Your Next Move - Andy Dunn’s Secrets to Leading a Company and Taking Care of Yourself

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Inc. Editor-in-Chief Mike Hofman interviews Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobos and founder of Pie, on stage at the 2024 Inc. 5000 Conference. Everything has a price in the startup world, especially when it comes to the health and well-being of founders. This episode offers hard-earned advice about how successful founders have achieved success while also preserving their own physical and mental health.

With the Venture X Business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with no preset spending limit, your purchasing power adapts to meet your business needs. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Venture X Business. Terms and conditions apply. I'm Sarah Lynch and you are listening to your next move, Audio Edition, produced by Inc. and Capital One Business. Today's episode, recorded live at the Inc. 5000 conference, is a conversation between Mike Hoffman, Editor-in-Chief at Inc. and Andy Dunn.

Andy is the co-founder of e-commerce menswear brand Bonobos, and served as the company's CEO for 10 years. He's backed dozens of highly successful startups and wrote the memoir, Burn Rate, Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, which explored his diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Andy's latest project is the app, Pi, which aims to defeat social isolation.

But before we get to that interview, I talked with Karen Bonner, VP of Brand and Acquisitions Marketing at Capital One Business, about the role that founders have in supporting the health and wellbeing of their team. Karen, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks, Sarah. It's great to be here at the Inc 5000 Conference.

Founders put so much time and effort into building their teams. What is their role when it comes to supporting team members' health and well-being? Yes, it's critical for founders to remember that investing in happy, healthy, engaged employees is really vital to their company. The effort you put into building your team is wasted if your team burns out and turns over. So, taking steps to ensure that employees are adequately supported makes it easier for them to manage and balance all of their responsibilities, the ones at home and the ones at work.

For example, companies should routinely evaluate their culture and benefits to ensure that employees are set up for success to be their most effective and their most productive. It's also wise to make sure your benefits package has clear guidelines in place to support employees in more complex situations, such as when an employee needs to take a leave of absence or let's say they need flexibility to handle some caregiving responsibilities.

Regular associate surveys are also something to keep in mind. They can be an invaluable source of feedback on how your employees feel about company culture or managing their workload, and just generally how satisfied they are within their overall employee experience. Are there other ways that leaders can support their teams?

Beyond benefits adoption, a simple but effective way to set your employees up for success is by creating inviting office spaces. So think about things like investing in proper lighting, ventilation, comfortable furniture, and even office supplies. These can make a big difference in your employees' daily work and office experience. But at the most human level, founders can impact the well-being of their teams by placing value in human connection. So take the time to demonstrate genuine interest in the lives of your team members. Check in frequently and ensure they feel included and supported.

— Sometimes it could be hard to stay up to date on the latest trends in employee well-being or get ideas about exactly what is working in employee support. Are there resources that can help? — Yes, absolutely. There are nonprofits out there like the Healthy Work Campaign and Great Place to Work, and they aim to provide research-based recommendations for workplaces to improve employee well-being

and overall culture. So by implementing some of the best practices from research-backed organizations like these, companies and their employees can reap the rewards of a healthy workplace. Why is it important for founders to pay attention to and invest in employee well-being? When your team is well-supported,

they are typically happier and more engaged, and that has bottom-line benefits for your business. Gallup Research found that employees who strongly agree that their employer cares about their overall wellbeing are 69% less likely to look for a new job. Ensuring that your company is prepared for a range of situations where employees may need support and training leadership teams to effectively communicate

to their teams about benefits and wellbeing can strengthen your organization overall and its relationship to its team members. to their teams about benefits and wellbeing can strengthen your organization overall and its relationship to its team members. Thank you for being with us and sharing these insights about Teams' health and wellbeing, Karen. Thank you, Sarah. And now here is Mike's conversation with Andy Dunn.

Enjoy. So Andy, you talk about the genesis of Pi coming both from your background as a mental health advocate and someone who struggled with that and from your time during the pandemic and how that changed your life and everyone's life. And you note some truly alarming stats about how, among other things, all of us collectively and this is a crazy statistic, all of us collectively have lost 24 hours a month in in-person time, like talking to other people and being with other people since 2020. How big a problem is it? So it's funny when you're building a startup and the Surgeon General drops a report that

validates the idea. So 20 years ago, we were already in a bad place. Degradation of the American social fabric, cars changing the town square, the decline in faith-based institutions, things like the PTA going down, and this book, Bowling Alone, came out. And I grew up in Westchester, Illinois. My mom's an Indian immigrant, my dad's Scandinavian American. And we used to go bowling on Sundays in the bowling league.

