Chapter 2 - The Paralyzing Fear of Getting Started

Written By Brett Hurt

DIGITAL COMPANION

 

 

Chapter 2

The Paralyzing Fear of Getting Started

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

— Khalil Gibran, “The River Cannot Go Back”

It’s only human nature to want to share the good parts of a story first: The liberation of becoming an entrepreneur, the sheer thrill, the exhaustion transforming to euphoria, the discovery of that essential among the essentials of this book — the ‘soul’ of the endeavor. So full disclosure now that you’ve completed Chapter 1, The Soul of the Entrepreneur: I haven’t been straight with you. Like most storytellers, and for that matter like most entrepreneurs, I haven’t told you everything right away. 

What you also need to know is that the handmaid of the unleashing soul — both your own and that of your creation — is fear. Fear that will stalk you outright. Fear that will sneak up silently. Fear that can contort itself into depression. Fear that will seep slowly and destructively into the very same soul we talked about in Chapter 1. 

Often the fear is rational. Will my money run out? While I’m still at the drawing board, will my competitors get to the market first? Will I fail and be a failure before friends and family? Oftentimes, the fear is irrational. Am I deserving of success? Is it my time to do this? Do I have the energy and do I have the skills to deliver on my vision? Is my idea as good as I think it is?

Ironically, self-doubt disproportionately affects high-performing individuals, a group that includes you, the entrepreneurs for whom this book is written. As the late Robert Hughes, the author and social critic once wrote in Time Magazine: “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

I really share Hughes’ stance on this. But fear and its derivatives of self-doubt, angst, and even depression, I must tell you, are among the occupational hazards for the entrepreneur. I want to talk about my own experience of this through the six companies I’ve founded or co-founded, from the very first company, a consultancy — which I started while working on my MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 — to the most recent, data.world, birthed in 2016. In particular, the point I want to elaborate upon is that even though the space between Hurt Technology Consulting LLC and today’s data.world is light years in terms of both scope and scale, the formative angst of both is very similar. And I also will share some solid ways to cope with fear. But before getting into my own specific experience, you need to understand just how universal this reality is for every entrepreneur.

As I emphasized in Chapter 1, The Soul of the Entrepreneur, there is nothing more rewarding in a career than being a creator — an entrepreneur. You get to build something from scratch and, if amazing people decide to join you and the world embraces your creation, it is truly euphoric. There is nothing like it: You made your small contribution to society. Or maybe a large contribution. You created something new, alongside a great team. But… if it fails… it is truly gut-wrenching. Again, the questions: What if the world rejects your creation? What if your market timing was really off? What if a competitor kicks your ass? Your name is all over this, sometimes quite literally in the name of the company itself (as is the case with the $70 billion-plus creation of Michael Dell). Whatever your fear is, however, that paralyzing fear when you are getting started is normal. People have this perception that we entrepreneurs are totally comfortable in jumping off the figurative cliff and building our company’s wings on the way down. But that is bullshit, and I’ll get into that further in Chapter 7, What’s in a Name? And we sometimes perpetuate that myth by glamorizing each other. The truth is that great entrepreneurs are usually risk-averse, a topic we will explore later.

That said, entrepreneurship is really scary. A good example is Elon Musk, as of this writing the world’s richest person — and, I have to mention, a recent transplant to my hometown of Austin, Texas. As you can see in Musk’s interview with The New York Times, on the Digital Companion, even this titan is not immune. “There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three or four days — days when I didn’t go outside,” Musk said in a 2018 interview that alternated between laughter and tears as he described the panic and the anxiety as he raced to meet production deadlines for the Tesla Model 3 amid insecure funding and a threatened probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Another good description of this comes from Vidhya Ravi, the founder of Travelsheets, a web portal that helped travelers develop unique itineraries. Of all the fears Vidhya wrote on Medium in 2020, the one that hit her hardest was the fear that she simply wasn’t up to the task.

“Over the last twelve years, I’ve quickly started, abandoned, or dismissed five or six viable startup ideas by simply telling myself that I didn’t have the experience to do those startups — essentially, I didn’t know what I was doing,” she wrote, in a Medium essay linked on the Digital Companion. “I finally caught on to the biggest secret in the corporate world. Everyone feels like they don’t know what they are doing, at least some of the time.”

And then there is that offshoot of fear, a dimension of the entrepreneur’s journey that frankly should be discussed more openly. This is depression. Some VCs, such as Homebrew, one of our investors at data.world, have incorporated the subject of founder depression into their model of support for entrepreneurs. And it’s something I encounter and endeavor to help with among the entrepreneurs whom I mentor.

One of the best explorations of this, linked on the Digital Companion, was produced by Catherine Shu of the online technology magazine TechCrunch. She found depression surprisingly widespread among founders and her article describes the battles of a number of them, anonymously of course.

