiences gained are valuable.
- The key is to try to avoid pitfalls and recover quickly when setbacks occur.

The video discusses how founders can prevent setbacks and recover from them in their startups. It emphasizes the importance of setting up infrastructure and planning ahead, as well as taking care of mental well-being and surrounding oneself with supportive people. It also highlights the need to evaluate objectively and consider giving up on a failing venture when necessary. The video warns against sacrificing personal relationships and financial stability, and advises founders to be cautious of those who may take advantage of their situation. Overall, the key is to try to avoid pitfalls and recover quickly when setbacks occur.

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best approaches to developing a healthy lifestyle that ultimately helps you run and grow a successful startup. Take care of yourselves out there.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply
Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 
00:00 - Introduction
00:35 - Plan for the punches
01:50 - Adulting harder
03:07 - Audit how you live
04:05 - Good & Bad Habits
07:23 - Information diet
09:22 - Salary bump
12:51 - Hard conversations
16:37 - Expectation setting
18:00 - Fight or flight
21:08 - Good R&R
24:59 - Healthcare
26:50 - Fatal punches

However, sometimes we look at the facts and you're not fine.

This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell.

In our last video, we talked about the setbacks that make founders feel like shit when running their startups.

And this time we're gonna talk about how to prevent these punches to the face and how to take a punch and recover if You absolutely must.

So Dalton, I think the cool way to think about this is a little bit like healthcare.

There's preventative healthcare, and then there's treatment.

So let's start with the preventative, and let's set the framework here.

A lot of times founders get punched in the face as almost unforced errors.

It's like a result of magical thinking or like other parts of their lives not being set up.

And so here are things you can do to either reduce the number of punches that come or at least reduce their intensity because you have your other shit locked up.

It's like, as we spoke to last time, you can't think that you're not going to have any setbacks and you're not going to, again, take some punches.

And so rather than assuming you can be so smart that you will never have low lows, instead plan ahead.

Put the infrastructure in place so that when you do have these big challenges or these low moments, you have the infrastructure set up that you plan ahead for it.

So we were joking when we were talking about what to talk about in this video, a lot of these things could be put in the category of adulting.

And it might turn out that if you want to be a founder of a very successful company, you might have to adult harder than the people around you.

In fact, it almost assuredly requires adulting harder than the people around you.

Sometimes I think founders look at us and they're kind of like, well, you know, my roommates don't do this, so why do I have to?

And it's like, well, your roommates aren't trying to build a billion dollar company, then they don't have to.

But maybe you need to be better than the people around you to do something extraordinary.

It's yet another thing that distances you from your peers.

And if your whole thing in life is, I'm the same as my peers, and I'm the same as my roommates that have jobs at like big tech companies.

This is yet another way that you're gonna be isolated and different and have to learn to love that and not feel sad that when they're like, hey, we're gonna go pull another all nighter or wanna go party Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

You have to be cool with opting out of that, right?

We're here to tell, we're here to ruin that have it all dream.

So what I like to start is audit how you live.

Like think about where you're waking up in the morning.

Is it, are you living in a place that makes you more powerful or less powerful?

Are you sacrificing, like, are you losing hit points at home?

You know, And if that's happening, man, that's unforced error.

So that's who you're living with, what you're eating, do you have easy access to exercise, are you living in a place with a bunch of alcohol and drugs everywhere?

At the minimum, your home should be neutral, but I think for the most successful people, the home's actually a plus.

Like the home is like where they're making points, where they're winning points.

And I think that a lot of founders in their early days don't understand how much they could be losing based on just how they're living.

Yeah, I think almost from a clinician's perspective, when someone is having issues, the first thing you look at is sleep disruption, diet, and exercise, right?

If you go look at research depression or anxiety and things, that's usually where the 80-20 solution is for a lot of folks that are struggling, is you look at their sleep patterns.

And so if you don't have your house in order on those fronts, you are not, even if you don't currently have depression, you are not well situated to deal with really hard things that might happen to you, right?

But Dalton, I went to an Ivy League school and it was really hard.

And I went to a really challenging high school and I didn't have to change these things to get good grades or to get the good internship.