And people were ripping cigarettes and beer. It wasn't the best kind of set of role models for me, but it was a way that people kind of came together. And all of that has sort of unraveled over the last 20 years, plus technology and screen time. I'm glad that we're now paying as much attention to that, social isolation being a pandemic, according to the surgeon general, as we paid our attention to physical health

during the pandemic. And you were saying in addition to everybody losing sort of a day of time a month, even like day to day people are losing time to screen time on top of what used to be like watching TV, right? Yeah, if we live at home with a companion, we're spending five hours less time with them, five hours, seven hours, an incremental screen time above the TV era. So if we've got our lives so digitally focused, our question at Pi was, how do we take those digital addictions and start to compete for offline attention? How do we move from being on our phones

to in the real world making platonic friendships again? And that's our focus. So how does Pi work? So the research on platonic has been amazing. And actually originally we built a one-to-one matching algorithm and it didn't work at all. So we spent two years kind of wandering in the desert trying to find product market fit. So people were swiping right or swiping left and couldn't get there. We were told that what would happen is you'd have a perception of an adverse selection

of desperate people. Mm, okay. And you would have... It's so dark, right? It is dark. And then a dynamic where people would match but not chat. And we basically spent two years proving that thesis true. And then Dr. Marissa Franco came out with a book called Platonic.

And the lessons of Platonic are there's two ingredients in the emergence of a friendship. First, seeing someone again and again, five to seven times in a group environment, that is unplanned, unplanned interactions. And then secondly, mutual disclosure of vulnerable information at some point. So that became the challenge of how do you productize an unplanned interaction in a group setting?

That's interesting. I mean, in some ways, this is a digital solution to a digital problem that's like sort of paradoxical. How did that shape your thinking? Yeah, I was telling you before, it's sort of funny that we now have realized we have to be on TikTok and Instagram where Gen Z and millennials are, and I'm now addicted to TikTok, which is super messed up. So my mental health is going the wrong way, but the idea is if we're there influencing how Gen Z and millennial folks spend their time, let's get them off their phones and

into the real world. So for example, there's something called Sunday Morning Club, started by a guy named Kyle. He was an alcoholic for a long time. At 28, he decided, I'm sick of waking up hungover on a Sunday morning. Let me get people together on Sunday mornings on Oak Street Beach in Chicago, where we're based. We'll have beach volleyball. We'll have cold plunges. We'll have guys doing yoga, which is called down dogs. And the first day when we started Pi, the first Sunday there were six people there. Now there's over 500 people there every Sunday,

people driving in from hundreds of miles. And I think it's because we really do crave belonging and connection even if the narrative is that that's changed. And so in what year do you launch this? So launch is a funny word. Of course. We started the company in 2020. We failed up for four years.

And then we really started to grow at the beginning of this year. Now we're growing 20% month on month, and I think part of the reason is we started to drink our own Kool-Aid. So the team was remote and hybrid for four years, and it just wasn't a good culture. Like we didn't have social collision,

we didn't have serendipity, we didn't have socializing, we didn't have feedback, we didn't have the conversations that happened before and after the meeting. So we decided to go all in five days a week in person in River North in Chicago. And I don't think it's a coincidence that that's when the growth started. Five days a week.

I mean, so everybody knows, right? Remote work and hybrid work and return to office. These are some of the flashpoints. Some businesses just kind of skip over them and are fully remote forever. But other businesses have real tension with managers and workers and other stakeholders about whether or not they should be in office. You've decided for your company, you should go all in, and as a result of that, you've seen growth.

Can you talk about that? Yeah. So we were remote and hybrid, small team, about 12 people, and realized that we had to change it up. So I said, all right, we're going to be in person. We're going to be where I am, which is Chicago. And offered everyone three months cash bonus. And I said, I'll personally find you an apartment on Zillow.

And I thought, you know what, we'll get a couple of people, three people, no one. Everyone said no. So I was the only employee at the company on January 1st, which was a little terrifying. And people had kind of generous severance and they went their ways. And then I got to do something cool,

which is I got to recruit people who were looking for it. And so I got to say, look, this is five days a week in person. And folks say like, well, Gen Z doesn't want that. And maybe that's true, but we found the people that really do want that. And how are we gonna train up and coming generations if we're not together?

