Why Worker Affinities Should Guide Corporate Culture
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Andy Dunn
Author of “Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind”
Andy Dunn
Author of “Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind”Andy Dunn is the co-founder of the Bonobos menswear-apparel brand and the author of Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, a radically honest and unconventional entrepreneurial memoir and a revelatory look at the presence of mental illness in the startup community. In intimate and insightful prose, Andy fearlessly shares his experience building a business while living with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis he kept secret from almost everyone for more than 15 years. At 28, fresh from Stanford's MBA program and steeped in the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley, Andy found his calling with a new-school approach to an old-school product: selling men's pants online. Against all odds, business was booming. As he hustled to scale the startup, raising millions in venture capital, boundaries between work and life evaporated. As Andy struggled to keep Bonobos afloat, he was also haunted by his “ghost”: the bipolar diagnosis he received after a wild manic episode as a college undergraduate. For years, Andy had understood his diagnosis as an unspeakable shame, which, according to the codes of his family and the business world, should never be addressed. With his secret locked away, Bonobos began to take off, but he found that some of the very traits powering his success as a founder–relentless drive, confidence bordering on hubris, and ambition bordering on delusion–were now threatening to undo him. A collision course was set in motion, one that would culminate in a violent night that nearly unraveled all that he had built. Dunn served as CEO of Bonobos through its 2017 acquisition by Walmart. As an angel investor and through his venture-capital firm Red Swan, he has backed more than 80 startups, including Warby Parker, Oscar, and Coinbase. Dunn serves on the boards of Monica + Andy, an organic baby apparel company founded by his sister, and the tech nonprofit Raised By Us. Named to Fortune's 40 under 40 list in 2018, he is a graduate of Northwestern University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He lives with his wife and their son in Chicago.
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