“If I’m feeling really depressed I won’t come into the office around others, I won’t answer the phone, and will reschedule calls/meetings,” one founder told Catherine. “The reason is I basically cannot function properly, speak well, or make sound decisions.”

Another founder told Catherine: “If anything, I think the tech community is conducive to depression because it applauds excess and the lack of life balance.”

As if that was not enough on the somber side of entrepreneurship, there is one more harsh reality that compounds the dynamics of fear. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella remarked once at a gathering of CEOs I joined: “You can’t have a bad day as a CEO.” What he meant was that if you are in a bad mood, if you are feeling fearful, you can’t project that mood within your company. And part of what Satya said is right, of course. Senior leaders, and especially CEOs, are typically seen as stoic, fearless personalities. Fear is not something people believe leaders experience, much less something that plagues them. Yet, the senior leader knows fear all too well. 

I actually think this is a very common state of being for entrepreneurs starting out, regardless of their experience or success. But it isn’t something we talk about, especially if you are a founder and CEO. Of course, we are supposed to project confidence, right? What Satya meant was that if you are in a bad mood, if you are feeling fearful, you can’t project that mood within your company. Company employees will model their CEO’s behavior, and his point is that you need to strive to be the ultimate model of performance, confidence, and positivity.

Fair enough. But Satya left something out. I’m quite sure he would agree with me that, along with the virtues of a commander’s bold face amid any storm, leadership is equally about authenticity. Projecting confidence is paramount, for sure.  And many are the self-help business books that draw on the hard-as-nails examples of military leadership, of Ulysses Grant, George Patton, or, more recently, Stanley McChrystal, whose swagger resonates in his three books on leadership. But today’s entrepreneurial leadership, particularly in the fast-emerging economy of data and digital innovation, is about building creative teams, about co-creation of new knowledge, of flat hierarchies. This demands that you, the entrepreneur and leader, be human and show your humanity too. I believe it’s a critical factor of success. I’m not suggesting you freak out your team if you yourself are feeling freaked out inside. I am saying that you should never fake a “good day,” when the reality is otherwise, but rather demonstrate authentic resoluteness and sincere resolve when the clouds gather and the headwinds pick up. In other words, show your humanity.

You know that old expression, “It’s lonely at the top?” It’s true. But it’s less lonely when you have the means to cope with the inevitable fear and its threats of paralysis. So let me turn to my personal experience, which I believe is instructive, both on my early lessons on fear as well as those that came later, when one might have thought that my success would have extinguished my fears.

I founded my first business in the early stages of my time at Wharton.  Hurt Technology Consulting started out as a one-man consultancy. Interestingly enough, I had written all my application essays when applying to Wharton around my passion to ultimately start my own business. I certainly never would have guessed that I would do so in my first semester. But I had arrived at Wharton from Deloitte Consulting where I’d been an analyst and in fact, I was technically on a leave of absence from Deloitte. But life is what happens when you are making other plans, as John Lennon famously sang, and a senior manager from Deloitte called me in a panic in November of 1997, right before the winter break after my first grueling semester. He had sold a client - the Louisiana Department of Labor - on a project where he would build a system to replace the tracking of their adult education system with a client-server design to replace the state’s current paper-based filing systems. This would allow for more efficiency and better reporting and analytics. The problem was that he had a very small budget and no idea how to build it. So he turned to me. And I was in.

Talk about fear. I had two weeks over that winter break to create the entire system. From scratch. While proficient from the age of 7 in programming, I also had to learn a new programming language. I did so with the help of a very smart friend who happened to be visiting the Wharton campus to consider whether he would also earn his MBA. And I worked my butt off. I was determined to prove that I could do it. I literally worked every day and night until around 3 a.m. over that two-week period, including during the Times Square ball drop on New Year's Eve, where I paused to watch the ball drop on TV for five minutes and then returned to work.

My fears were massive. What would happen if I failed to deliver on time? Would the system work? My wife Debra played a big role, believing in me through my moments of deep doubt while standing clear so that I might prove myself to myself. And I did! My system worked, was fully documented, and got deployed successfully all over the State of Louisiana. The former senior manager, now an entrepreneur himself, was a hero. And I kept Hurt Technology Consulting LLC up and running, contracting with brilliant undergrads in Wharton’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, and they shared in the financial success. 

In 1999 I took the next step, founding MBA ZoNe with two classmates, Brenda and Marc Mizgorski. It was an online community for MBA students, conceptually much like the early version of Facebook and also based on advertising. I learned a great deal, including the fact that I didn’t like selling advertising, and worked my way through many fears and anxieties. This was my first business with co-founders, another source of fear. Will we get along? Will we clash? As with many fears, these were unfounded. As Mark Twain put it, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which didn’t happen.” These fears were in that category. The only conflict we ran into was that I just wasn’t passionate about it (be true to one’s self) and ultimately I sold my equity to Brenda and Marc and they continue to run the company today.

