Over the past two decades, Americans have become increasingly isolated from one another, Bonobos co-founder Andy Dunn said Thursday at the Inc. 5000 Conference in Palm Desert, California—and, he added, the pandemic made things worse.
That crisis of social isolation, partially rooted in the rise of the internet and other technological advances over the past two decades, was a large part of what prompted Dunn to launch Pie, an app that aims to help users find and organize social events.
“Our question at Pie was how do we take those digital addictions and start to compete for offline attention,” the chief executive told Inc. editor-in-chief Mike Hofman during their main stage conversation. “How do we move from being on our phones to in the real world, making platonic friendships again? That’s our focus.”
Part of that, he added, means helping people see the same unfamiliar faces at group events multiple times—enough so that they start to develop meaningful offline relationships with people who were once strangers.
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(That power of in-person interactions, Dunn said, is also why Pie employees are in the office five days a week: “We decided to just pretend like the pandemic never happened.”)
Dunn’s emphasis on mental health isn’t just bluster, either. He’s been outspoken about his own struggles, too, which have made him an advocate for therapy—especially for founders.
“There are a lot of highs and lows, and there is a lot of interpersonal conflict, and there are stresses that occur with your families and friends,” he said of his experience running a company. “Having someone whom you can objectively talk to about that, and get those emotions out of your body so that you can show up better and more communicative in those relationships, I think is the most valuable investment you can make as an entrepreneur.”
While building Bonobos, Dunn was concealing a secret: He had untreated bipolar disorder, he told the audience.
“Building a company is a roller coaster, and so that became an excuse and a cloak for this underlying medical condition that was also probably making those highs higher and those lows lower,” he said.
After getting his diagnosis, Dunn had gone into denial and stopped taking his meds, he recalled. He didn’t deal with it for 16 years—until he had what he calls a reckoning.
“One of the pernicious things about mania is it can come from a good mood; it can come from something good that happens in your life,” Dunn said. “In my case, it was: I was falling in love with my now wife—I ended up in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York City for a week.”
When he came down from his mania, he was ready to face his mental illness head-on: “I was relieved that I was now acknowledging, and everyone around me was acknowledging, ‘Andy has this issue. He isn’t the issue, but he has it.’”