Many of us here who are in our 30s or our 40s or beyond, that's how we learned. And I feel like at least some companies owe it to the up and coming generations to provide that kind of mentorship and serendipity. I think it's interesting in the startup culture too, right? Because you want people to learn the product and develop the product and change it, respond to market forces. And people also learn how to be, you know, move up the ladder and move into a new role and expand their skills through observation. And that's something that can feel lost in a remote

world unless you're really intentional about it. Totally. And I think many of you here probably have remote or hybrid companies thinking like, well, this is working really well for us. And I think that can definitely be true. I think if you have a culture that was built prior to the pandemic and now your team is distributed, you already have trust. You already have found something that's working and growing. But if you haven't found something that's working and growing, and if no one really has spent that much time together, how do you even earn the right later to have more flexible work policies?

And that's where we decided to just go, just pretend like the pandemic never happened. And now I try not to have any Zoom meetings all week. Oh, wow. How does that go? It's amazing. I'll tell people even who want to connect externally, I say, let's meet when you're in Chicago, let's get lunch. They're like, why don't we schedule a Zoom? It's like, no. So how has that changed the way you work?

You're getting applause. I know. Yeah. How has that changed the way you work? Oh, you're getting applause. It's been- No. Yeah. You know, I'm like, I don't know, I'm like a three-dimensional person. You know, 91% of human communication is through body language. Who is actually looking at who in a meeting?

Who's checked out? Who do you call on because they look bored? These things are like, let's go grab lunch. These things, I don't know how we're going to do it over time. I totally respect it if it's working for you. I want to cheer that on, that's awesome. But I also want to encourage those of you who are like, can I do this?

Just do it. You'll have some people say, well, I don't want to do this. You can just say, great news, you don't have to work here. You know what I mean? Work somewhere else. You don't have to be here and that's okay. We're lucky. We live in a very low unemployment era and if we're doing information work or work,

people have a lot of options, they'll figure it out. Yeah. I think it's interesting. So, Pi is around this platonic friendship. For many of us, I think, a way that you made friends earlier in your careers were the people you worked with. And that's something that I think has been lost in kind of the remote work era.

Is that something you think about? And do you see the new in-person folks at your company actually developing friendships with their colleagues? Well, I lived in New York for 15 years. That's where I built Bonobos. That's where I met my wife, had a kid, and we moved to Chicago three years ago. My dad's had cancer for 10 years.

It was time to come home and focus on that. Then grandparents and grandkids is a beautiful thing. So I moved to Chicago with my wife, with a one-year-old. My parents live down the street, my sister lives down the street. So I had all this love in my life, and yet I felt lonely. And I realized I don't have any guy friends.

Like I wanna hang out with friends. I wanna vent, I wanna like watch sports, I wanna just do stuff. I don't have any of that in my life. And I also didn't belong to a tribe. Like I love tribes, I love groups, I love building teams. And I didn't have that in my life. And so it's been really nice to have friends again.

Our COO is someone that I've really bonded with, and I have a friendship now with someone through work, which is by the way how it used to happen. Right. It's interesting. So do you see the startup scene that you're in now in Chicago as being different from the startup scene that you were in in New York when you were building Bonobos? The startup scene in Chicago needs some help.

Oh, interesting. It needs some help. We have a lot of venture capitalists who actually do private equity, but they call it venture capital. So talk about that nuance. They're looking for proof. In startups at the early stage, they're not about proof, they're about belief. And I think that Chicago doesn't have that

growth mindset fully baked into the culture. And so we call it Pi-PAL culture, which is we think Chicago needs a PayPal. We need that picture of the 15 people who went out and changed the world, except we need some women, people of color in it. And I think Chicago's got that potential, but we need a company that throws off a thousand angel investors and another 100 startups and decided let's try to be that company. That's interesting. You've raised money from Forerunner and you've raised money from Williams of Twitter. Yeah.

I think it's interesting. On some level, Pi is trying to address the problem created perhaps by social media and being funded by one of the most created perhaps by social media and being funded by one of the most successful entrepreneurs in social media. Great. That's a great tension point. When you and he talk about Pi and how it can be both on some level a social media app,

but also be different, tell us about those conversations. Well, when Elon bought Twitter, I asked Ed as one of the founders of Twitter, a board member, how do you feel about it? He's like, well, he sent me a funny emoji. I won't say which one. Then he was getting approached to build a new Twitter. Lots of people, lots of teams. Eventually, he just told me,

I don't think we can solve this problem with another digital product. There is just a thing about the way the digital town squares behave, and some behave better than others. But at the end of the day, they do attract a certain kind of narcissistic person. Everyone who's not narcissistic is observing everyone who is.

