Mr. McGuigan (left) and Mr. Frazier from Bitbanger Labs

There are only two rules for the “idea dinners” held by New York early-stage investment firm ff Venture Capital. No side conversations and a strict 8 p.m. end time. Every month, the company invites financiers, founders and other “influencers” to its Midtown headquarters for a catered get-together. The meal is served in a glass-walled conference room, situated just past the rows of adjustable standing desks, where it’s not unusual to see startup employees cranking out code well past dessert.

The conversation often focuses on tech-oriented subjects, but this February, as the group fired questions at veteran investor Esther Dyson, the discussion turned to the subconscious.

Josh Weinstein, the 25-year-old founder of YouAre.TV, brought up his experience using lucid dreaming to get over his fear of heights, noting that he first toyed with the idea while trying to memorize Chinese characters during an immersion program in Beijing—using his nonwaking hours to cram for tests. Later, when he found himself flying above the jogging path along the FDR in a dream, “I just let myself drop onto the concrete,” Mr. Weinstein said. “I would hit the ground, but I wouldn’t feel impact. I kept experiencing that sense of falling without actually feeling the pain of impact.” Above him, the sky morphed into psychedelic swirls. “I don’t do any drugs or drink, so when people talk about their experience being high, this is analogous.”

Lucid dreaming refers to the act of being conscious while in a dream state—you’re in the dream, but you know it. With practice, proponents say, you can harness that awareness to manipulate your surroundings. Think Inception without the corporate espionage, or Neo’s trips to the Matrix after he downed the blue pill. (Tom Cruise’s cryogenically induced affair with Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky doesn’t quite fit because, for a good two hours, the poor sap thought it was the real deal.)

A century after the term “lucid dreaming” was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913, the practice is experiencing a major resurgence. For New York techies, already dutifully maximizing their waking hours, it seems sleep has become the last efficiency frontier. “We need to maximize the output that we get from our time, so if I’m not sitting in front of Codecademy or eating, I should be doing something cool, learning something, analyzing things, having cool experiences,” Mr. Weinstein said later.

After two hours that included watching investors whip out their calorie-tracking FitBits (Ms. Dyson’s was affixed to her bra strap) and blood-pressure monitoring iPhone apps, the takeaway from dinner seemed to be that truly self-optimized life-hackers should be quantifying their bodies’ every input and output, standing while they work, learning to code or speak Mandarin in their free time and using their dreams to overcome personal weaknesses or conjure up the next billion-dollar app. Or at least indulge in some mind-blowing virtual sex—often the first stop on a Lucid Dreaming Experience Tour. “It’s rewarding,” suggested psychologist Stephen LaBerge, who spent decades researching the science of dreams at Stanford and then at the Lucidity Institute and has been credited with proving the existence of lucid dreaming, “and people who don’t have the opportunities for getting sex elsewhere in their lives, then why not?!”

Then again, who wants to be conscious all the time? Weren’t bars invented expressly to avoid the burden of 24-hour lucidity?

At the dinner, Rob Cromer, the 26-year-old founder of a stealth startup called Adcade, chimed in with advice about “reality checks” that he picked up from a lucid dreaming coach at a cocktail party. One of the trickiest parts of lucid dreaming is recognizing that you’re in a dream. Thus practitioners train themselves during their waking hours by, say, drawing a dot on their hand as a signal to look at a clock.

New apps are coming on the market to solve the same problem. In less than a month, the Brooklyn-based duo behind Bitbanger Labs has managed to raise more than $330,000 from more than 3,800 backers on Kickstarter, including Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Cromer, to build a sleep mask called Remee that uses flashing LED lights as a “reality check.” Their initial goal was just $35,000. Kickstarter also hosted campaigns for the book Oneironautics: A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming, funded three times over; and The Lucid Dream Tour, a “multimedia, multidimensional road trip event” that promises to showcase the “entrepreneurial possibilities of today’s consciousness movement.” Soon that will include a video game designed to elicit lucid dreams currently being developed by a grad student in Copenhagen.

Since Remee first appeared on Kickstarter on April 3, the number of people who subscribe to the lucid dreaming forum on Reddit has grown more than 30 percent, up to 33,300 “oneironauts,” as practitioners like to call themselves. The influx of new users got be such an issue that the moderator was moved to create a separate forum for lucid dreaming memes so as not to interrupt discussion topics like “I can’t feel emotions in my dreams” or “Loosing [sic] track of reality quickly, help!”

The fantasy of controlling one’s dreams goes way back—Aristotle and Tibetan Buddhists were proponents—but for the new wave of technologically-savvy acolytes, dreams are seen more as a form of virtual reality. “The brain works so well it’s like the operating system on a Mac,” said Dr. LaBerge. By exploring your subconscious, “You find out how the system works.”

The last lucid dreaming boom had a more spiritual cast. “I think that was the ’80s,” noted Bitbanger Labs cofounder Duncan Frazier. “It kind of got new-aged a little bit. It went away and now it’s coming back and people are trying to make sure it doesn’t go down that weird road of pseudo-science.”

