- The speaker, Daniel Gross, discusses the importance of staying sane and healthy as a startup founder.
- He compares being a founder to being an athlete in the Olympics, highlighting the difficulty and challenges.
- Gross emphasizes the need to work smart and avoid the mistake of working hard without achieving desired results.
- He mentions common mistakes founders make, such as neglecting their well-being and burning out.
- The talk covers areas such as sleep, food, exercise, mind, and leadership, providing practical advice and tips.
- Gross suggests prioritizing sleep, eating healthy, and exercising regularly to maintain peak performance.
- He encourages founders to invest in themselves and avoid unhealthy habits.
- The speaker acknowledges that not everyone will follow his advice but emphasizes the importance of taking care of oneself in order to succeed.

- The focus is on how to convince oneself to exercise, rather than whether one should exercise
- Start small and build positive memories to create a habit of exercise
- Surround yourself with others who are exercising to reduce willpower required
- Set up good habits while at a plateau or during an up phase
- Feed your brain by spending at least one day a week not working and reading long-form content
- Shift from a first-person mindset to a third-person mindset for better problem-solving and leadership
- Aim to spend as much time as possible in a state of flow
- Constantly iterate and experiment to find the best strategies for productivity and leadership
- Robert Keegan's theory of adult development is discussed as a guide for becoming an inspiring leader

- The video discusses different stages of personal development and leadership.
- Stage 1 is characterized by selfishness and transactional relationships.
- Stage 2 is characterized by caring too much about what others think.
- Stage 3 is the ideal stage for founders, with clear ideals and self-awareness.
- Stage 4 is the ability to embrace and extend ideas from others.
- Stage 5 is the ability to think in systems and see the bigger picture.
- It is important to ask genuine questions and be interested in others' perspectives.
- Leadership requires treating oneself like an athlete and prioritizing important tasks.
- It is important to assume others have figured it out and strive to catch up to them.

- Switching to third-party camera mode and experiencing emotions in the third person is important for survival in challenging situations.
- Launch and iterate, collect data, and retrain your model to improve.
- Be genuinely curious about other people and ask compelling questions.
- Shift from playing finite games to infinite games in life.
- Leaving a comfortable corporate position to join a startup requires innate interest in the problem being solved.
- Strategies for handling the mental health effects of being online include team enforceability and focusing on rapid growth.
- Startups should be seen as playing a video game on expert mode, where managing psychology and building a successful product are key.
- Building a community and finding peers is important for personal growth and motivation. Startup school and YC provide opportunities for this.

- The speaker questions the idea that doing the opposite of what was discussed in the presentation leads to success.
- The speaker believes that successful founders would agree with the points made in the presentation.
- The speaker suggests that life doesn't have to be difficult and mistakes are not necessary for success.
- When trying to come up with a new product idea, the speaker recommends not being in a pressure cooker and not obsessing over starting a startup.
- To get out of the pressure cooker, the speaker suggests taking a day off and going for a walk in nature.
- When managing risk, the speaker advises not to mistake type 2 decisions for type 1 decisions and to take the riskier path.
- To get co-founders on board with not overworking, the speaker suggests framing it as not dying while building the company and using time-constrained areas of responsibility to resolve disagreements.

Daniel Gross discusses the importance of maintaining mental and physical health as a startup founder. He advises working smart instead of just working hard and avoiding common mistakes like neglecting well-being. Gross provides practical advice on sleep, food, exercise, and leadership. He emphasizes the need to invest in oneself and prioritize self-care. Gross also discusses the stages of personal development and leadership according to Robert Keegan's theory. He encourages founders to shift to a third-person mindset, seek personal growth, and ask compelling questions. Gross emphasizes the importance of managing psychology and building a successful product in the startup world. He suggests building a community and finding peers for motivation. Gross challenges the idea that mistakes are necessary for success and recommends not obsessing over starting a startup. He advises taking breaks and managing risk wisely. Finally, Gross suggests framing the importance of not overworking to co-founders as a matter of survival and using time-constrained areas of responsibility to resolve disagreements.

