Tech CEOs Could Use Group Therapy, Says Tech CEO

At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference, Jess Lee, CEO of Polyvore, spoke about the pressure tech CEOs are under to put on a happy face, no matter what.

Polyvore CEO Jess Lee onstage at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit in San Francisco.

Via Flickr: fortunempw

Jess Lee's parents were shocked when she announced she was leaving a cushy job at Google to work on a startup. Today, she's CEO of that company, Polyvore, and the three men who founded the company have dubbed her an "honorary cofounder."

Three years ago, Lee wrote a blog post titled "Why Startup Founders Are Always Unhappy." On stage at Fortune's Most Powerful Women NextGen conference, she was asked to reflect on mental health in leadership roles in today's frothy tech industry.

"What you end up putting out in the press is funding, growth milestones. There's this pressure to be out there constantly saying, I'm crushing it! And that's almost never true. There's always something going wrong. Even if you are growing, there's something falling apart inside the company — it's normal. The most important trait is tenacity, to keep on going. but you don't want to make your employees feel concern or start looking for another job so you have to toe the line. I wish there were more people talking about it. [...] I wish CEOs had group therapy sessions. If you only read the press you have very few data points on what it's actually like to run a company. Over time you have a broader sense of where you are."