According to psychologist and dream researcher Jayne Gackenbach, hard-core gamers are more likely to both have lucid dreams and be able to control them. She's releasing three books on the subject this year, including a self-published e-book called “Play Reality” told from the perspective of her 27-year-old son, a harcore gamer.

Still, both Dr. Gackenbach and Dr. LaBerge cautioned against getting too goal-oriented with one’s REM cycle. “Dreaming is specifically designed for information processing,” Dr. Gackenbach explained. “It’s when we store new emotions and process negative emotions and try to make sense of them. If you’re trying to optimize it, what does that mean? Do you want to get rid of your negative emotions in an efficient way? It’s a system that’s doing pretty well on its own.” She expressed some skepticism about the idea of maximizing the use of this supposed downtime. “If it’s just about being able to control this alternative reality and go to a Rolling Stones concert,” she noted, referring to a goal articulated by one of her students, “then I have some concerns.”

Mr. Frazier and Steve McGuigan, the 30-year-olds behind Bitbanger Labs, makers of the Remee sleep mask, don’t seem too worried about it. During a late-night visit to Mr. Frazier’s apartment in Windsor Terrace, he talked about flying over the Grand Canyon and being able to push and pull the mountains below him at will, like he was “conducting music.” On the desk next to his left, a handful of Remee prototypes with their circuitry exposed lay in front of a 3D printer Mr. Frazier built from scratch.

Mr. McGuigan plays around with dimension. “I’ve always been into increasing or decreasing my size,” he said. “Shrink down to the size of an atom. Get microscopic and go hang out with subatomic particles.”

Teaching oneself to fly is another favorite pastime of lucid dreamers. “People on Reddit like to ride dragons,” added Mr. Frazier. At the dinner, Ms. Dyson, a trained cosmonaut, said she dreams of weightlessness.

In the late ’80s, Dr. LaBerge actually put out two versions of a mask similar to the Remee, among other “lucid dreaming induction devices,” called the DreamLight and NovaDreamer. But at around $1,000 a pop, he sold only 10,000 or 20,000 in the five or six years they were on the market, though he noted that they “had a disproportionate influence on technical types.”

A standard-issue Remee will retail for $80. The device is simple, using flashing LED lights on a timer—“like the front of Knight Rider,” as Mr. Frazier put it—to prod the dreamer into lucidity without waking him up.

“We’ve had to explain it to most of our friends, and it takes awhile,” Mr. Frazier admitted. “Over beers.”

-ntiku@observer.com

A version of this story appeared in the May 2, 2012 issue of the New York Observer.

Mr. Weinstein. (Twitter)

Last week, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss of Facebook and HarvardConnection fame appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box to talk about their new fund, Winklevoss Capital Partners. Like many investors, they're interested in investing in the cloud. "We think the cloud is going to be huge, it already is," Tyler said. It's important to find a truly unique cloud startup because there are so many cloud startups already, Cameron added.

Here's a prospective investment for the Winklevii: Josh Weinstein's cloud. "Everyone is talking about clouds and how everyone wants to 'invest in the cloud,'" Mr. Weinstein, founder of the flameout social network CollegeOnly.com and now the CEO of YouAreTV, told Betabeat over the weekend. So he created InvestInMyCloud.com, a cloud startup that accepts donations via a website with a picture of a cloud. He's also submitted a campaign to Kickstarter and hopes to raise $20. 

For payments, Mr. Weinstein has partnered with Amazon, which is widely acknowledged as a leader in the cloud space. The first investor was Matthew Witheiler of Flybridge. "I just got $10," he told Betabeat by Gchat on Sunday. "LOL! We are break even!"

Mr. Weinstein said he is also looking for people to help me engineer the cloud, specifically candidates with strong HTML skills and "at least 2 days of CSS experience." He added, "real-time highly concurrent/available messaging is a strong plus, as well." These skills also happen to be applicable to his company YouAreTV, a video platform for interactive entertainment that hosts The Merton Show with the infamous ChatRoulette video performer.

Mr. Weinstein is teaching himself Javascript and Ruby on Rails. "I just like to hack on stuff as per my 'learn to code' blog post," he said. "It's part fun, part helpful, although this might have made my skills worse."

It gets better. Seriously.

One week ago, Betabeat rolled out a story about the dangers of depression among young founders in the startup world: 'U CAN’T HAZ SADZ: The Hushed Dangers of Startup Depression.' We'd be lying if we wrote that we didn't expect some kind of response to the story. That said: We didn't even remotely expect the scale of the response to the story, in size or intensity.

Over the last week, we've seen everything from openly empathetic comments to blisteringly cynical retorts; founders and startup celebrities penning posts about their own experiences with the matter; nitpicks about everything from the cover to individual lines, and then some. It also, on the first day, became one of the most read stories on Betabeat since the blog's inception.

As such—and without further ado—we thought we'd do a follow-up on the story: crash notes on everything from the reactions the participants received for coming out to speak on the matter, to the lines they felt were missing from the story, and of course, some of the behind-the-scenes editorial notes on how the story came together.

