How Founders Beat Loneliness | Marina Davidova, DVC General Partner | TEDxWoodLaneWomen

Transcriber: Daeun Kim Reviewer: Abdullah Al Hashel According to a recent pathology report, 76% of founders feel lonely. The rest? Too busy pretending they are not. 16 years in venture capital taught me this. Startups are nothing without people and their energy, and this energy erodes in loneliness. Loneliness is the silent killer of startups. Startup world is supposed to be vibrant and bustling, but deep down we project confidence. We don't feel signal success after facing rejection. We become masters of disguise. Future unicorns for investors. Polish certainty for customers and superhuman optimism for teams. We call it stealth mode, but really, it's hiding feelings under a hoodie. as venture capitalist backing more than 150 companies. I talked to founders every single day, from first time entrepreneurs to the leaders of the most successful tech giants. And I can reassure you, most of them are lonely, no matter how many people are around them.

People try to connect, but instead they meet the mask, not a person. Soon this mask talked to the mask of the world. Connection disappears and loneliness takes its place. And I felt the same. My most intense moment was in 2020. My husband, who is also my business partner, and I, we were building a company at the same time. We were immigrants building life from scratch. And then classic startup drama happened. One day our co-founder was texting me parenting tips. The next, he asked my husband to join a quick zoom on screens were all board members the lawyer? Cameras on, suits on. Well, at least on top, because back then, during Covid, you could not really tell. They announced my husband, co-founder and president of the company, was fired, effective immediately. Call it the OpenAI board move. We just better tested this. We fear that Covid would break our business, but instead it strained our bonds.

Isolation seeped in, replacing connection with doubt. I don't think our co-founder was malicious. Maybe he felt not in control and alone. That situation taught me something counterintuitive about loneliness. It wasn't about being alone. I had family, friends, people who loved me. Loneliness came from losing trust in partnerships, friendships, the world. But most of all, in myself. My mornings arrived with this weight on my chest. Noise in my head with constant self-doubt was loud. After life's earthquake, map went blank, and planning even a single day ahead felt impossible. That moment I realized control is an illusion. We can't change others, and we cannot predict with complete certainty what's next. Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky studied stressed baboons, then stressed humans. Turns out we are not that different, though baboons have better work life balance, to be honest, most of our behavior is determined by factors beyond our control.

Genes we inherited childhood. We experience early stress that shaped our brain. But we do have agency. Yes, these determinants set the baseline of our behavior, but we can shift our brain's chemistry through simple, repeatable choices. Nutrition, sleep management, stress management. Movement. And you cannot delegate this to to your cat. You can also reshape your environment by choosing natural spaces over concrete, supportive relationship over toxic ones. Intentional routines over chaos. The circular thing you can control is small, but it's enough. And responsibility is not in mastering the uncontrollable. It's in an engineering inputs you can impact. So I took this responsibility for myself and stopped waiting to be rescued. I couldn't control earthquake, but I could build a solid foundation. So I built pillars. Rules. Simple enough to write down in a day. Powerful enough to live by for a lifetime. I call it the triple B body, brain and belonging for my body.

I'm scheduled recovery, massages, long walks because movement didn't just hold pain. It's carried it away for my brain. I'm fed up with learning obsessively. I even started two book clubs for my belonging. I meditated, I practice forgiveness, but most importantly, I gathered with people I didn't have to perform for. Sometimes we cried, sometimes we laughed. loved most of. Most of the time we just talked. Build your body. Feed your brain. Find your belonging. Your triple B routine may look different, but this is the only triple B rated investment as and as I could recommend. My trust grew in small steps. First within, in myself, then outward. If these pillars work for me. What if we could build them into a system for all founders and design inputs together from habits to architecture. When inputs align across people, trust becomes a system property, not just a personality trait.

And this architecture gives us something steady to return to an anchor, and people around it form a tribe. Humans did not evolve in isolation. We survived in tribes. Our ancestors gathered around fires for warmth, light to share food and stories. Fire was actually our first engineered trust system. We couldn't tend it alone, and that's still wired in our brains with neural circuits for social bonding. And belonging is not a luxury. It's actually our human operating original system. And we can design it for trust with shared goals, clear incentives, transparency, and repeated interactions. Inputs create experiences. Repeated experiences create norms. And once these norms are visible and rewarded, trust and help become the default. Can you force trust? No, of course not. But you can engineer conditions where help is a smart move, and we tested this in real life and built our venture capital firm as a tribe of 400 people.

We still gather around fire, sometimes literally, but mostly around ideas that spark imagination. We designed it for psychological safety, fear, social ladders, repeated cooperation, and we reward the value added. We also make sure that our founders do not fly too close to flame and get burned out. Decades of research confirms that social support buffers stress, and in our experience, this effect is tangible. In our recent member survey, 94% said that helping others is valued in the community and 75 feel safe to ask for help without judgment. One founder put it simply, it's a like minded tribe where I can be open, and for us, it's a proof of concept. If you engineer community for trust, community become a preventive infrastructure for mental health and performance, and it's transferable. These inputs work in startups, in classrooms, clinics, everywhere, where people need each other. Startup world taught me to hide weakness, to wear a mask, to pretend that loneliness doesn't exist.

But I felt it. And in my darkest moment I kindled a light. And I saw that I wasn't alone. I found a tribe, I found one, I built one, and I became one for someone else. And my tribe taught me that vulnerability is not a weakness. It's a foundation of trust. Because the most valuable thing you can build, it's not a unicorn company. It's a community where no one has to walk alone. And now I would like you to help me a little bit. Could you please take out your phones and turn out the flashlights? Hold it up like you're in a real concert. I'm a pop star. And now, please look around. Someone here will maybe feel alone today. Someone is carrying something heavy. But we are all here today. And we can be their tribe. And trust and build and start building trust together.

Thank you.