Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - In this "gripping" (TechCrunch), "eye-opening" (Gayle King, Oprah Daily) memoir of mental illness and entrepreneurship, the co-founder of the menswear startup Bonobos opens up about the struggle with bipolar disorder that nearly cost him everything.

"Arrestingly candid . . . the most powerful book I've read on manic depression since An Unquiet Mind."--Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife

At twenty-eight, fresh from Stanford's MBA program and steeped in the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley, Andy Dunn was on top of the world. He was building a new kind of startup--a digitally native, direct-to-consumer brand--out of his Manhattan apartment. Bonobos was a new-school approach to selling an old-school product: men's pants. Against all odds, business was booming.

Hustling to scale the fledgling venture, Dunn raised tens of millions of dollars while boundaries between work and life evaporated. As he struggled to keep the startup afloat, Dunn was haunted by a ghost: a diagnosis of bipolar disorder he received after a frightening manic episode in college, one that had punctured the idyllic veneer of his midwestern upbringing. He had understood his diagnosis as an unspeakable shame that--according to the taciturn codes of his fraternity, the business world, and even his family--should be locked away.

As Dunn's business began to take off, however, some of the very traits that powered his success as a founder--relentless drive, confidence bordering on hubris, and ambition verging on delusion--were now threatening to undo him. A collision course was set in motion, and it would culminate in a night of mayhem--one poised to unravel all that he had built.

Burn Rate is an unconventional entrepreneurial memoir, a parable for the twenty-first-century economy, and a revelatory look at the prevalence of mental illness in the startup community. With intimate prose, Andy Dunn fearlessly shines a light on the dark side of success and challenges us all to take part in the deepening conversation around creativity, performance, and disorder.


About the Author
Andy Dunn co-founded the ecommerce-driven menswear brand Bonobos in 2007 and served as CEO through its 2017 acquisition by Walmart. As an angel investor and through his venture capital firm, Red Swan, Dunn has backed more than eighty startups, including Warby Parker, Oscar, and Coinbase. Dunn serves on the boards of Monica + Andy, an organic baby-apparel company founded by his sister, and the tech nonprofit Raised By Us. Named to Fortune's 40 Under 40 list in 2018, he is a graduate of Northwestern University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He lives in Chicago with his wife and their son.