The Reporting

As it's been mentioned, reaction from the startup community was—for the most part—intensely positive. The piece was written in the wake of 22 year-old Diaspora* founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy's death, which "[appeared] to be a suicide" according to the San Francisco Police Department. Internally at Betabeat, there was a pronounced initial concern among all four of us over whether or not publishing this kind of piece so close to the event was inherently, nefariously exploitative, a concern that after some discussion we eventually set aside with the confidence we had that this issue was as widespread as it was under-discussed. The logic we followed was simple: Young people, a lot of pressure, a lot of money, and very little experience with failure. How is that not an incubator for depression?

What we didn't have—and wanted—was empirical evidence to support this idea, or to understand the scale of it. Were we drawing too much from one news story? There was always the possibility that maybe in the startup community, depression wasn't discussed simply because it didn't exist, and that the type of people to get into these endeavors were just, maybe, broadly immune to these issues.

After one day of reporting the story, we were pretty sure we were on to an issue that was as endemic as it was unspoken for.

The Reader Reactions

The concern of being exploitative was all but gone by the time the story went to press, and reactions started arriving. Most of them were some stripe of this:

• "Important and under-discussed."
• "This needs to get talked about more."
• "Agreed. I know many founders deal w/ these issues (very quietly)."

 
The story shot to the top of Hacker News and stayed there for the better part of two days. Plenty of people there and elsewhere relayed similar experiences:

• "This shit is hard."
• "Hard to be positive & sell your startup 100% of the time when it's impossible to be doing well 100% of the time."
• "Happened to me. 22. Was 19. Raised some cash, tried to build a product, failed. Nearly got sued. Not good times."

 
And quite a bit of praise was also reserved to those who spoke out for the story about their own experiences with depression and startups:

• "Props to @joshrweinstein."
• "huge respect to @joshrweinstein for speaking up."
• "thanks @jerrycolonna for shining light on this issue. any startup founder who is honest has been depressed."

 
It wasn't all positive. The most common criticism on the story we received came right up front:

• "Worst title, but a good article."
• "Great article at Betabeat about startup depression that is sadly ruined by an awful title."
• "Interesting article, but terrible title."

 
Even Jerry Colonna—the guru and advisor to many an angel investor, VC, and startup founder we spoke with for the piece noted: "Ignore the silly headline."

Be it editor or writer, when you come out with a strong headline, you know it's going to be decisive. And this is exactly what you fear will happen when you fail.

As we wrote on the day the story was published, we did have a conversation about the headline, and we knew it wouldn't work for some people. The fact is, it wasn't a matter of wit so much as: How can we sell this rather morose story on people who aren't inclined to spend 2200 words' worth of their time on a downer of an issue? That said, we'd also be lying if we didn't admit we were going for something a little punchy, too. We can't calculate whether or not it drew more people than it turned away, but if we did it again, we might do a triple-take on it, at least to figure out if there wasn't anything better out there.

We'll say this, though: when your newspaper's senior designer, Scott, is making the rare comment on editorial by asking you if that's actually the headline you're going to go with, you might want to listen to him.

The Press: Reactions and Causality

Interestingly enough, most of the traffic for the story came through Twitter, Facebook, and Hacker News. That didn't surprise us too much. What did surprise us was where the story didn't appear. One paragraph that was deleted from the published draft was from the introduction, where we noted the rightfully but unusually subdued tones websites like TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider took when discussing the death of Ilya Zhitomirskiy (something Betabeat didn't even initially report as breaking news; not because we didn't think it was relevant, but because we were concerned—maybe overly—with the touchy issue of exploitation at that point, already).

The story, for what it's worth, drew up exactly zero links on TechCrunch and Business Insider. All Things D linked it up on the front page. Which brings up something else that didn't make the story, a moment in an interview with angel investor and TechStars managing director David Tisch, as he decried the lack of culture and personality-driven stories in the tech press at-large:

The human story in tech today is totally, totally erased by the rush to get news out.

YouAre.TV founder Josh Weinstein, who spoke with Betabeat about his own experiences with the issue, noted the effect a largely complimentary press might have on young founders:

"There are very few overnight successes. The problem is survivor bias. Those [successful startups] are the ones you see on TechCrunch."

Another insight that didn't make the original story—one we were especially sad to see go, but knew it'd come back here—was about the effect the tech press has on founders and depression. Big surprise: It's palpable. From Jerry Colonna:

What about the media?

There's a negative implication with the media, where there's a fascination with this kind of culture. The United States lionizes entrepreneurs in a way in which a lot of other societies don’t.

Certainly, we're guilty of it, the lionizing and the obsession.

Yeah it’s the Observer, Betabeat, but it’s the media in general. Look at what happened with Steve Jobs: he became the best CEO who ever walked the face of the earth, nevermind the fact that he left a trail of broken bones behind him

There's that, too.

The Fallout

Making the rounds since the article appeared was another large piece about how volatile startup culture can be, specifically, Zynga's, as they move to take their IPO on the road. Former employees noted how relentless both the work and the treatment of their colleagues could be.

