Athletic Founder's Hidden Stress
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Sam Parr shares a story about the contrast between public perception and private reality of successful founders, specifically about Alex from The Athletic.
"I used to host these events and get all these speakers who were founders of every startup you've heard of. I would hang out with them in the green room with about 6 of them at a time and it was nothing but complaining and fear.
We had this guy named Alex who started The Athletic, which eventually sold to New York Times for hundreds of millions of dollars. I was with him on a Friday, and that Wednesday before they had just released an article saying they'd raised $100 million in funding. Everything was going great, they had this beautiful photo shoot. But he was a ball of stress, venting to me about everything that was going wrong and how frustrated he was.
I remember thinking 'dude you're in the New York Times on Wednesday and you had this beautiful photo shoot, it sounds like everything was going great.' But that was my major takeaway from hosting all these events - the people I admire were shit shows just like I was. That was kind of a game-changing, mind-altering belief."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.