Daniel Gross, former YC Partner and founder shares his wisdom of how to survive and thrive as a startup founder.

Learn more at https://startupschool.org.

The next speaker, Daniel Gross, is a former YC founder and YC partner, and he is going to tell you some really important things about staying sane and healthy and whole while you're doing this incredibly hard thing that is being a startup founder.

Sorry, we're running a little behind today.

If any of you are working on curing traffic, I suggest you get to it a little bit faster.

So this was the original title of the talk.

In hindsight, it's kind of a terrible title.

This is actually what I want to talk about today.

I think everyone here fundamentally is playing a game and you want to win that game.

Whatever project you're working on, I'm sure people here are excited to build kind of the next empire, become the next Rockefellers.

And 1 kind of view here that I've noticed over years of working with different startup founders, being a startup founder myself, is when you're a founder, the mentality you get into is kind of like you're an athlete.

And what I'd like to do in this talk today is go over some of the kind of mistakes some novice athletes make while they're trying to play in the Olympics.

Because I do think they're kind of repeated.

And over the course of the past few weeks, I think you guys have seen great talks on mistakes people make, say when marketing or hiring or growing your company, but there's a lot of mistakes you make with yourself.

And I'd like to help you potentially avoid them.

A lot of the mistakes stem from this recurring theme, which is you're working really hard and not smart, kind of like this guy with the rickshaw.

Examples of things that will be in your head as you start a company, especially as you start growing out a team, are, you know, I'm going to be in the office all the time.

Or I will make sure to be the last 1 out today.

And while there's a lot of value in it, that stuff could kind of go wrong because ultimately input doesn't equal output.

Founders seem to make this mistake kind of over and over again.

And what they forget is nobody wants to work for a tired idiot.

And so, ultimately, if we were to do a little quick Harvard two-by-two matrix here, this is the most common startup founder mistake where you just focus on like, I'm going to pedal the bike as hard as possible and you don't really get anywhere.

I would not want the outcome of this talk to be the other extreme, which is maybe like you could define academia.

You're not pedaling as hard, which you really want us to be doing both.

And so we're going to be talking a little bit today on how to do that.

Before we dig in to any details, I thought it should be interesting to maybe quickly go over why this even happens as a problem.

So Out of curiosity, if you've ever worked for someone before that you respected, a manager you respected, please raise your hand.

Ultimately when you're a founder, you kind of want to win the approval of your pack, be it your team or other founders.

And the problem is, a lot of first-time founders don't really have that experience of what that thing you want to look up to is.

So they don't have a mental model for what to emulate.

And as a result, there's just like a lot of common mistakes people make because they don't know kind of what greatness looks like.

And so they optimize for the wrong thing.

So that should set hopefully the general framing for the talk.

What does this actually mean in practice?

So we're going to go over a couple of different areas.

Common mistakes with sleep, food, exercise, your mind, and leadership.

This is kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of sorts to startup success where I think you can only tackle the stuff at the bottom after you tackle the basics.

What's really ironic about the advice I'm about to deliver you is I'm sure for about half the people in this room and I'm sure many more people online.

You will make all these mistakes despite me saying what I'm about to say.

It's kind of fascinating, but I'll go through the exercise anyway, just so I could tell you I told you so.

It just takes a couple of hours to apply.

There is no way that cutting that hour of sleep was actually worth it for your company, unless there's a real emergency.

When I started my first company, I was very focused on, as I mentioned earlier, just being in the office all the time, working as hard as possible.

And in fact, bad for your shareholders and for your entire company, if you're coming in there with 20% cognition because you're not sleeping well.

I would spend a bunch of weekend time, you don't have to spend your company time on this, optimizing your sleep environment.

I think sleep masks are the most underrated product in the world in terms of the upside that they give you and the cost.

It's like $20 and you'll sleep, I sleep significantly better.