Ousted TechCrunch founder, venture capitalist, and pirate UnCrunched publisher—or whatever he is now—Michael Arrington wrote a post vaguely alluding to the week's recent discussions about the emotional toll working at a startup can take. To summarize, in his words:

Expect more articles soon about the woes of being asked to work hard at a startup. People are working so hard, they’re crying themselves to sleep!

Early Netscape engineer Jamie Zawinski—whose writing from years ago Arrington used to make his own point—struck back at Arrington:

He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous.

Arrington returned fire , because, of course, how could he not? To briefly editorialize: Michael Arrington, you're being an obtuse idiot, as either you're tapped into what the discussion is ostensibly about as opposed to what it actually concerns—not the extent of the work, but a medical condition that can develop and metastasize into something more dangerous because of it—or you don't believe depression can exist, which puts you in the same categorical camp of crazy as Tom Cruise.

Of all places, I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGUR blog network founder Ben Huh posted about his own experiences with depression and founding a startup. It was surprisingly and admirably candid:

I spent a week in my room with the lights off and cut off from the world, thinking of the best way to exit this failure. Death was a good option — and it got better by the day.

Heading Out

There's one other criticism the story received that we wanted to save for our final word on the matter, which was less a criticism of the narrative than a disagreement with the premise.

From Foursquare engineering brain Harry Heymann:

I dunno, when people ask me how I’m doing I routinely tell them “God, it’s killing me.” I think the rigors of a leadership position at a startup (or really any position at all) are a pretty common topic of discussion these days. Pretty much everyone understands that working at a successful startup is likely to have a strong negative impact on your life, health, relationships, and overal mental state. I’ve also had quite a few discussions on the importance of combatting this and methods to do so.

We'd disagree that everyone understands it in a coherent way, but we'll concede that not enough emphasis was placed on the way many of the founders we spoke with extolled the virtues and rewards of dealing with all the rigors that come with startup life, something Josh Weinstein and his friend "Chris"—another 25 year-old founder who had dealt with depression—made especially clear: in the end, it was worth it, with the notation that there are better ways to deal with it than most people do. That said, Mr. Weinstein also mentioned the ways in which he and other founders deal with it. More that didn't make the original cut, from Josh Weinstein:

Whenever people ask me how I’m doing, I give them a very honest answer. If we’re not doing well? "We’re not doing well." It’s not good for the reality distortion field, but I guess you could say my reality distortion field is just reality. And general optimism. One of my mantras is that hope springs eternal. If you keep going, it’ll work out.

I’m very open. Most people aren’t. What Chris was saying is that founders can’t be.

Where in society is it socially acceptable to talk about it your issues except for 'Blank' Anonymous? [Some of us] have Founder Therapy. It’s like Founders Anonymous. You talk about stuff you’ve gone through. If you’re open about it, and you tell someone that you’re going through a tough time, you’ll hear back: “Yeah, I’ve gone through a tough time, too. This is what I did to get through it.”

Harry? Point taken. As for other founders, as many in story explained—as well as many of those discussing it agreed—the most dangerous facet of this problem is also the most easily solvable: It's not talked about enough. Before we wrote this story, we were pretty convinced it was a discussion worth having. On the way out, it's now become pretty evident that talking about depression as endemic to young startup founders is less a matter of measurable value than it is necessity. Surely, there will be those—like, for example, your Michael Arringtons—who'd rather not hear it.

And of course: It's a shitty reality to deal with. But, of course, most of the ones worth dealing with generally are.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The most—or least—of one's worries.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, ON A SUNDAY MORNING, the startup world woke up to that rare stripe of news which quietly sends shockwaves reverberating throughout an entire culture of people: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 22 years old, had passed away. The cause of death "appears to be a suicide," noted a San Francisco police officer who spoke with CNN. A forthcoming coroner’s report will make a final determination. Mr. Zhitomirskiy was one of the four co-founders of Diaspora*, once breathlessly hyped in a May 2010 New York Times article as a “cry to arms” against Facebook, in a story that employed a classic tech narrative: four brilliant young men, on the verge of changing the world, subsisting on ramen and pizza.

Y Combinator’s Hacker News link to the item racked up pages of comments, many devoted to shouting down those who wanted to have a discussion about depression in the technology and startup community, noting it as an inappropriate moment for that topic. One user noted that a breaking news thread announcing Mr. Zhitomirskiy’s death was “a terrible place to have a discussion about ‘the stresses of life … related to tech.’”

Another disagreed: “We don’t talk about suicide in society very well let alone within the startup community. Founders find themselves in extremely stressful situations and living lifestyles that exacerbate the effects of this stress.”

This second comment read in contrast to the first, whose final suggestion on the matter was to “have that discussion inside your head” for the time being, and then go talk about it some other time.

IT'S FRIDAY NIGHT at New York City's startup workspace-cum-mecca General Assembly, and it’s YouAre.TV founder Josh Weinstein’s 25th birthday. A crowded party with a sufficient supply of pizza and beer warms up in the main hall. Mr. Weinstein, however, is found quietly typing at his desk in the South Wing, isolating him from the Startup Weekend New York kickoff raging outside the door.