Next, and again while still a student, Debra and I launched BodyMatrix, in some ways inspired by my parents who were always retail and direct marketing entrepreneurs. We successfully sold sports nutrition products all over the world, managing the global enterprise from a brownstone in downtown Philadelphia. One of the early frustrations, and frankly a source of the fear that the enterprise might even fail, was that we were effectively blind to our customers' needs, habits, and behaviors online, which were masked by a web browser. In my parents’ stores, you could at least ask a customer, “Are you finding everything you need?” and “How did you hear about us?” But not here. So, I built the technology to “see.” Having written the original code for the e-commerce platform we constructed, I knew all of the code inside and out. I did what I thought was most logical. I wrote the customers' actions as they occurred directly into the Microsoft Access database that powered the site. Where did they visit us from — recorded. What products did they look at — recorded. What products did they buy — recorded. What products did they search for — recorded. What products did they abandon from their shopping cart — recorded. How did they find us — recorded.

These innovations, meanwhile, drew attention around campus, both from professors and classmates, a couple of whom became co-founders in the creation of my fourth business, Coremetrics. This was my first foray into enterprise software, as we sold the analytics tools we’d developed to “fix” the customer visibility problem at BodyMatrix to other firms. Somehow, and perhaps insanely in retrospect, I kept all four businesses going while concluding my MBA. When I graduated in 1999, I sold the first three businesses as fast as I could and doubled down on Coremetrics with a singular passion that was to carry me along an often rocky and scary road, straight into and through the 2001 dot.com crash. 

For readers who may not remember, the Nasdaq Composite peaked at 5132 in March 2000. A year later, the index was in the 1900s.  The Dow Jones Internet Composite Index fell to a fifth of what it had been just 12 months earlier. It’s hard to imagine now, but Amazon’s value fell from the sky by 94 percent, its shares reaching $6 in September of that year. For comparison, Amazon was hovering around at  $3,400 a share when I was wrapping up this book in the spring of 2022.

“The market had gone cold, investors were holding their money close, and the last thing you wanted to be was a young company with dot-com at the end of your name,” wrote historian Margaret O’Mara in her seminal book on the technology business, The Code - Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. You can read all about that period in her book, a review of which you'll find on the Digital Companion along with an interview with her. But I was there with Coremetrics, serving the dot-coms, along with so many others. It was bad.

Not to revisit that terrible time, except to say that fear of the very sector in which you’ve staked your life and future as it collapses is a raw, intense elixir combining everything we’ve been exploring in this chapter. But managing that, along with managing our business, is what carried us to the other side. And arriving at the other side, having conquered that fear, really was a kind of revenge of the nerds in California’s Silicon Valley, Austin’s Silicon Hills, Boston’s Technology Corridor, and elsewhere. After we survivors tended our wounds and moved on, the first two decades of the 21st Century were to become the Golden Age of technology in my view, one that continues to accelerate and further reason that I am writing this book.

Which takes me to 2005, and the founding of my fifth company, Bazaarvoice, an online engine that powers and enables customer reviews — both positive and negative — for some of the largest retailers and brands that sell through retailers worldwide. After weathering the dot.com bust successfully at Coremetrics, we soon found ourselves at Bazaarvoice in the Great Recession, which began in 2007 and deepened in 2008. I was giving speeches reminding entrepreneurs and others that this was something we hadn’t seen as a nation since the Great Depression. And we hadn’t. There was plenty to fear as a CEO. I put on as brave a face as possible, but was also candid with my team. Even though our sales and revenue remained strong, beating all of our goals, I imposed a six-month hiring freeze as a precaution against things getting worse. Everyone took on more work and we got through it as a team.

Amidst that storm, however, one of the biggest name brand retailers in the United States moved to remove negative reviews from its site. This was a “stand your ground” moment that we had to fight with every tool we could muster. I certainly didn’t want to lose the customer, but the credibility of our entire company — and theirs too — was on the line. A global engine with a mission of enabling transparency to customers and potential customers simply couldn’t survive if it was seen to be mere cherry-picking propaganda. Our mission statement was, “Changing the world, one authentic conversation at a time.”  Again, we prevailed, but not without many an anxious moment and many a sleepless night. We took Bazaarvoice public in 2012 and I exited as CEO, earning enough for my labors to never work again should I so choose. Debra and I soon became investors in startups ourselves, co-founding Hurt Family Investments. I took three years off in any operational capacity. I read. I traveled. Debra and I spent time in India studying and learning Vedanta, a 5,000-year-old Indian philosophy on how to achieve happiness in life. I took on short, part-time stints at the University of Texas at Austin as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence and also at Austin Ventures as a partner. And then I took the leap that was hardly forced upon me, plunging again into, among other things, that river of fear — but this time from the shore of a financially secure, “proven” entrepreneur.

