As a startup founder, you live your startup 24/7.
You breathe it. You eat it. You shower with it. You sleep with it.
At the beginning of 2023, I experienced sleeping problems for a few nights in a row due to the mental stress and uncertainty of founding a startup (the last time I had sleeping problems was during my PhD, which lasted a long longer). Thoughts would circle in my head all night long. It was then that I first developed the “brain cancer” metaphor — because no matter where I was, what I was doing, or how late it was, Flourish was always there in my brain, taking up my mental bandwidth, refusing to leave.
One time, I was attending the annual conference of social psychology (“SPSP”), which used to be my favorite academic conference. But somehow, no matter what talk I was listening to or who I was talking with, I could not be 100% present because part of my brain was going back to building Flourish. Sometimes, I caught myself completely missing what the other person was saying because I just got lost in thought — like a hole in time suddenly appeared and swallowed those few seconds.
That even happened when my husband was chatting with me (shhh). I needed to concentrate extra hard to hear what he was saying during our walks. Sure enough, oftentimes he was talking about statistics and how to teach a machine to “self-introspect,” which wasn’t the easiest thing to follow. But still.
Fast forward — it’s March 2024, more than a year into my startup journey. By now, I can breathe, eat, shower, and sleep just fine.
And I finally decided to write a blog to provide an intimate look at what this startup journey is like.
Part of it is to simply unload my mental “burden”, even though I highly doubt if this will cure my metaphorical brain cancer.
Part of it is because I know this is going to be a unique and extraordinary journey full of new learnings and insights, and I want to document and share it. Many people dream of doing what we do — I’ve met countless people over the past two years who aspired to found a mental health startup. We are among the few who have the ability, courage, blind faith, and sheer luck to take this leap and just run with it. What we are learning on this journey — closing the last mile of science, building an AI-powered mental wellness app, and making the knowledge and practice of happiness and well-being personalized, fun, and accessible 24/7 — will be incredibly valuable to many out there who also wish to make a difference.
People often tell us our story is incredibly inspiring. So, if nothing else succeeds (I’m confident Flourish will succeed, at least by our standards), at the minimum, we can inspire some brave and curious souls out there, and they will hear and remember our extraordinary story of building Flourish.