Like, you know, I was able to like work hard and play hard.

It's working, it's working for me, this lifestyle.

I think it can work for people, and you and I know people that certainly don't follow this advice and they still did okay.

I just think you and I also know the same people where eventually you've got to pay the piper.

Like at some point, no matter, it's almost like you're going into debt, like personal health debt or whatever you want to call it.

And man, you can go pretty far into debt.

But at some point the debt comes due where you can't hold it all in anymore.

You can't hold the whole world on your shoulders.

And I think what we're just trying to say is if you start off with good habits early, you're not going to incur this massive debt that 1 day causes you to have like a breakdown or meltdown or again, whatever

Well, To double down on that, I might argue that you probably can sacrifice these things for 5 years, maybe even 7 years.

The tricky thing is that the best companies last multiple decades.

The tricky thing is The shit that you can get away with in your 20s, you can't get away with in your 30s.

And so I think sometimes people are like, oh, this is gonna be a relative sprint.

But it's like, what I like to talk to you about with YC founders a lot is like, what happens if this works?

Like, are you set up for this to not work?

Because if this works, like, woo, you're gonna be in it.

And I think sometimes people set their lives up for it to like not work and then, wow, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy.

And when you think about it, this isn't an age thing.

This is a lifestyle thing because you'll see like 19 year olds with all the good habits and you'll see folks that are 19 that like still live like 19 year olds.

Well, and you'll even see successful people with good habits lose them and then wonder why they can't succeed again, right?

It's like even just having these habits doesn't mean you keep them.

So, okay, so that's your physical life style set up.

You want to talk about this kind of social media piece because I think that a lot of people don't understand how toxic social media is.

Yeah, I think you just want to look at your information diet.

The metaphor I think about this stuff with is, the same way we have a food diet and like, of course, what we eat and drink affects our moods and how we feel.

I actually think the information we consume affects us.

And if you think about, again, like myself, all of us, when it's a really heavy time in history, when there's a lot going on, when I'm doom scrolling all the time, reading about pandemic news or war news or whatever, of course that affects my state of mind.

And so to some extent, you can't completely stick your head in the ground about what's going on in the world.

But to the extent your social media habits make you feel bad or compare yourselves to people, or say you follow a lot of like investors and everything they're talking about is the investment market and who's raising and all of that.

And this is just every day you're bombarding your brain with stuff about investor shit.

How is that helping you actually run your startup?

Reading what a bunch of investors say about the market all the time.

And I think people are surprised that successful founders explicitly block social media.

They do crazy things like they gray scale their phones so it looks less interesting.

They're aggressive users of screen time tracking.

They actually pretty aggressively audit this stuff.

And so again, so if you're consuming media every day and you're reassessing the value, like if you're too paying attention to this stuff, It doesn't make you make better financial decisions, does it?

The next area I like to talk about is salary.

Oftentimes, and this is more, of course, for companies that have raised funding, Just a small incremental 5 or 10 percent salary bump can make a huge lifestyle difference.

I think people screw up, and this is what I say to founders.

If your startup salary is allowing you to save money, it's probably not good.

You shouldn't be sitting here like with Google employee level savings running your startup.

However, if your startup salary is giving you the lifestyle that allows you to be all in on your startup because the real world isn't distracting you negatively, then it is good.

And what's interesting is that Often for different founders, this is a different salary level.

Perfect example, when I was starting, I had student loans in college, my co-founders didn't.

I made a little bit more money so that I wasn't going into debt with my student loans and that was perfectly reasonable.

And no 1 was like, oh, well, you need to take X percent less because you need to pay a $200 student loan every month.

Now, if you have a co-founder where it's like, I need to make a half a million dollars a year and I'm 23, yeah, that's probably different.

But sometimes people are sacrificing, penny wise, pound foolish, right?

Like sometimes people are being penny wise, pound foolish.

I think this is 1 of those topics, also like equity, where what founders want to hear is here's the right answer, 1 size fits all for everyone, or here's the formula, Oh, here's a spreadsheet.

Just fill out the spreadsheet and we're done.

And sadly, like many things in life, anyone that tells you their simple answers is probably trying to sell you something.

