My Dad Was a Founder

My father died from colon cancer on July 21, 1993—exactly twenty years ago today.

I was 11 years old at the time, and I have now lived nearly twice as long without him as with him. As I saw this date approaching in my calendar, I decided to look up his obituary online---it’s still there in the LA Times and NY Times archives. And while all the facts and bios are the same as they have been for the last 20 years—this time one particular line from an obituary caught my attention: “He founded his own clinic…”  

My dad was a founder. 

My parents got divorced when I was two, and my dad got sick when I was nine---so I don’t have a large storage vault of poignant childhood memories of him. But one moment I remember very clearly had to be when I was about eight years old. My dad was standing in a conference room at the sleep disorders clinic he had founded. He was gesturing to a map of the U.S. he had just pinned up on the conference room wall. He ceremoniously placed two colored thumbtacks in the map, one in Palo Alto, CA and the other in Walla Walla, WA---the sites of his first two clinic projects. He then waved his hand excitedly across the map and said, “Just picture this map filled with sleep disorders clinics! We’re going to help so many people and we’re going to be millionaires!” 

That vision—and the unequivocal passion behind it—stirred me as an 8-year-old-kid just as it inspires me now when I sit across from the founders I coach.

Fast forward to early 2012: I was sitting in the office of a venerable venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road. He asked me if I inquire or explore with my clients how their relationships with their parents influence them now. Parents do come up in my coaching conversations---but not often. Parent metaphors, however, come up all the time. [“Why does my co-founder always get to be the fun parent while I am the mean parent?” “I think it’s really important I find my co-founder before I settle on the idea…I just want them to be there at the moment of conception.” “I feel so alone as a solo founder---it’s how I imagine a single parent must feel.”] 

This VC went on to explain to me a curious trend he had seen in his years of investing: “I would say about 80% of the most successful entrepreneurs I see all end up coming from a similar family dynamic: one parent was consistently present and supportive, and the other one, in one way or another, abandoned the family.” 

I froze in my seat. “Wow, that’s my story too.” My father died too soon—leaving his two beloved daughters, his two nascent sleep disorders clinics, and his world-changing founder dreams all behind. And it was my mother who helped me survive that loss. She filled the hole my dad left whenever and however she could. And she modeled how to thrive and persevere in the face of such a destabilizing event in a way that was as strong and tough as it was warm and caring.

Over the last year, I have floated the VC’s theory to other entrepreneurs, and have found it emerge as true for many of them as well. (That said—I would never claim that absent or unstable parenting is somehow a prerequisite for future entrepreneurial success.)

I told this VC I would mull his observations over and get back to him when I had a more thoughtful answer. Over a year later, I still haven’t arrived at a fully satisfactory answer, but here are a few possibilities I think might be contributing to what he has seen:    

1) Resilience: I am not a trained psychologist so I can’t comment meaningfully on the myriad psycho-social impacts of growing up with an unstable or absent parent, but I know first-hand that kind of trauma is an incredibly stressful event. So, what enables children to thrive in the face of such stress? Resilience researchers have observed that having someone to talk to during hard times is one of the most critical factors that enables resilience. I’d argue that having one parent who is consistently supportive throughout the traumatic period gives just enough of an anchor to keep children grounded. And thus the process of surviving the loss or the instability can build resilience---a critical ability to enduring the hardships, the no’s, the setbacks and the losses that are usually part of an arduous entrepreneurial journey. 

2) Self-Sufficiency: If you grow up in a situation where you can’t rely on one of your parents, you conclude that adults can’t always provide you with what you might want or need. In having to care for yourself or suddenly “mature beyond your years,” you get a lot of early practice at being self-sufficient. The significant upside to this is you probably became extremely resourceful—one of the most important attributes for scrappy entrepreneurs who routinely must solve problems and create value with limited resources. The dark side of hard-core self-sufficiency, however, is when you don’t open yourself up to any kind of dependency at all. Sure, on the surface, you can and do ask for help all the time with your venture. But do you really open yourself up to the possibility that people could disappoint you or let you down? Do you panic in some way when people do fail you and then make unproductive decisions to reduce or curtail your dependency? (I know I am still working on both of those.) 