But why? As just described, I had started successful companies before. data.world was my sixth. I had a bigger network than ever before. I had more know-how then at any other point in my entrepreneurial career, including the lessons that hardened me in writing my blog Lucky7 over the years to help other entrepreneurs. I had spent three years in deep reflection. I had seen over 2,000 startup pitches, which really do have the effect of making new mental connections, what VCs call “pattern recognition.” I had worked behind the scenes at the once-powerhouse Austin Ventures, seeing how the VC industry really works. I had served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at both the Wharton School and my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin.  I knew company culture like the back of my hand — Bazaarvoice had been rated the best place to work in Austin when it was a small, medium, and then large-size company, winning #1 in all three categories as we rapidly grew. Alongside my excellent co-founders, I had spent months researching the viability of data.world. In short, I was, rationally speaking, more prepared than I had ever been before. So why was I afraid?

One of the most famous entrepreneurs in Austin once told me, after Bazaarvoice, “Be careful what you do next. Everyone is watching. You are near the top of the entrepreneurial heap in Austin, so choose wisely.” This message was coming to me from an entrepreneur who had experienced a lot of financial success but had never stepped back into the entrepreneurial arena directly. Why? Because they had made enough money? I had, too. Or was it because they were afraid of failing if they did it again? Fear in the arena is eternal. So must be the effort to confront it.

We are the creators. Don’t we have an obligation to overcome that fear and continue to create? To live our meaning? I want you to realize that feeling is normal. As you feel that fear beginning to paralyze you, I have some advice. Keep moving. That is the only way through it. Find that state of execution flow. Remember that ancient bit of wisdom, “This, too, shall pass.” Or, as my CEO coach, Kirk Dando, says, “The road to heaven goes through hell.” Be strong. Get that momentum going. No one is going to do it for you. As Dr. Seuss wrote, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

There are many ways to talk yourself out onto the ledge of fear, but only a small number to talk your way down. So among them, when you find yourself in the grip of fear, I recommend:

First, talk to someone about it. This could be your co-founders. It could be your spouse or best friend. Don’t just carry that burden alone. Everyone sometimes needs a friend to help them overcome their fears. You are human. I’ll never forget a class I took at Wharton where we all laid out our fears. That class helped me commit to continuing as  an entrepreneur after graduation. While most of my classmates took high paying jobs my salary was the grand total of $0 for the first six months post graduation and then $60k for the next six months after that, a far cry from the $150k+ that most of my classmates were making two decades ago right after graduation.

Second, do something that centers you again. For some, this is meditation. For others, like me, this is exercising. Or it may just be going on a long walk or a beautiful hike alone. Or going to a conference or reading a book that helps you overcome your fear and keep moving. Whatever you do, take care of yourself.

Third, if you find yourself sitting there, paralyzed, remember that momentum begets momentum. Pick up the phone and call a potential Advisory Board member, which could be some guru in your industry who may help give you confidence, or tell you what to change. Call a potential client. Call a potential partner. Let the market speak to you. Get moving and your fear will start to dissipate.

Fourth, once you have overcome your fear, talk about it like I’m doing in this chapter. Let’s normalize this for other entrepreneurs instead of just talking about the “glory” or our “successes”. Entrepreneurship is hard — it is the ultimate journey of self-discovery.

For me, that feeling dissipated about three or four months into data.world. I found my state of flow, bolstered by my amazing co-founders, and today we are the largest collaborative data community in the world, with feature-rich enterprise offerings for our clients and many integrated partners, such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Google Data Studio. Momentum is building every day. But… we still have plenty of execution challenges ahead. And there will still be periods of fear. And I will work through it, keeping in mind that placing one foot in front of the other is the only way to get to the other side.

Again, fear is normal, even for the most experienced entrepreneurs. Maybe even more so because they have more face to lose. Because we know how hard the journey is. Because we aren’t as naive as we used to be. No matter our level of experience, let’s talk about this more and not hide behind our “success stories.” Founder depression — and fear — are real issues to deal with. 

So always, keep walking. No one said it would be easy to be an entrepreneur, but the journey is the reward. Fear will come, and it will abate. Learn from your mistakes and don’t marinate in them. Just keep walking.

Take it from one of the ancients, one of history’s greatest philosophers: 

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

— Plato

Brett Hurt
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Chapter 1 - The Soul of the Entrepreneur
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Chapter 3 - Advice for the Middle Age Entrepreneur