They're like, yeah, it's probably snake oil.

And so the subtlety that I agree with you on is you want to pay yourself enough that you don't get into debt.

You want to pay yourself enough so that you're properly motivated.

You also want to keep enough, you want to keep the money in the company.

Like these are all variables that you have to turn and you know if you're gonna be a successful founder you have to have good judgment and you have to have opinions.

And so when founders have no opinion about this stuff it's not a great sign.

So it's kind of like you need a philosophy of what you're solving for around compensation.

Align incentives well, and also realize that This looks different for every company, man.

A lot of folks ask me, well, how much should I pay employee number 1?

What's, you know, do you see what I'm saying?

Like, it's like what they want is some answer.

But like, no, man, that's like, That's not how this works.

It was almost easier to come to these conclusions when I think back because we didn't have very much money.

Yeah, like whenever anything is scarce, you have to ration it more effectively.

And I think that like our philosophy, because I like what you're saying, there's no formula, but we had a philosophy which is like salary is for living and equity is for upside.

The next area of prevention, you have to learn how to have hard conversations with your co-founders and for everyone to be okay afterwards.

And everyone has to go through this and it's going to suck.

But if you have some of those in the bag, when you get punched in the face, you all know a little bit more how to interact with each other.

And to me, the biggest challenge that I've seen on this front, and we've talked about this at YC quite a bit, is this anxious personality type versus avoidant personality type.

You know, When people are challenged, people are frustrated, and this is way over simplification.

But sometimes people are anxious, they want to deal with the problem right now, they're leaning in, they want to talk for, they've talked for 2 hours with you and they want to talk for another 2 hours with you.

And you know, after 5 minutes, they're done.

They want to think about it for a long time.

And I actually see that most problems between co-founders, the root cause isn't whatever went wrong or whatever they're debating.

It's actually their style of dealing with their frustration.

And if you can have a little empathy if the person who you're working with has a different style of dealing with frustration than you do, and you can just take a beat, right?

I wanna like talk about it for 6 hours, then 6 more hours.

I wanna plan, I wanna write it down right now.

And I always get into trouble when I'm interacting with someone who reacts negatively to that.

And I always have to kind of be like, fuck, I gotta take a beat.

Like in this situation, I gotta take a beat.

And so in my experience, if you can figure out that dance with your co-founder, It's so much more helpful when you're dealing with these external challenges.

And like, the startup's going to present many opportunities for frustration with your co-founder, right?

it's like the whole topic today, which is eventually you're going to take punches, you're going to have setbacks with your startup.

Eventually, you're going to have conflict with the co-founder.

And the thing that you're disagreeing about isn't even the thing.

And like, it's not about who's right or who's wrong.

And it's funny, because a lot of people want to ask us advice about co-founder stuff, but what they want is us to agree that they were right and their co-founder's wrong.

They're like, Dalton, can I tell you about this situation?

Basically, I'm smart, my co-founder's dumb.

Like, it's always and it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to take the bait on that.

Like the actual thing that you need advice on a thing to work on is the meta conversation, which is like how do you deal with conflict so that people feel good when it's over?

Otherwise, whatever the, you know, not cleaning up your dishes or taking the trash out, whatever the equivalent of that is in your co-founder relationship, eventually it's not gonna work out, man.

Well, I think that's what's fun about this 1, is that Early stage founders argue about the dumbest things, that there's almost infinite opportunities to practice this dealing with frustration of your co-founder.

There's infinite opportunities before something that's a real whammy comes.

So like take those opportunities, like please take them.

Do you have any more on the preventative side before we move to treatment?

I think it's just this expectation setting.

I think so much of life is expectation setting where setting expectations for yourself, setting expectations for people you work with about what to expect.

If you are good at that, people can deal with all sorts of stuff.

And when you get into the biggest trouble, both with yourself managing your own brain as well as working with other people, is when you say a bunch of stuff that turns out to be really not true, and you set expectations poorly, and you have to dig yourself out of this deep hole that you dug yourself into because you promised a bunch of shit or you set expectations in such a way that just weren't true.

And so expectation setting is key for prevention.