As we find a place to sit, a few people regard him with quick back-slaps and Happy Birthdays. Another colleague working nearby is surprised to hear of the occasion, quickly offering the same. Along the way, he nods to a nearby colleague, “Chris,” to accompany us as we search out a quiet place to speak; the unannounced third party is joining, Mr. Weinstein explains, because he—another 25 year-old startup founder—has much to say on the topic, the both of them having experienced some stripe of professional failure and the depression that comes with it.

[“Chris” agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity not because he doesn’t want to publicly speak about depression, but because his startup is trying to avoid press in its early stages.]

Mr. Weinstein and Chris sat with Betabeat in a couch-filled cubicle, and immediately begin firing off insight on depression among their contemporaries with the enthusiasm one would expect to be reserved for a particularly fascinating segment of code.

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“I’d be really surprised if you could find a founder who—if you asked them about their emotional state—hasn’t been through depression,” Chris explains. As a computer engineering student working at a startup at a prestigious college, and then as an entrepreneur going it alone after he graduated, he’s experienced in sparring with his own mental health.

“That’s why I asked Chris to come,” Mr. Weinstein explained. “We’ve gone through it at different times. We talked about it; it’s a club. It’s good to have that support network. A lot of people don’t ask for help.”

The World Health Organization cites depression as affecting 121 million people worldwide. The Center for Disease Control estimates one in every ten American adults are suffering from some form of clinical depression. In the 18 to 24-year-old age group, that number goes up to 11.1 percent. To Chris, the startup world is even more susceptible.

“It’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when’ it happens,” he sighed. “I’d almost say if they aren’t going through depression, you’re probably not actually pushing hard enough, or taking on enough risk, because that’s just an inherent part of owning something.”

In a phone interview a few days later, angel investor and TechStars managing director David Tisch—who once acted a mentor to Mr. Weinstein—corroborated this theory. “When you as a personality are able to take the risk to start a company, in making that choice, you have to consciously understand that you are rebelling against the easy path,” he explained. “That’s not a foreign concept to the people I work with.”

Mr. Tisch illuminated this with a story he rolls out to young founders on their first day of TechStars that his friend—Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer—once told in an interview: for the first two years in founding the company, after every important meeting, they’d inevitably take the elevator down to street level, and on the doors closing, jump up and down, laughing hysterically. Or start crying.

“That’s fucking crazy!” Mr. Tisch observed. “In reality, that will screw up anybody. Think about a startup experience like that. Unless you’re emotionally and psychologically tough enough to withstand that roller coaster, you are going to go through [those emotions].”

Jerry Colonna, a venture capitalist turned business and life coach to Silicon Alley royalty, has seen the pressures founders (and particularly young founders) can face. Often. “Every. Single. Day,” Mr. Colonna said in a phone call with Betabeat. “Ten times a day. These pressures are not just unique to this age group, but they are exacerbated in the entrepreneurial community.”

In this tightly knit community, he continued, the factors unique to young entrepreneurship can add up. “When you layer status against the pressure cooker of, say, Broadway between 23rd Street and the Village, that whole corridor”—where General Assembly is, of course, located—”what you end up with is a sort of high school [scenario]. Who are the cool kids? Who aren’t the cool kids? Whose popularity is rising, sinking? You get this incredible pressure on people.”

Mr. Colonna illustrated a scenario that isn’t all too uncommon these days, specific players aside: “Imagine that you’ve just raised a million and a half dollars from Fred Wilson. Exactly. Scared shitless. Oh, and by the way, you’re worried that everybody’s going to find out that you have no fucking clue what you’re going to do.”

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Cody Brown, the 23-year-old co-founder of NYU Local and the recently-launched Scroll, corroborated this point by phone from his apartment in Bushwick. “The fact of the matter is: there are a lot of people in their early 20s being handed thousands of dollars, multimillion dollar checks, and having this self-imposed pressure,” which is in addition to the pressure of trying be a normal, young, 20-something. Like, for example, “trying to find a girlfriend,” he laughed.

He went on to point out a distinct irony for those like him in this specific moment in technology startups: “It’s funny how many help enhance that feeling of stress. Like, foursquare! Oh, god. I really don’t need to know every party that I haven’t been invited to, routinely and beautifully laid out on my phone!”

Even the most cursory of looks reveals young startup founders living lives that are potential incubators for depression. If that’s the case, we offered, then why have many of the people we’ve spoken with felt that the past week is the first time a discussion concerning tech startups and mental health has happened at a significant volume? After all, these are the same scientifically and socially progressive creative types brought together by the mandate to bring the world new and improved ways to hack everything from their workweek to their own bodies, let alone socialize.

Back at General Assembly, Chris sighed: “In the startup community, there’s a real stigma to depression. Every time someone comes around and asks ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ you’re always like”—and here, he vamped a disposition familiar to anyone who has ever had a discussion with a startup founder—”‘Best day ever, man! Killing it! We’re crushing it!’ You have to do that, because your job as founder is, to some extent, to create the Steve-Jobs-Reality-Distortion-Field.”