There's a website for this that details it.

I would just go through all their products.

I would be incredibly frugal in general in life, and I would spend lavishly on this 1.

Again, just think about it as a nootropic.

I know there's a lot of people that are obsessed with kind of, I don't know, taking L-theanine or caffeine.

This is a far better nootropic than all that stuff.

I would try to avoid using an alarm clock at least for half the week.

Again, your ancestors didn't have an alarm clock.

Sometimes you know 1 thing your ancestors obviously were not exposed to is a lot of light in the night.

And so occasionally resetting your security and rhythm I think for a lot of folks, especially software engineers can be helpful.

I think if you're a software engineer you probably have, well I found at least most software engineers that I've worked with have about a 25 hour cycle.

That is to say they increasingly wake up later and later and later.

If you take a little bit of melatonin, you can actually reset that quite well.

For various fascinating regulation reasons, most melatonin sold in the United States is way much more than you need.

Your body makes 0.3 when it wants to put you to bed, so that's what you should take.

You literally have to buy this on Amazon, the reasons for which are fascinating, but outside of the context of this talk.

Okay, so we just discussed sleep a little bit.

I don't think you should tackle anything else before you're sleeping.

I'm sure most of you, some of you will follow this advice.

A lot of you will continue doing what you're doing.

Okay, so again, just think of, just think of what you're doing and what you want your team to be.

I would, I at some point realized I was letting everyone else down on my team if I was not playing at peak performance, if I was not treating myself like an athlete.

I really don't want to go down the rabbit hole of like what diets to do.

I'm not a dietician and I'm not here to be your Tony Robbins, but I would just focus on whatever you think is healthy.

I actually think there's probably a lot of psychological benefit to just eating whatever you think is healthy.

Frankly, if you believe sugar is really healthy, if you really believe that, maybe that's fine.

Whatever fad you're into, just go for it.

This is a contentious topic, but I think it is immoral to have junk food, weaponized junk food in your office.

I would just get rid of all of it and focus on healthy food.

You can find healthy foods that's just as cheap.

I also think everyone is dehydrated all the time.

I would try to drink an uncomfortable amount of water.

This is probably the only weird hack I'm going to give you in this talk.

But practically speaking, yes, you got it.

I think you'll feel much better if you do.

All right, so that's a little bit about food.

The message here, the repeated message here is invest in yourself because startups are 1 of the most draining things you can do to your body, to your mind.

It's again, just like sleep, the results are pretty conclusive on this 1.

1 thing I always, well, taking a step back, if you don't exercise, I would at least try to spend a lot of time outdoors.

If you have a team, you can start having one-on-ones outdoors if you're managing that team.

If you're somewhere terribly cold where you can't spend time outdoors, that sucks.

But well, maybe you should move to somewhere that has more sun.

I would always picture in my mind, because I'm an overly competitive person, that whoever my competitor was, they were probably working out like 4 times a week, becoming better, having better ideas, becoming more creative.

If that framing is helpful for you, I would use it.

I think, you know, I don't mean to be overly prescriptive on what you do.

I think anything you do, you know, in the spirit of exercise is good.

I don't have to cite, I can't, I don't have time to cite all the studies that correlate with this.

I do think running is probably the best in terms of time expenditure to potential reward if you can do it.

And I think the more interesting question with exercise is not whether you should do it, because I think it's pretty clear to everyone on the planet you should do it, but how to convince yourself to do it, because that's the harder psychological bit.

The largest mistake I think people make, especially if you're a founder of a company, is you know you have like I'm gonna go all in mentality, you tend to go all into things, if you go all into something like running for the first time you're gonna hate it because you're gonna sprint.

So I would I would not overdo it And I would start really small and build positive memories that you can grow on.

What you want to do is pretty much for everything.

But in this particular thing, the trick is to create a positive memory such that when your brain predicts whether you do that activity the next time, it looks back and thinks, yeah, that was kind of fun.