And you know we talked about this in another video, but man, it helps to study the real story of companies.

It helps to just know how long this takes.

Man, it really helps for you to not have stupid expectations.

Oh, well, this company became a billion dollar company in 2 years, So that's clearly the average path.

It's funny because in some ways you're saying sometimes these companies punch themselves out, right?

Like they don't even need external forces.

They don't hit their own unrealistic expectation.

And you're just like, holy crap, you just invented a crisis.

Startups have enough crises without that.

Well, we've talked about all the things you can do to prevent the injury.

Let's say the punch happens, bam, and you need some treatment.

Something really bad happens, or you suspect something really bad happens.

I think the first point that you brought up that I really love is this idea of like, do I have to do anything right now?

Yeah, I think I learned this as a founder the hard way, which is when something bad happens, you want to immediately like make a move.

You wanna like call a meeting or you want to you get a you get an email with bad news in it you want to hit respond and like in the moment of fight-or-flight when your adrenaline's pumping you're like How dare you sir?

You know You wanna yes, you want to get started writing emails with that tone dear sir in response to your query about like if you're ever typing an email with that tone, like don't do it.

What I've noticed is you can just like not respond or like let stuff sit a little bit.

And sleeping on it is the minimum thing I would do.

This is what I always tell founders is when they have something to happen to at least sleep on it.

Cause I just noticed the next day, you have

a whole new amount of clarity on the situation.

And I often find myself in my best moments, in my worst moments, I'm exactly like you said, I'm like, act now, go, send that email, like punch back.

In my best moments, I'm always like, if there's ever a decision that feels like it's action 1 or action 2, there's always a third option, which is don't act.

I find a lot of times lawyers fuck companies with this.

And it's like, it's not like, how about we

And then what's really funny is that like the best founders, no action becomes 1 of their like key plays.

Like they use that play way more than you think.

And it's amazing that like for the best founders, no action is like, you know, 20, 30, 40% of the time what they do maybe more.

But for other founders, they don't even know the play exists.

Like they don't even know the play exists.

And of course, don't do this in the case where someone's health is on the line or someone's gonna go to jail or whatever.

Yeah, it's more of like the stuff where it's like interpersonal or someone, I don't know.

You can wait till the weekend's over to reply to that Slack message.

So the next 1 on the list is it's okay to take a day off.

I think that, you know, There was 1 moment in my career where we were going to get bought, Social Cam was going to get bought, and we were 2 months into the diligence process, and we got a call that said the deal was off.

And it was the only moment in my career where I was like, I'm not going to react to this well in front of my co founders.

At least home I can react in a way that won't be a bad example to them, you know, like, because they're going to look at my reaction, they're going to be like, are we fucked?

And if I'm looking like we're fucked, like, that's not helping, you know, when the generals like pulling their hair being like, this looks horrible, we're gonna die.

And man, like going home, hanging out with, you know, at the time was my girlfriend, but then later became my wife, like taking that day, the next day I could kind of bring a better Michael to the table.

I was thinking about this in the context of like, when things go bad, there's a current set of people you should probably be hanging out with and a certain set of people you probably shouldn't be hanging out with, right?

Yeah, I mean, I have my personal experience and I have all the data points we have across YC Founders.

And you just sometimes see people that are taking punches and having a hard time.

And there's some really amazing people that you can hang out with that support you and tell you you're okay and validate your experience and let you take space for yourself and all this good stuff.

And these are great people to have in your life.

And then we see other sorts of folks that are like, oh, you should do tons of drugs.

Or, hey, like, let's go not sleep for a really long amount of time.

Or like, you know, like, there's all these different crowds you can get into.

And it's depressing how predictive that is for how people will deal with like setbacks, you know.

Even, and these are adults, we're not even talking about, these are adults, these are our own people, our age people Still struggle with this particular 1.

And so I think you just wanna think about, yeah, who you're spending time with when you're taking punches and what kind of habits that you're taking from the peer group?

You know what, man, I really think that the best people, you know, I'll be explicit, right?

The best people, shit goes wrong and they go take a hike or something.

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Most Important Lifestyle Habits Of Successful Founders