As conversations about mental health and depression in startups stay at hushed tones, the idea that anybody else is going through a common experience is a difficult prospect to embrace. “There’s no way you can talk about it, because you feel like you’re in this alone. You feel socially vulnerable when in reality,” Mr. Weinstein kicked his feet up on one end of the couch, in what one could have easily been mistaken for a therapy session, continuing, “everyone else is going through the same thing. The pluralistic ignorance is a big problem. You can talk to your friend, and be like, yo, I’m depressed, and they’re like,” and with this, he smiles: “‘Yeah, I’ve been seeing a psychologist for the last year.’ And you’d be like, really? And they’re like… Yeah.’ Nobody talks about it!”

Mr. Brown echoed this sentiment: “Founders don’t want to discuss this,” he explained. “They want to have the public appearance of always being in control, and always being on top of their game.”

A 24-year-old female startup founder was at first reluctant to speak at all, noting over an email that it “makes me nervous as a young company to admit ever wavering.” She finished: “I feel like you might run into other entrepreneurs who might decline [speaking out] for fear it’ll make their investors look twice at them.” We did. She eventually relented, explaining her own experience with the problem over an instant message:

“Sometimes you get run down and depressed because your product is fucking awesome, your team is great, and you can’t stop yourself from working ’round the clock on it because you love it. But, your body rebels against that. Makes you tired unexpectedly, makes small problems inflate. And then you freak out, thinking that one off day is going to set into motion many, many more. So,” she finished. “You keep it inside.”

But, we asked her, wouldn’t it befit all parties involved to make this an open dialogue? Founders could get the help they need and investors could be satisfied with knowing the full condition of their investment. The idea was roundly rejected, one Gchat ping at a time:

“No
I don’t even think it would help
I think I’d get replaced”

IN A SITUATION so obviously built for so many involved to experience some form of depression or anxiety, be it mild or severe, one could reasonably assume the venture capitalists handing over money to these bright young things would have trained themselves to see it coming in their founders, and actively intervene. Some, Mr. Tisch argued, do: “The best investors out there get to know the entrepreneurs to the point where they’re there as a friend. It’s a very honest relationship that gets built. The best VCs pay attention to these things,” but, he qualified, “like in every industry, not everyone’s the best.”

“I don’t think [these issues] are getting brushed under the rug, but,” he concluded, “It’s probably something we can all do better in exposing.”

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Of course, the first and most rudimentary answers to these problems are as obvious as they are readily available:

“Stay focused on that self that exists outside of work,” Mr. Colonna explained. “Make sure you are dissipating the anxiety through physical exercise, eating right, all the things our mothers taught us.”

Mr. Tisch’s advice was more philosophical: “Understand where you are in the process. Consciously understand that you are rebelling against the easy path,” he suggested.

Chris noted: “Be comfortable having others know about it.” He nodded at Mr. Weinstein: “You have to identify people you can talk with about it.”

Mr. Weinstein agreed that so much of dealing with the emotional rigors of startup life was simply a matter of battling the character traits that helped those like him get there in the first place.

“Depression is so common, especially with people who are Type A,” Mr. Weinstein shook his head. “When you’re wired to execute and accomplish, it’s a challenge that you need to overcome. If you don’t recognize it yourself, or talk to people about it, it’s not going to be fun.”

Earlier that evening, when we first found out it was Mr. Weinstein’s 25th birthday, we couldn’t help but ask him:

It’s Friday night. It’s your birthday. You really going to stay here coding all night, or are you doing anything for it?

“Yeah,” he smirked, “we’ll be fratting our brains out at happy hour.”

As it turns out, Josh spent the rest of the night working.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Young Weinstein

YouAre.TV founder and General Assembly alum Josh Weinstein is back in New York after an ill-fated adventure in Palo Alto, taking with him his hockey pads and leaving behind a flaky coder who was supposed to become YouAre.TV's CTO.

Mr. Weinstein penned a tell-all-blog post in which he explains how Palo Alto was fun at first, what with all the hanging out at Facebook and Google, and how he got to play hockey with Guy Kawasaki (more than once!) and had a stand-up desk. Of course, it was superangel Peter Thiel who convinced Mr. Weinstein to move to the Valley--Mr. Thiel regards the bright young founder as an accolyte--so Mr. Weinstein was able to be close to his mentor. "At first, we wondered if Mr. Thiel just wanted to have someone to play chess with. But YouAre.TV just recruited a new CTO, so we guess there are still plans to build a company," Betabeat wrote in a rumor roundup at the time.

Sadly, things quickly went sour. Mr. Weinstein discovered Palo Alto was understimulating. "As a city kid, I started to feel the isolation of living in Palo Alto and not working in a coworking space," he wrote. To make things worse, his CTO wasn't working as much as promised--and kept pushing back his start date.

"Sure enough, after midnight on the day Ted and I were supposed to really start (after pushing back a month and then a week), I received an email from him titled "Involvement with youare.tv going forward,'" Mr. Weinstein writes.