3) Perception: The character Ria Torres in one of my favorite TV shows Lie To Me exhibits a “natural” gift for detecting deception just from people’s facial expressions---an ability we later learn she developed because she was abused as a child. We similarly know that hyper-vigilance is a known symptom of PTSD. My guess is that a heightened sense of perception and awareness is something a lot of children develop after being exposed to any trauma even those traumas that weren’t as severe or chronic. When you have to care for yourself at a young age, you learn quickly how to read people and emotions well. For example, you don’t want to anger or provoke an alcoholic parent so you learn how to anticipate emotions in others, how to smooth things over and how to perform so that destabilizing conflict can be avoided. These powers of perception can help an entrepreneur in many ways. They can help you become a more captivating storyteller. They help you intervene more influentially in conflicts on your team. And, perhaps most importantly, they can help you observe and unlock insights from users that other might not see.

4) Risk Tolerance: Experiencing the loss of a parent makes mortality very real at a very young age. Does this reduce your fear of risk? Does it heighten your drive to make meaningful impact while you can? Do you somehow take life less for granted? I know I live my life with a ferocious intensity that stems, in part, from a lived understanding that we are not guaranteed a life into old age. My dad died at 45. As I near that age myself, I often take stock---am I doing what I want? Am I spending time with the people I love? If cancer comes for me at 43, will I be ready? At times, I think I am just impatient or bad at tolerating situations that aren’t fulfilling --- but I also hear this rhythm of “Do. Not. Waste. Time.” like other people feel their heartbeat. And so I take the risk to say the thing or do the thing. 

5) Control: On some level, children who come from these backgrounds might still be blaming themselves for the loss of their parent (whether that loss was actually due to accidents, cancer, alcoholism, divorce or some other abandonment) --- and at some very deep level they see their ventures and their stewardship of those ventures as a symbolic assertion of control. If they spent formative years feeling very stressed and very out of control, it would make sense that as adults they seek to put themselves back in control. “Screw this corporate job. I am going to create and influence my own destiny!” (See my point above about being anti-dependency.) The irony of course is that a new venture is wildly out of your control so the entrepreneur’s learning curve is steep here. (I know mine has been.) But the desire or aspiration for control makes them very committed to shepherding an idea to fruition; very driven to perform and deliver value; and sometimes freakishly obsessed with the details that matter. 

6) Calm Under Pressure: Finally, a childhood spent in an unstable environment trains people as adults to handle high-stress crisis situations. This assumes that the entrepreneur has developed enough emotional regulation to not get triggered/paralyzed by the stressful event that occurs in the startup. I suspect there might even be a physiological response whereby entrepreneurs who were stressed like this as children developed ways to cope physically with stress and can unconsciously reduce blood pressure/calm their heart rate when they face startup stress. Those coping mechanisms enable them to lead teams through dark, twisty, stressful and scary times---unquestionably a huge asset to have in your entrepreneur skillset.

Whether parent loss of any kind is in your background or not, your relationship with your parents does influence what kind of entrepreneur and leader you are. And while you can’t control the past, the way in which you understand, accept and manage those legacies is very much in your control. The first step to that is opening yourself up (whether through therapy, coaching or deep talks with a loved one) to the nature of your particular loss in order to understand and accept how it affects you in your current role. 

So, ask yourself: How does my relationship with my parents affect my approach to leading people? 

You might be surprised to find what you uncover. 

And the next step is to ask yourself: What do I want to do with that new awareness?

You might: Hold on to it. Reflect on it. Act on it. Keep doing it. Or stop doing it and start doing something else. Manage it some other way. Or redirect it in a more productive direction.

When I re-discovered my dad’s obituary and read that particular line, I cried. Of course, I always knew that starting the sleep clinic was a part of his professional resume, but something about reading about him as a “founder” gave me this new and freshly painful way to access the loss. 

I wish he were here to see what I’ve done as coach to founders and an entrepreneur myself. I know he could have been a great mentor, a trusted advisor and one of my biggest fans.

In some ways, he still is.