Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group, discusses his personal mental health history and the life events that triggered his first major bout with depression.
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“I had my first major depressive episode when I was running my first company in my mid-twenties, and it was triggered by three things happening at the same time. The first was I ended up getting divorced from my first wife. Our relationship blew up. The second was I got kicked out of a PhD program. I was good at running my company, but I was a terrible PhD student. And the third was that I was very bored Running my company was successful, but I was doing the same thing over and over again. I wasn't very stimulated by it. That depressive episode lasted two years.”
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