Burn Rate
Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this “gripping” (TechCrunch), “eye-opening” (Gayle King, Oprah Daily) memoir of mental illness and entrepreneurship, the co-founder of the menswear startup Bonobos opens up about the struggle with bipolar disorder that nearly cost him everything.
“Arrestingly candid . . . the most powerful book I’ve read on manic depression since An Unquiet Mind.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife
At twenty-eight, fresh from Stanford’s MBA program and steeped in the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley, Andy Dunn was on top of the world. He was building a new kind of startup—a digitally native, direct-to-consumer brand—out of his Manhattan apartment. Bonobos was a new-school approach to selling an old-school product: men’s pants. Against all odds, business was booming.
Hustling to scale the fledgling venture, Dunn raised tens of millions of dollars while boundaries between work and life evaporated. As he struggled to keep the startup afloat, Dunn was haunted by a ghost: a diagnosis of bipolar disorder he received after a frightening manic episode in college, one that had punctured the idyllic veneer of his midwestern upbringing. He had understood his diagnosis as an unspeakable shame that—according to the taciturn codes of his fraternity, the business world, and even his family—should be locked away.
As Dunn’s business began to take off, however, some of the very traits that powered his success as a founder—relentless drive, confidence bordering on hubris, and ambition verging on delusion—were now threatening to undo him. A collision course was set in motion, and it would culminate in a night of mayhem—one poised to unravel all that he had built.
Burn Rate is an unconventional entrepreneurial memoir, a parable for the twenty-first-century economy, and a revelatory look at the prevalence of mental illness in the startup community. With intimate prose, Andy Dunn fearlessly shines a light on the dark side of success and challenges us all to take part in the deepening conversation around creativity, performance, and disorder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bonobos founder Dunn recounts in this emotional memoir how his entrepreneurial success in making men's pants exciting covered up for the pain caused by his bipolar diagnosis. Raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Dunn grew up as part of a "solidly-middle class" loving family, did well in school from an early age, and later attended Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he started the men's clothing company Bonobos during his second year, in 2007. The company's growth was explosive—but while living a publicly successful life and leading a booming company, Dunn suffered from paranoia, mania, depression, and the occasional belief that he was the Messiah sent to save humankind. After being diagnosed with the illness he came to call "The Ghost," Dunn went unmedicated and untreated for almost two decades until an arrest for assault brought matters to a head. Instances of bipolar disorder are more common among entrepreneurs than among the general population, he notes, and his frank, pained self-examination shines a light on the upheaval mental illness can bring to even seemingly successful lives. "Let's not celebrate ‘crazy,' and let's not stigmatize it, either," he writes, "let's, for everyone's sake, stop pretending that it's not here." The result is as memorable as it is moving.
