Do dysfunctional families breed entrepreneurs?

September 23, 2009 | Steve Blank | Comments | |

(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This column originally appeared on his blog.)

I was having lunch with a friend who is a retired venture capitalist and we drifted into a discussion of the startups she funded. We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. I said, “well for me you’d have to add coming from a dysfunctional family.” addams_family

Her response was surprising, “Steve, almost all my CEO’s came from very tough childhoods.  It was one of the characteristics I specifically looked for. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.”

I couldn’t figure out if I was more perturbed about how casual the comment was or how insightful it was.  What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. My comfort in operating in chaos was something I first recognized when I was working in the Midwest.

Out of the Air Force, my first job out of school was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the mid-1970’s installing broadband process control systems in automotive and manufacturing plants throughout the Midwest. I got to travel and see almost every type of Rust Belt factory – at the time, the heart and muscle of American manufacturing – GM, American Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, Whirlpool.

Our equipment was installed in the manufacturing lines of these companies, and if it went down sometimes it brought the entire manufacturing line down.

Repairing our equipment could be time critical. One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager.  He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.”

As I’m troubleshooting our equipment scattered across the plant, the manager followed us still yelling.  My understudy looked at me and said, “How can you deal with this chaos and still focus?”  And until that moment I had never thought about it before.  I realized that what others heard as chaos, I just shut out.

A day in the life of a founder
For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.  Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc.  You literally have to take your vision of the opportunity and against all rational odds assemble financing and a team to help you execute.  And that’s just to get started.

Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers.  And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die.

Great founders live for these moments.

Creating the entrepreneurial personality
Fast forward three decades back to today.  The lunch conversation was an interesting data point to add to a hypothesis I’ve had.

I’ve wondered, just as a thought experiment, how would we go about creating individuals who operate serenely in chaos, and have the skills we associate with one type of entrepreneurial founder/leader?

One possible path might be to raise children in an environment where parents are struggling in their own lives and they create an environment where fighting, abusive or drug/alcohol related behavior is the norm.

In this household, nothing would be the same from day to day, the parents would constantly bombard their kids with dogmatic parenting (harsh and inflexible discipline) and they would control them by withholding love, praise and attention. Finally we could make sure no child is allowed to express the “wrong” emotion. Children in these families would grow up thinking that this behavior is normal.

(If this seems unimaginably cruel to you, congratulations, you had a great set of parents.  On the other hand, if the description is making you uncomfortable remembering some of how you were raised – welcome to a fairly wide club.)

Over the last five years I’ve asked over 500 of my students how many of them grew up in a dysfunctional family (participation was voluntary.) I’ve been surprised at the data. In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core” entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing.

Founders as Survivors
My hypothesis is that most children are emotionally damaged by this upbringing.  But a small percentage, whose brain chemistry and wiring is set for resilience, come out of this with a compulsive, relentless and tenacious drive to succeed.  They have learned to function in a permanent state of chaos.  And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship.

Therefore, I’ll posit one possible path for a startup founder – the dysfunctional family theory.

One last thought. The dysfunctional family theory may explain why founders who excel in the chaotic early phases of a company throw organizational hand grenades into their own companies after they find a repeatable and scaleable business model and need to switch gears into execution.

The problem, I believe, is that repeatability represents the extreme discomfort zone of this class of entrepreneur. And I have seen entrepreneurs emotionally or organizationally try to create chaos — it’s too calm around here — and actually self-destruct.

Lets be clear, in no way am I suggesting that growing up in a dysfunctional family is the only path to becoming a founder of a startup.  Nor am I suggesting that everyone who does so turns out well. And in particular I’m not suggesting that every employee who joins a startup fits this profile, it just seems more prevalent in the founder(s).

And this hypothesis might be a good example of confusing cause and effect. Yet I am surprised given how much is written about the attributes of a startup founder, how little has been written about what “makes” a founder.

Next Story: DEMO: Answers.com adds wiki features to its Q&A service
Previous Story: GeoVector lets smartphone users “click on the real world” to get info

Bookmark and Share

Tags: ,

Photo of Steve Blank

About the Author, Steve Blank

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur and has been a founder or participant in eight Silicon Valley startups since 1978. After he retired, he wrote a book about building early stage companies: Four Steps to the Epiphany. He's moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. The “Customer Development” model that he developed in his book is one of the core themes for these classes. In 2009 he was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the department of Management Science and Engineering.

  • debbym
    My three sons are all entrepreneurs. Since their early years were filled with turmoil their entrepreneurial spirit may have evolved in accordance with your theory. As a mother, I always regretted those early years; however, they may have served there purpose. Also as a single parent it was also a fact that they needed to produce an income to sustain the lifestyle they desired--not many hand-outs.
  • ken
    Someone once said "The world is changed by unreasonable people". A reasonable person would look at the status quo and accept it. Only an unreasonable person would try to change it.

