Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing Your Mind
Andy Dunn’s start-up, Bonobos, was being courted for an acquisition by retail giant Walmart. It was an exhilarating process, however the co-founder and former CEO of the web menswear brand knew it was time to reveal his secret: He had bipolar disorder.
In his latest book, “Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind,” the 43-year-old entrepreneur opens up about how his personal life fell apart shortly before Walmart’s $310 million acquisition of Bonobos in 2017 got here together. He shares among the lowest points, including his stay in a psychiatric ward in Bellevue Hospital in Recent York City and assault charges from a severe manic episode when he struck his then girlfriend and her mother. The costs were later dismissed as Dunn sought treatment and repaired the connection along with his girlfriend, Manuela, who he later married.
Dunn joined Walmart after telling the retailer in regards to the episodes and his efforts to recuperate with therapy and medicine. He oversaw Walmart’s growing collection of brands that began online and contributed to the corporate’s push into the digital world.
Dunn left Walmart in 2020 and has founded a social media start-up, Pumpkin Pie. Its app, which has been described as a “Tinder for friendship,” is about to launch later this yr.
Early this yr, Walmart launched a latest, lower-priced extension of the Bonobos brand, Bonobos Fielder. It marked the primary time that Walmart’s website and a few stores sold apparel under the Bonobos name — a part of the corporate’s broader technique to launch its own fashion-forward apparel lines and sell more general merchandise.
Dunn spoke to CNBC from his home in Chicago. His comments were edited for brevity and clarity.
Andy Dunn, Creator
Courtesy of Brian McConkey
You could possibly have devoted the book to advice about entrepreneurship, or Bonobos’ acquisition by Walmart. Why did you choose to put in writing a book about your mental health struggles?
It was an important conversation with my editor, before he was officially my editor. He put it in a candid way, which was in a turndown email: “If Andy wants to put in writing a chest thumping, self-congratulatory memoir about entrepreneurial success, I’m not interested. But when he desires to do an unvarnished story about mental illness, told through the lens of an entrepreneur, then that might be a very exciting project.”
And I used to be like, yes, that is what I need to do. That is the person I need to work with.
What made you able to relive among the parts of your past?
4 years of therapy, twice every week, and having really done the work to process and metabolize and rebuild myself after this devastating psychotic break in 2016. And all of the strength of family members around me
It’s never over with this diagnosis, but I believed I had a singular opportunity to share how I got through not less than some really difficult days. I didn’t wish to waste that.
Andy Dunn credits his family, including his wife, Manuela, for helping him to get healthy. He said the birth of his son, Isaiah, has also helped him stay grounded.
Courtesy of Andy Dunn
Within the book, you mentioned one other achieved entrepreneur who had a really public battle with mental health, Tony Hsieh of Zappos. Why do you think that mental health has been such a taboo topic within the business world, and really, on the earth of entrepreneurship?
Tony’s case is so sad and tragic in its own right. Here’s a one who wrote a book called “Delivering Happiness,” who built an organization rooted in a joyous energy. Zappos was long known and studied for its culture. He was known to be the lifetime of the party and someone who did a lot for the community in Las Vegas.
He was a hero to me. After which, obviously, he had been privately suffering.
I feel that is an element of the standard entrepreneur archetype, someone who’s got that — an excellent, charismatic spirit. And it’s expected, right? You bought to indicate up with that on daily basis, and that is inhuman to expect out of anyone.
The pandemic has began a broader conversation about mental health. What role can the business world and employers play in attempting to improve access to care and fight the stigma?
The very first thing is making a protected environment for disclosure, so that individuals can share what they’re coping with. It’s incumbent upon leaders to role model that behavior to indicate their teams that it’s protected for them to come back forward.
Step two is constructing community around it. I’ve gotten a likelihood to talk to a bunch of corporations in the previous couple of weeks. I loved my conversation with [tech company] Carta because they have already got a neurodiversity worker resource group.
The third part is basically investing within the care that individuals need. Regular medical insurance is not getting the job done when it comes to the power to search out mental health professionals. Reimbursement rates are sometimes too low.
The one way for that to vary is for there to be investment.
The contrasts within the book were really striking. You are staying in a psychiatric ward after which soon after, you are in talks to do a take care of Walmart. What was it like whenever you heard Walmart was keen on buying Bonobos?
I had gone from considering that we might do a personal equity transaction where we stayed on the independent path towards IPO, to spending time with the team at Walmart, particularly Marc Lore [Walmart’s then-e-commerce chief] and [CEO] Doug McMillon and really falling in love with the chance to be an element of the digital transformation of the Fortune One company.
As I went from being like, “independent to the moon’ to ‘joining forces with Walmart can be incredible,’ we got to an element of the deal process where the background checks were coming up. It was time I believed where I had to reveal it [my diagnosis and arrest record]. I didn’t wish to attempt to hide it.
Andy Dunn attends a launch party at a Bonobos store on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in 2016. After operating as digital only, the direct-to-consumer start-up opened brick-and-mortar locations called “guideshops,” where customers could try on clothing and order it straight to their doors.
Daniel Boczarski | Getty Images
You helped birth the direct-to-consumer movement in some ways. But lots of those corporations haven’t change into independent, profitable businesses. What do you think that is the longer term of the DTC model?
The pure-play web model is difficult. Direct-to-consumer founders — and I used to be certainly one of them — type of fall too in love with the direct-to-consumer potential of their brands, but ignore the parts of the legacy retail world which might be still alive and well.
Pure-play web models are only fundamentally challenged on long-term profitability. It is important to have humility as a direct-to-consumer founder and bear in mind that even when the e-commerce side of the home is growing really quickly, there’s still lots of revenue going through traditional brick-and-mortar.
How have you ever ultimately found a greater balance between your drive for achievement and your desire to remain healthy?
My son, Isaiah, is an enormous a part of it. He’s 20 months old, and he doesn’t care about my success. He cares about himself and I feel it’s a good looking thing. I felt so self-involved for therefore long. Constructing an organization could be a self-absorbed endeavor.
The best way I might describe it goes from being in the middle of the solar system to being a planet that orbits him. It just creates a fundamentally different worldview.