I think I don't totally mean that. So, Ev's view was the next battle is for the online winner that is going to capture the offline attention. Right. So, that's why I capture the offline attention. Right. And so that's why I think he led our seed around. And I'll tell you, we did a very cool pre-seed with Forerunner and Lightspeed, and then we had no momentum. And I went out to the venture capital markets and everyone said no.

I pitched 150 to 200 people for our seed and everyone said no. And so I realized I need to find a high net worth person that believes in this. And Ebb has been amazing. And it's great to work with someone who's a builder and entrepreneur themselves. And it's been invaluable having someone like him on the cap table. I'm curious, how is working with a founder in that capacity different from if you had an institutional investor? What's the nature of the interaction that's different?

I think for me, it's like, you've done it. And I think there are some great investors out there, but often you're getting advice from someone who hasn't done it. And you're kind of like, well, how do you know? And then I'm with Ev, who invented blogging and co-invented tweeting and then long-form journalism. He started Blogger, then he started Twitter, he started Medium. So it's a different level of, I think, wisdom and empathy for the entrepreneurial experience

that he has. And it's a different level of admiration and respect for that wisdom and for what he's built. I remember one time talking to him and saying, hey, what kind of growth to get to this round? What are you looking for? And he was like, I don't really care about growth. Let's just build a product that matters and that can endure.

And it just looks like an investor that doesn't care about growth, but cares about product and something that can endure. And that was just a really special moment because it was at a time where we weren't growing much. That's fascinating. So you said like sort of a year ago or so, if I'm getting my chronology right, Pi started to grow after sort of being stalled for a while. What were some of the things that happened that put you on that growth path? Like when did it click? So first it was hiring

people in Chicago who were scrappy, who really wanted to do this in a market where there's not as much competition for talent. And we went out and we built all these recurring ways people can meet with our team. So like men were really bad at making friends, so we launched a series called Dudes Getting Pancakes. And Dudes Getting Pancakes became a way for men to feel safe getting together and hanging out. Then we had Silent Book Club.

We had Snail Mail Sundays where- Silent Book Club, what is this? Silent Book Club is actually already a thing, but it's like you get together and read communally, but you don't talk. I love it, I love it. And then when you finish reading. It's the quiet car on the train.

It's the quiet car on the train because we like being around people, right? And then we did some more obvious stuff, like basketball and football. And then we just kept innovating. We had a woman on our team, she's 25. She loves playing pool, but she feels like men are really aggro at bars. Where'd she get that idea?

Yeah, she launched Gals Playing Pool. And it's just a bunch of women getting together. Then we were talking about, like, well, how do we build a dating experience? And she said, why don't we build a heartbreak club? And so now we convene people who just have gone through a breakup. And what's cool about that is, first of all,

everyone's single, which is interesting, and everyone's kind of broken and vulnerable and wounded, which is a great time to meet people, just kidding. And also- Transition, transitions are good. And also you short circuit that vulnerability that builds relationships. And so that's kind of our goal is,

how do we get people to be honest with each other so that we can speed up that platonic friendship formation cycle, but also not have it be too high pressure. Because you don't really know who you're going to connect with. I think there's some good one-to-one matching products, but that's not exactly how it actually works. If you think about our lives, it's people that we just,

you don't realize they're friends until you're in the rear view mirror. You're like, oh, we're friends now, because we kept hanging out. Whereas that one person in your life who's like, do you want to be my friend? And you're like, oh, we're friends now because we kept hanging out. Whereas that one person in your life who's like, do you want to be my friend? And you're like, no, I don't. That's stressful. We're going to take a quick break and be back with more from Mike and Andy.

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Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureX Business. Do you find it difficult to make friends as a founder? I think other founders sometimes make bad friends. It's like herding cats. I don't want to know that many other founders. Like, I want to know some musicians and history teachers and firefighters. Like, one of my son's friends' dad is a plumber. Like, we go to the Blackhawks game, and that's fun. So I like, I mean, I love you all. Right?