If you want to write a maximally cold and destructive break-up letter to your cofounder, here's how to do it. We've included the letter from Mr. Weinstein's almost-CTO with annotations below:

Hi, Josh,

Hope you had a good trip back. [open with friendly greeting, the limpness of which will contrast with the rest of a letter which will have devastating consequences]

Would like to discuss with you about my involvement with youare.tv, and I am sorry for the change. [understate and euphemize wherever possible--"my involvement" for "our signed agreement that I would be your technical co-founder"]

Things have changed in last 36 hours, since a few people I am leaving [company name redacted]. [act as if there was no way you could see this coming]

There are a few very exciting opportunities just surfaced, from idea stage to growth stage, and all are working on very disruptive products and technologies, [sideways insults implying that vague "exciting opportunities" are cooler and more disruptive than the startup you had committed to]

All these sounds exciting, and I would definitely like to explore further - still too early to tell, but sounds very exciting.

Would like to discuss how I can best help youare.tv going forward, maybe an advisor role to help you recruit a few engineers to work on the product. We can meet early next week to discuss further. [empty promises are essential]

Also, I will not be available Monday, but can meet together Tuesday afternoon. [put caveats on any offers to help--the more they emphasize how busy and in-demand you are, the better]

I am very sorry about this change - really get attracted to the news things. [a brilliant kicker that showcases what an idiot you are and therefore what an idiot your partner must be]

Cheers! [overly cheery closing provides striking contrast to gravity of the situation]

Mr. Weinstein is left to take another lesson from failure. His first start-up, CollegeOnly, arguably failed because it got too much hype in the beginning, between 10,000 initial sign-ups and a million bucks from Mr. Thiel before the product was ready for primetime. But Mr. Weinstein took the most successful aspect of CollegeOnly, which was a dorm-to-dorm video chat, and spun it off into a new startup focused on interactive, web-native video entertainment with gaming elements. The result is YouAre.TV, an interactive game show which looked bonkers and confusing when Betabeat saw it demo'ed but was obviously very innovative--and fun.

As one of my former chess coaches, Svetozar Jovanovic, always said “You learn a lot more from a loss than you do, if anything, from a win.” While it’s always better to win, the lesson learned here above all else is there is only one person you can really, truly trust in making critical decisions and executing thereupon - yourself. As noted, trust is critical - and if your gut indicates you you probably can’t or shouldn’t trust someone - either exhaustively figure out and deal with it, or, more likely, hit the big red stop button and shift gears.

Yes, in case you were wondering, we are looking for a CTO with significant experience in the bi-directional video space and management/recruiting experience.

GAWKER CONSORTS WITH HACKERS. Gawker's Adrian Chen has been tirelessly tracking the story of Lulz Security hack attacks. Mr. Chen spoke to a member of the collective via Skype, he claims, and although we're not sure how Mr. Chen would know one way or another if he was Skyping with a Lulz hacker, the quotes are amazing.

"As an arrogant and violent sociopath driven to a frenzy by the sense of my own power, I can't divulge the upcoming releases," he said. (Earlier in our chat, Topiary had brought up a March Gawker article that he said portrayed him and his crew as "arrogant sociopaths.")

After all this bluster, we asked if Topiary was worried at all about being caught. His response: "Worrying is for fools!"

MOAR TECHSTARS! The line-up of TechStars start-ups and hackers should be coming down the pike soon, but we'll just tease a few more: Add a content platform/marketplace, a closed social network, and an SMS-based queuing system in addition to the ad tech start-up, food delivery start-up and fashion start-up we teased last week.

RUMBLINGS FROM THE HACKER NEWS MACHINE. Nodejitsu could be in big trouble as Y Combinator rival Heroku rolls out its competing node.js support this week, several sources told Betabeat. The New York start-up had a headstart and benefits from its singular focus on once type of hosting, while Heroku "must balance the goals of being a curated, erosion-resistant platform against keeping pace with extremely active developer communities" in different languages. Hard not to picture the rivalry as a Japanese martial arts fight scene in the snow, arewerite?

COMPETITION. Fortune is seeking a tech writer--a certain graying newsosaur is ramping up its tech coverage--and now TechCrunchers are coming to New York? Let's get out before this thing jumps the shark.

KNIGHT TO DISTRICT 14. At last, Peter Thiel has convinced CollegeOnly/YouAre.TV founder Josh Weinstein to move to Silicon Valley. "Peter Thiel loves Josh," lean start-upper Trevor Owens told us. "They're both chess grandmasters." Mr. Thiel was a U.S. Chess Master; Mr. Weinstein was a "nationally-ranked" tournament chess player. Betabeat, sad to see one of the weirdest web products in New York go, pinged Mr. Weinstein to verify the news. "Was going to follow up with you individually so it didn't make it to Betabeat... yes, I'm moving out to CA," the founder said. "Leaving next week." At first, we wondered if Mr. Thiel just wanted to have someone to play chess with. But YouAre.TV just recruited a new CTO, so we guess there are still plans to build a company. Godspeed, Game of Boxes.