So that may mean running a mile and then getting a frappuccino, just because what you'll remember is getting the frappuccino.

But try to really trick yourself into doing this.

I think the other thing you can do in order to kind of reduce the willpower required to do anything is make it surround yourself by other people that are doing it.

You can tell other people that you're running, which is great because then you'll kind of feel like you have to do it because you told everyone about it.

You could surround yourself with other people that are running.

For me, especially through the dark phases of my startup, this, this was definitely my light.

And you guys are going to go through a lot of ups and downs.

I suggest setting up these good habits while you're either at a plateau or at an up because it's really hard to convince yourself to do anything while you're down.

But if you set up the mental habit, it's a little bit easier to come back to.

So if you got down the basics, You're sleeping well, you're eating well, you're exercising.

Then we can start to talk about kind of the more interesting things you could do and you should be doing to transform yourself as a leader and to really take your company to the next level.

There are a bunch of subcategories within to how to think about optimizing your mind.

The largest mistake people make, I think, in terms of just thinking better is they focus a lot on feeding their body and then they don't focus on feeding their brain.

But ultimately your brain I think is just constantly doing pattern recognition and the pattern recognition that it's doing is very much powered by the information it's consumed.

And so you really want to focus on feeding your mind like you're feeding your body.

In practice, I would spend at least 1 day a week not working as hard as you can.

And your goal here is by as hard as you can, you want to do whatever activity will help you feel the most refreshed when you come back to work.

And there's all sorts of interesting studies of spending time in nature is really good for this, maybe going to the beach, whatever.

I don't intend to be prescriptive, but you really need to spend a day a week not working.

This is really helpful because when you come back to work, your brain will just be different and it will be solving problems in a more novel way.

And let me frame it this way, your competitors are probably doing this and they're coming up with better answers than you are.

I mean it blows my mind that people don't do this.

It's like I guess a separation of the the urgent and the important that people struggle to do.

I would focus a lot on reading long form.

I think a mistake people make here is everyone talks about reading a lot and people get very obsessed with like, you know, reading is a thing to do.

The greatest gift someone gave me was this idea of not really caring about what you read, whether you even finish the book, just trying to read any book, anytime, all the time, like every day.

Because I, and I think this is common amongst founders, you get obsessed in this mindset of, I got to do it.

You get stuck in a crappy book, you stop reading altogether.

So just pick anything, continually try to read it.

I find that the value that books give you are not just informational.

They actually set up your mind in a particular way.

If you read a biography about a person, you'll find yourself thinking a little bit more like that person thought or like you read that person thought on that afterglow I think is really what you're trying to get and I don't think you can get that from short form content I would sign out of all unless unless your businesses could tie to it in which case good luck I would sign out of all this crap on your phone and just make it a little bit harder to use.

Yeah, it's just too good is the main problem.

So that's in terms of how you should feed your brain in terms of how you should think like the software that's running in your head probably the largest thing you want to do is you want to move from this mode where you're playing first person to this mode where you're playing third person and what do I mean by that I mean by that it's a little bit less I'm angry and a little bit more I'm feeling anger.

The other term people use for this is mindfulness.

I'm trying to avoid that and repackage it in terms that seem a little bit more exciting.

But it's building the habit of kind of stepping out of the frame and experiencing yourself almost in the third person.

Well, it's actually not that useful if things go really well, in which case all of your emotions are awesome.

But when things start going south, it's gonna become really important.

It's gonna become also really important when you start doing bad things that are mostly a byproduct of your own insecurities.

You know, so someone, say, who reports to you says something disagreeable to you in a meeting.

And it's quite helpful to be able to step back and say, what's happening now is like, I feel insecure, as opposed to I'm dumb, which is what actually happens if you're playing in kind of first person.

And you'll be able to react better, you'll be able to lead people better.

In terms of how to do it, meditation is 1 way to achieve this.

There's a lot of studies that show that it just happens as a byproduct of being in your mind for more years.