But I think it's important to diversify on so many fronts who we spend social time with. And does that diversifying help you build a better product? I mean, certainly, I think we've gotten to this world where the elites run the world or something like that and lost some sense of empathy for people that are different than us. And what I like about Chicago is a very blue collar city. People just call bullshit on you.

I don't know, I lived in San Francisco and New York for 17 years. There's something refreshing about being in a town where that's just not tolerated to show up that way. There's also a problem with it, which is that there's also a tallest poppy syndrome of, maybe don't be too ambitious, which I loved about New York. Like New York, there's a worship of chutzpah and ambition.

So I'm trying to blend what I learned on the coast with being back home. That's really interesting. So you write in Burn Raid about challenges and struggles in your life, right? Like you're a mental health advocate and that comes from a place of having mental health struggles. For folks who haven't read the book, can you talk a little bit about that and how that shaped your view as you built Pi? Yeah, yeah.

So when I was building Binobos, I was wrestling with the secret, which is I had unmedicated, untreated bipolar type one. And as we all know, building a company is a roller coaster. And so that became an excuse and a cloak for this underlying medical condition that was also probably making those highs higher and those lows lower.

And I come from, as mentioned, Indians on my mom's side and Scandinavians on my dad's side, a very divergent set of cultures, but with one thing in common, you don't go to therapy. Have you ever met an Indian in therapy? Sorry, just kidding. There is a sense that I had growing up that you don't do that unless there's something wrong with you.

And so when I was diagnosed out of college, after I had something called a manic episode, which is basically thinking you're Jesus for a week, which is like awesome. Like being Jesus for a week is so cool. Yeah. But it's- The ultimate founder syndrome, right?

Yeah, totally. Talk about it. And it's obviously a nightmare for everyone else because you're losing touch with reality, you're psychotic. And so I got to the hospital, my parents got me there, I kind of got jet-amined tricked to going. And I spent a week there and as I walked out, they were like, here's your diagnosis,

it's bipolar type one, your mania could return at any point in your life. I went home and looked at it and was like, the suicide attempt rate for bipolar one is 60% and the suicide rate is 20%. And it just was too much to take on as a 20 year old, like all of a sudden I had this thing. And with mental health, we even say like,

you are bipolar, you don't have it. Like imagine saying, you are cancer. Like I've got bad news for you,. Like imagine saying, you are cancer. Like I've got bad news for you, you have cancer and also you are cancer. And that's basically what we do with people with mental health challenges. We conflate the illness and the identity. So I did with what a lot of kids do with this diagnosis,

which is I just was in denial, stopped taking my meds, said I didn't need treatment, and then had this really wild 16-year run of not dealing with it until there was quite a reckoning. Can you talk about that reckoning? The reckoning was bad. One of the pernicious things about mania is it can come from a good mood. It can come from something good that happens in your life.

In my case, it was I was falling in love with my now wife. Which is like the greatest thing, right? It's the best. I mean, it's its own form of euphoric feelings. I ended up in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York for a week. It was very different. I wasn't 20. I was 36. I wasn't a college kid.

I had 600 employees and had raised 100 million in venture capital. When I came down from the mania, which takes about three or four days, you get a lot of sleep medication, you take a lot of medication, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers. It was very different because I was ready to deal with it. I was glad, I was relieved that I was now acknowledging and everyone around me was acknowledging Andy has this issue. He isn't the issue, but he has it. So I walked out, I was discharged after a week,

and I was ready to give my family a hug and move on with my life. I walked into four NYPD police officers, and I was read my rights, they put handcuffs on me. They put me in a cop car. They had a cop car in front and in back. I was like, what am I, Al Chapo? Like, what's going on here?

Like, I'm not a threat to society at this point. But obviously it was a very dark day because it turns out that while I had been manic, I had assaulted my now wife and mother-in-law who were trying to prevent me from running out into the streets of New York. So that became a very difficult year to figure out how to get healthy,

to see if Manuela would stay with me, to see if I was gonna lose my job or have to step down. Was there gonna be press about this? Was I gonna have a long journey to the legal system? And my mother-in-law really helped heal me. I went and sat down with her a week after I got discharged and she put her hand on my hand. Try to picture this. The last time you saw this person in their 70s,

you literally assaulted them. And now you're showing up for lunch being like, what is this going to be like? And she put her hand on my hand, and she said, Andy, this is just like any physical illness. All you have to do is take your medication and see your doctor. And if you do, and if Manuela wants to stay with you, then you have my blessing."