DEAL ME IN! New York based group-buying deal site BuyWithMe, funded to the tune of $20 million, is raising a new round soon, peHUB is rumormongering. "BuyWithMe, on the other hand, has less ambitious plans. Given that the company has raised less than $25 million to date, that’s not shocking. However, our source says that the company—which has been snapping up smaller competitors in the U.S. this year—will stick to its knitting and maintain a North America-only focus as it continues to develop both by organic growth and M&A," the private equity blog says in a chipper, anonymously-sourced post that we bet came straight from the horse's mouth.

IPAD ADVERTI$ING. Rumor has it, the New York Times is sold out of inventory for ads in its supa-slick iPad app for some time. But the company's partnership with TechStarsNY-engendered OnSwipe, which builds HTML5 sites that can be viewed on mobile devices such as the iPad, lets them cheat and sell web ads at iPad prices.

FULL SPEED START-UP AHEAD. Local developer and TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon all-star Mark Webster tweeted on June 7 that he'd accepted a challenge to build a start-up in a week. Betabeat checked in. Launch much? we asked. "Sort of. Prototype is done, got us to the next step. Should have some BIG news in about a month or so," Mr. Webster said. "We've assembled a team of four people. My business and hackathon partner, Aaron Foss, and I will be making up the product team. We're going all-in on this startup and will be shutting down our consulting business, Kickstart Concepts, at the end of month to do this full-time... That's about it. I know it's nothing, but we'll have some big news coming up soon. When it's more interesting, I'll be sure to share."

DEPT. OF FUN FACTS. Venture capital attorney Doug Bernstein was a punk in law school! While Betabeat was hanging out in Turntable.fm this afternoon--and also working--the lawyer threw some Clash on the decks and waxed nostalgic. "I read this at my law school graduation. It was my speech. Dean wasn't amused," he said of "I Fought the Law."

YouAre.TV is the reborn version of CollegeOnly, the social network, video roulette and Facebook alternative for which fresh-faced founder Josh Weinstein raised $1.15 million from Peter Thiel, David Tisch, David Kidder, FirstMark Capital and other funds in the summer of 2010.

College Hype failed to catch on due to a combination of overhype and errors with the product design, so Mr. Weinstein decided to switch tacks. He launched YouAre.TV, technology that enables a frenetic, wacky interactive version of web television, at the New York Tech Meetup. Betabeat rated it "delightful-unmarketable" In its current iteration.

Now the General Assembly-based start-up is looking for a chief technology officer or lead developer to complement the hustle of its young founder.

"Previous company product iterations featured in dozens of major publications and garnered tens of thousands of users," the ad says. "VC-backed + angels include Peter Thiel and David Tisch. In discussion with major players in the entertainment space, partnerships/investment pending launch."

Web show host Aspen Steib left the start-up in April; YouAre.TV is currently a placeholder.

The idea had a ton of traction, especially among the generation that started school while Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard (we really thoughtFacebook would be about college forever). I was at the tech blog ReadWriteWeb at the time CollegeOnly arrived, and remember receiving a super-slick press kit that looked like an American Apparel ad and being asked to hold a story until after The New York Times. The launch was also covered in Mashable, Silicon Alley Insider and college papers around the world. CollegeOnly had 25,000 signups before it was ready to full launch.

The buzz was actually a big part of the problem, founder Josh Weinstein, 24, told The Observer today.

"We had insane number of signups, but we knew we were still in beta," he said. "By the time we rolled out, there was too much lag time. We really had some pretty crazy metrics and I was really excited about it, but the product is ultimately what people come for and what drives that hockey stick growth. And we didn't have that ready."

CollegeOnly had too many ideas, Mr. Weinstein explained, which had been sort of mashed into one site. His other sites, RandomDorm (video chat for students) and GoodCrush (dating site for students) were combined with the CollegeOnly idea. He raised more than a million dollars over the summer, some from Facebook investor Peter Thiel, and launched the site at the end of August 2010.

By October, CollegeOnly had flamed out. Mr. Weinstein had "a bunch of conversations" with fellow entrepreneurs, including his General Assembly neighbor Carter Cleveland, CEO of Art.sy, and Geoff Lewis of Topguest, who told him it was time for a pivot.

That was the genesis of YouAre.TV, an interactive online game show that started as a promotional vehicle for CollegeOnly.  "You have to focus on one thing," Mr. Weinstein said. "One of the potential partners we're working with was like, 'You know, when you talk about this idea your face lights up, and the amount of excitement that you have just shows that you have a serious passion for this more so than CollegeOnly.'"

Mr. Weinstein and his team of eight full-time employees and four part-time employees are now focused exclusively on YouAre.TV, which has given them new clarity.

Mr. Weinstein demonstrated YouAre.TV at the New York Tech Meetup last week, the first official peek at the pivot. But he is decidedly not attempting to build buzz; he was in fact a little hesitant to talk toThe Observer. "The lesson we learned with CollegeOnly is that we shouldn't use press to get users. Press should come from success rather than us trying to leverage press to see it succeed."

The new strategy is to develop the site a feature or two at a time and ensure the user experience is excellent. "Iterate, iterate, iterate. Then get press," he said.

Disclosure.