    Is an unreasonable person dysfunctional? To some extent, I would think so.
  • Wow Steve I was almost shuddering reading this. I came from an extremely dysfunctional family, my father in my teen years became an alcoholic. I was the oldest of 4 and was given the responsibility to raise my siblings a lot of the time, including being in charge of them flying first time out of the country from Sydney to Fiji when I was the grand old age of 12 years old. I have to admit love being a troubleshooter when everything has gone to hell, a strange calm comes over me. Thanks for this post it is incredibly self revelatory. Best Pemo Theodore, AstraMatch Blog
  • Yep. I've made this observation about my own entrepreneurial career: Channeling all of the family dysfunction into a healthy (rather than destructive) form of chaos.
  • Thanks for sharing Steve's interesting observations.
    Most important: This is a great invitation for all who lacked early and healthy nurturing to recognize the potential in those survival skills. Many realize their own capacity to cope, yet do not feel competent. Finding resources and support to turn all that tenaciousness, agility in chaos, and passion into success is gold. It can make the difference between a self-destructing entrepreneur, and a founder who can cross the divide from the adrenaline of early chaos to long-term scalable success. That's resilience.
  • 1232
    In the above quote. I believe it went like this.. "The reasonable man adapts to the world, the unreasonable man adapts the world to him. Therefore all change depends on the unreasonable man.

    Great thought. I hope you can expand on it more, maybe write a book. In addition to those points, being raised in those families also meant they were denied access to their material wants, and I believe (depending on the personality type) they may take 2 paths. 1 developing a submissive mentality to material wants, and 2 relentlessly and creatively getting what they want. Resolute AMBITION is the seed to tenacity, resilience, and so on. Without ambition, one does nothing.

    Also, I believe casino gambling at the mid to extreme can develop emotional characteristics of an entreprenuer. Especially, capital risk and being emotionally balanced in the highs and lows.
  • 1232
    Exposure to volatile environments, strengthen mentalities. Through these experiences, people are able to judge the context of chaotic situations, making it easier. Having these frames of reference to decide "hmm.. well this isn't as bad compared to driving through a mine field when I was in the marines..."

    This is powerful to any entrepreneur. Just think of the worst possible experience in your life, or the worst that could happen in your life and use that as a baseline. Just keep that in your head at challenging moments and everything will be a little easier.
  • Geoff H
    Anecdotal evidence: +1
  • Ben
    My parents' relationship issues; the loss of my dad, brother, and both sets of grandparents; and other fun-filled life events have definitely given me a knowledge of how short life is and, because of that, taught me two lessons:

    * Tell the people you love what they mean to you, and...
    * Don't live your life like it's a trial run. You and everyone you love are going to die, so there's not much to fear. Losing your home, your loved ones, your health-- it'll happen. Until you don't wake up one morning, you might as well shoot for the moon and try to change the world.

    Great article, Steve! On another note, a local entrepreneur was telling me about your book just earlier this week. I'm looking forward to it!
  • PressM
    Hi Steve, Press here, hope all is well. Thank you for the article and the insight. It made me think of one of my favorite quotes by J. Krishnamurti who said, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." Of course this implies that one's recognition of the insanity is a necessary step towards sanity. The "Leave it to Beaver" camp is closed indefinitely for repairs. To your point Steve, children subjected to insanity (dysfunction) at an earlier stage would be required to either sink or swim, adapt or snap! In time, I recognized that the dysfunction within my own family was, sadly, the norm. Even those seemingly "perfect" families eventually showed how strange and dysfunctional they actually were. Perhaps this is a good thing because it will be the ingenuity and adaptation of American entrepreneurs who will re-build the legs of this economy.
  • TrickleWW
    What does dysfunctional really mean? Isn’t that particular to an individual?

    I have seen plenty of dysfunctional families output failures and successes within the same family and circumstances. My only conclusion is that it all depends on the genetic make up, and competitive nature of an individual.

    Success is relative depending on a person’s natural ability, but not judged that way: (
    Aren’t individual ventures at any level, entrepreneurship? So what’s the “one size fits all” measure of success anyways?

    As a 24 year-old self-made millionaire, I realize that without the distribution scale technology had allowed I would not be a millionaire. Take Facebook as an example, without the distribution scale they had available, would you give Zucker the same measure of success? Let’s give more credit to outside forces rather than the individual.

    How much entrepreneurship could have been achieved on Giligan’s Island? How do you measure it?
  • Dennis Tracz
    I'm also from a dysfunctional family. I wonder if being forced to figure stuff out by yourself develops an ability to dostort reality? A VC once said to me "We look for entrepreneurs who can distort reality long enough to create a business and you seem to have it. I didn't understand a word of what you said about your technology but we are in for $2 million"
  • Joseph B
    I believe Entrepreneurs come in all sizes and shapes but believe there is alot of truth in what you said. Yy own family was very dysfunctional and sometimes I believe I have a chip on my shoulder trying to prove something a quality often seen in most entrepreneurs. I know that survivors of concentration camps like Auschwitz went on to be very successful in business as to many immigrants from poor countries. Let's face it if you were raised in a nice family in America and had things relatively easy you are more likely to work for a large organization getting paid good money rather than doing something really risky or hard. Many Entrepreneurs I have met were societies misfits and could never fit into a corporate culture.
    Having said that, there is another type of Entrepreneur who do come from good families and do all the right things like go to Stanford and work at a big company that do succeed as an entrepreneur. I attribute their success to having alot of self confidence/ego, great connections and the ability to communicate with people in high positions with money..
  • Steve - thanks for this.

    As an entrepreneur from a dysfunctional family I have often speculated on this. And I especially appreciate your comment that it's predominantly destructive and that some of us have the silver-lining of entrepreneurial capabilities.