And then I just cried for 20 minutes straight. Because your own family kind of has to deal with you. But I'd always thought there was something broken about me, partly because of that illness, identity conflation. And so the fact that she was saying, I've just seen you at your worst, and I'm like, good with you, that was a really healing moment for me.

Wow, wow. Yeah. your worst and I'm like, good with you, that was a really healing moment for me. Wow. Wow. Yeah. You write really movingly in Burn Rate about that experience and your relationship with your mother-in-law and your now wife and your family. You also write, I think, very movingly around your relationship with your business partner who you had a very fractious relationship with.

Many folks here may have business partners and some of them may have former business partners if you know what I mean. You had a difficult relationship and you've been able to come to terms of understanding that your behavior was a big part of it. Can you talk about that experience of having a business partner through this really, you know, roller coaster ride? Yeah, so Brian Spaley was the kind of the product genius behind Bonobos.

He invented a better fitting pair of men's pants. We got in business together. And within two years, we had a lot of arguing and a falling out. And so over the course of the next year, the how do I say it? Like I basically staged a coup to get him out, and he left. And actually, the harder part after all that conflict was the year after he left,

and I couldn't blame it on him anymore. It was really nice to blame everything on him while we were together. And I've come to appreciate two kinds of people in life, blame everyone else and blame yourself. And I kind of like the blame yourself people because then there's also the agency of, if it's my fault, I can fix it. I wish I could go back and role model the thing that I feel like he was good at,

which is I was very direct. He was very direct and I wasn't. You know, in my dad's culture, Scandinavian culture, you don't talk about conflict, you don't resolve it, and eventually you don't talk at all. Like, my dad doesn't speak to either of his siblings. I just brokered a peace treaty with him and his sister who hadn't seen each other in 17 years,

even though they live 17 miles apart. And we had Lou Malati's pizza, and it was great, but we've lost a lot of time. And then my mom's family, the Punjabi Indian immigrants, where you say exactly what you think in real time to everyone except the person you think it about. So it's like a perfect transparent gossip network. And now my wife's family, New York City Jews, where like the first time I had dinner with my

now wife and mother-in-law, my wife was crying because they were in what I then called the fight that I now just call a spirited discussion. I didn't have that radical candor in the workplace, and Brian did, and I wish we could rerun the play if I could have met him there on the same level of transparency and honesty. As you think about the folks at Pi, how has you think about, how is Pi sort of constructed and designed culturally or otherwise to be different from Bonobos? Like, is there something that you're retrospectively correcting for? Yeah, so candor is one of our core values, candor and courage. And so I work, and it was almost a reminder to myself that I struggle with negative emotion communication. I'm good with the positives. I'm good with the like, you did amazing on that.

I'm good with the vulnerable stuff, which is like, hey, here's something about me. I'm bad with, I'm angry, I'm disappointed, I'm frustrated, I'm worried. Those I struggle with. And so I've learned that when I feel that on like a three out of 10 towards someone, I just like let the words fall out and say it.

Like that Sarah Burrell song, like let the words fall out. So it, like that Sara Bareilles song, like let the words fall out. So I'm in a meeting with someone, they didn't do a good job in my opinion on something, and I just say something like, I feel like you didn't do a good job on that thing. Oh, this Sara Bareilles Management Guru, right? It's such a relief to say it,

and you got to say it when it's like a little micro feeling, it's just percolating. Because once it gets here, then don not going to, it's going to, then don't say what you want to say, right? Like once your emotional intensity is high, then you have high velocity words like, I don't think you're good at this, which is very different than you didn't do a good job.

Gets back to identity and issues. So I try to role model that now. And by the way, I'm just much happier with my job because I'm not holding onto stuff for so long. It strikes me that one superpower of entrepreneurs, if you can get there, is the notion of knowing how to manage yourself. Is that something that you feel like you've gotten better at

over the past couple of years? One of the blessings of the journey with bipolar is I now do therapy twice a week. I don't think everyone needs to do that. But I think even if you feel like you're eminently sane, which you're not, but you feel like it, congrats. I think at six months of, out of every three years, you should do therapy once a week for six months.

Just to kind of take care of your mind, the way that you would take care of your body. So if you care about your body, we should care about maybe one of the top couple of organs that you need to live, which is your body. So if you care about your body, we should care about maybe one of the top couple of organs that you need to live, which is your mind. And so yeah, meditation and all these things. But therapy is helpful because you kind of get to get in there on your blind spots. And particularly having a therapist who doesn't agree with you all the time.