But I actually think the most valuable way to to get better at this is to just think about it.

But it is probably the largest, most important mental shift I think you can do as a founder because you're putting yourself through an emotional roller coaster.

So that's kind of a large software shift that I think is really, really important.

In terms of other cheap hacks that relate to your mind, I think the simplest goal that you should constantly be thinking about is how to spend as much of your day in flow as possible.

Flow is this concept of basically becoming unaware of how time passes.

There's a book written by a gentleman whose last name I can't pronounce, so I'm not even going to bother Mikhail something about this topic that I recommend reading.

You want to spend as much of your time in flow as possible.

And if you're really good as a manager, you really want to spend your entire team's day in flow as much as possible.

People should be moving from 1 thing to the next, to the next, to the next, not even really noticing time fly by.

And that is, you know, I don't have any like instant solutions to that.

But you may be kind of noticing a theme across the talk here, which is the key is to kind of launch and iterate.

I would be constantly asking yourself, like, what time of day is the best for you to do meetings?

What time of day is best for the team to do meetings?

You know, is the person you're going to put on a particular project, Are they going to enjoy that?

So you need to constantly be in this framework of trying different things and iterating.

There's a lot of information, data laying on the ground, that comes out of an emission from whatever you did by putting a meeting super early in the morning, super late in the day, bunching meetings together, keeping them separate.

I don't mean to be prescriptive because I actually don't know that there is a global answer, but there's definitely an individualized 1 to you.

And the really great people are constantly iterating on whatever that is, trying to improve themselves.

So you should do that because the competition is doing that.

The last thing I want to talk about is probably the most important 1 for you as you build out a team, which is how to become a really good, really inspiring leader.

There's a lot of different books on leadership.

There's a lot of different studies on it.

There's 1 particularly good 1 that I'd like to walk you guys through, which is Robert Keegan's theory of adult development.

Robert Keegan's a psychologist that has done a lot of work on adult development, distinct from child development, which folks like PSJ have covered quite well.

It's actually not, there's not that much literature on how adults, say circa 18 and beyond, evolve in terms of their thinking and thought patterns.

And what he's done is he's kind of split out 5 different phases that people tend to go through throughout life.

And not all people make it to the final 2 phases.

We're really going to focus here on stage 2 through 5 since 1 is basically really children.

I'm going to walk you through them, and then we'll talk a little bit about how you can kind of advance from 1 phase to the next.

So let's talk a little bit about an imperial mind.

You can kind of think of this as like a very simple AI.

This is someone who is for the most part.

These are children, but I think we all know some adults that fit this bill.

This is someone who is incredibly selfish.

So they're very focused on their own goals.

That's the number 1 most important thing for them.

So the relationship with other people is really just a way for them to get a thing done that they want.

They're unable to the view of the other side is untenable to them.

So, you know, oh, what do you think of, you know, a person brings up other ideas, can't even get there, can't even see how that person would have that view.

The challenge with this mode is that it's really hard to get people to cooperate with you over the long term.

As you guys grow teams, you may start seeing this flaw in actually some managers.

It becomes very easy to see actually when it's not you, but through someone else where people over time just aren't interested in working for them or don't find them compelling.

So this is kind of the the most embryonic phase you can be in as an adult which I think is has off some obvious limitations.

Once you advance beyond stage 2 you get to stage 3 the socialized mind or as I call it the NPC the non-playable character in the game.

This is most adults, and these are people who are kind of able to see the other side, but they almost see it too well.

They really care about what other people are thinking about them all the time.

And the social narrative of, you know, oh, people think I'm dumb becomes their narrative.

So you've kind of pendulum swung a little bit too far where instead of not caring really about what other people think, you now are entirely driven by it.

Occasionally we'll see founders that are kind of in this mode.

It's just it's really hard to have an independent mindset when you're in this mode.

And any great company, as you guys know, faces a lot of unknowns and you have to be able to kind of stare into the abyss and say, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

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How to Win by Daniel Gross