Khailee Ng and 500 Startups have a plan to stop founders from committing suicide

Photo credit: anelina / 123RF.

Two founders from 500 Startups’ portfolio of 1,800 companies have committed suicide. 120 out of the 600 firms backed by their first and second fund are now out of business. Of the 150 startups the VC has invested in in Southeast Asia, three founders have cancer, revealed Khailee Ng yesterday, talking about the human toll of entrepreneurial life.

“We are worried about it at 500 Startups,” Khailee Ng, managing partner of the investment firm, spoke in sombre tones last afternoon at the Tech in Asia Singapore 2017 conference. That’s why they are pitching a “personal life management accelerator.”

In true Khailee Ng fashion, he minced no words while driving home the high price of stress that entrepreneurs across the globe pay.

“Ask someone in the startup scene: how are you doing? The typical response you get is: I am killing it; my company is growing 800 percent month-on-month; and so on. But deep down inside, the product is broken; customers are leaking out; you got two-months’ runway left; your co-founder hates you; you just made a bad hire; your team hates you; if you go back home, maybe your partner or spouse hates you; your pet hates you; and you don’t even know whether you are supposed to be a founder or not!” Khailee says.

He knows what he is talking about. Khailee has founded two startups, GroupsMore and Says.com, grew them fast, and sold them to Groupon and Catcha Group. He also invested his own money into a bunch of tech startups such as App.io, Privy, CompStak, SupplyHog, Noonswoon, and iMoney before joining 500 Startups.

Khailee Ng, Managing Partner with 500 Startups, at the Tech in Asia Singapore 2017. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

One of them has a 12-month startup. He has put on 12 kg of weight! As a VC, I feel responsible.

Despite the enormous stress a founder goes through, none of it is shared with others around, Khailee says. “That’s the kind of thing we don’t talk to our investors, we don’t talk about it to our staff, and we don’t talk about it to other founders.”

He cites a Harvard Business School study done in 2012 which attributed 65 percent of startup failures to personal stress. He’s had different founders in the 500 Startups portfolio in different countries tell him that they have been piling on a kilo every month since they started their company.

“One of them has a 12-month startup. He has put on 12kg of weight!” Khailee says. “As a VC, I feel really responsible.” He adds: “Fear, stress, overwork, co-founder conflicts – these are things which are deeply personal yet they can cause a complete breakdown of a company.”

Some more scary facts

500 Startups didn’t want to brush it under the carpet. “What are we doing wrong? What can we do better?” they thought and found there was only so much they could do by themselves. So they need to get help from experts.

Enter Dr. Daniel Cordaro, director of wellbeing at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and executive coach Justin Milano. They are the founders of Good Startups, which aims to “improve the performance and wellbeing of entrepreneurs and their teams.”

Is our ‘tiger mom’ the culprit?

A personal life management accelerator