And it takes some therapists dating to get there, right? Like if you don't like your therapist, just stop and go to another one. And it might take three or four. And then you have like your best friend in building a business. It's not an executive coach, it's a mental health professional. And it can help a lot,

because there are a lot of highs and lows, and there is a lot of interpersonal conflict. And there are stresses that occur with your families and friends. And having someone who you can objectively talk to about that, and get those emotions out of your body so that you can show up better and more communicative in those relationships,

I think is the most valuable investment you can make as an entrepreneur. It's interesting hearing you talk about it. There's this network or ecosystem around you of people that you turn to for different things but all in the spirit of building resilience for you personally, and then hopefully that's something you can build resilience for your company as well. How do you think about maintaining those relationships and building those relationships?

I have an outside counsel lawyer one day who was like, you're kind of like a hot house flower. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you got to spray, you got to make the temperatures in the room right. And I was like, what the heck? And I came home and told my wife and she just started dying laughing. So no, it's a joke. I mean, I think on the one level,

I feel that that's true about myself. And also I feel proud that I'm like dealing with all this shit. And it does take, it takes a village around all of us, right, certainly in these roles, but around everyone in our lives. You know, they say that suicide is a thought that comes across the brain of 90 percent of people in their lives.

The hardest part is to tell someone you don't want to live anymore. But it's not that big of a deal because it's normal. So how do we cultivate the conditions where you can say to a friend or a loved one, like, I just don't want to do this anymore. Wait, do what? You know, this life thing. And so I celebrate a culture that's moving towards that kind of transparency

because we need to take care of each other. That's great. Cool. We've just a couple minutes left, but as you think about Pi, now suddenly you're on a growth path, which is great and exciting. What's sort of the next move for Pi? What's your next move as a company? So there is some research around how many people is the optimal size of a group to make a friend.

And the headline of what we're learning is six people. Six is the magic number around a dinner table. And at some of our larger events now, what we hear is, I went and I didn't know who to talk to. And that's its own form of social stress. So what we're working on is using AI't know who to talk to, and that's its own form of social stress. So what we're working on is using AI to be able to tell you, here are the five or six people that you should meet.

So imagine you could show up for a conference like this, where you're meeting a lot of people, and in a future state where many of you are on Pi, you could get a shortcut to who you go connect with. So that's the next frontier is, how do we take this inflection point in artificial intelligence and LLMs and multiply that by the inflection point of people acknowledging loneliness and social isolation and build a new kind of world?

My last question is, you know, founders play such an important kind of civic role that sometimes I think not fully understood where, you know, everyone is sort of the mayor of their own company in a way, right? There's this like group around them and founders founders can have a real impact on the lives of the people who work with them and alongside them. For everyone out in the audience who has employees, who is a founder, who can impact the lives of their employees, would you say building more friendships is a key part of that, not just for ourselves and the health of our businesses, but for society?

And if the answer is yes, which I think it is, then what steps can each person here take to create more meaningful connections and bonds within their companies? Yeah, I think there's two things. One is the research on happiness at work shows that the number one driver of work happiness is having one true platonic friend at work. It's not growth, it's not compensation, those things all matter, but it's having one person who you can go vent to about your boss, who you can talk to about things. And so how do we create the conditions where our team members can form friendships? As a leader, CEO, founder, it might be hard to find a friend to work with. Had a professor

at Stanford that said if you're a CEO and you want a friend, get a dog. But I think even all of you need to have one friend at work. There's maybe one person on your executive team or even more junior in the org or a partner where you have that. I think that's the most important thing we can do is create those conditions. Then in terms of our leadership of teams, yes, candor in terms of things that aren't going well, but having that in a three to five to one ratio of positive to construction.

Positive to constructive, and that's the John Gottman principle, which is it's easier to give feedback if you've poured in a lot of positive. So I had a mentor who says, there are no diminishing returns to specific positive feedback. So if you see something that you like, don't just say good job, but say good job with that thing. And those have to sit side by side,

the positive and the constructive. That's great advice. Hard advice sometimes to take, but great advice. Andy Dunn, founder of Pi and author of Burn Rate, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. Thanks, Alan. Thank you. That's all for this episode of Your Next Move. Our producer is Matt Toder.

Editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't already, subscribe to Your Next Move on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your Next Move is a production of Inc. and Capital One Business.