What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from The Friendship Cure
Building a company tends to compress every relationship that isn't the business into whatever hours are left over, and friendship is usually the first thing to go. Kate Leaver's The Friendship Cure argues that platonic connection is not a nice extra but a structural need, and for entrepreneurs that argument lands differently than it does for most readers. You already treat your calendar as a scarce resource, so when the book says friendship deserves the same deliberate planning as a product roadmap, it speaks a language you already use elsewhere. The trouble is founders often justify the neglect as temporary, a phase that ends once the company stabilizes. It rarely does. This piece applies the book's four ideas to the founder's week: the pitch meetings, the cofounder tension, the friends who stopped asking about the raise, and the loneliness that can sit under even a fully booked schedule.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Treating friendship like a line item, not a leftover
The instinct to protect deep work and investor time is correct, but the same protection rarely gets extended to a recurring dinner or a standing call with an old friend. Leaver's insistence that platonic bonds need real investment, not spare minutes, suggests founders should schedule friendship with the same seriousness as a board meeting.
A founder keeps rescheduling a monthly catch up with a friend from before the company started, and after enough cancellations the friend quietly stops proposing new dates.
Put one recurring friendship touchpoint on the actual calendar, protected the same way a key client call would be.
When the company eats the social map
Startups often become the entire social world, since cofounders, early hires, and advisors fill every waking hour. Leaver's chapter on the pressures modern life places on friendship applies directly to founders whose work and social circles have fully merged, leaving no outside perspective when the business gets hard.
A founder's closest confidants are all financially entangled with the company, so a bad quarter becomes something nobody around them can discuss neutrally.
Keep at least one friendship active that has no financial or professional stake in the company's outcome.
Repairing the friend you went quiet on
Founders sometimes realize, well after a funding round or an acquisition, that a friendship faded because they simply stopped showing up. The book's honesty about how often friendships end without ceremony, and how rarely people attempt real repair, gives founders permission to reach back out instead of assuming too much time has passed.
A founder avoids texting a friend they ghosted during a hard fundraising stretch, assuming the silence has already ended things.
Send one direct message naming the gap honestly and asking to reconnect, without over-explaining the business reasons behind it.
Letting friendship count as a real win
Founders are trained to measure worth in growth metrics, but Leaver's case for platonic love as a complete, dignified bond in its own right offers a different scoreboard. A friendship that has survived a founder's chaotic hours and distracted conversations is its own kind of achievement, not a consolation prize next to the company's success or a romantic partnership. Recognizing that shifts how much attention it deserves.
Early in a company, the urge to treat friendship as infrastructure will constantly lose to the urgent client call or the investor update, and that tradeoff is sometimes genuinely correct for a week or two. The risk is letting a short term tradeoff become the permanent operating mode. When in doubt, prioritize repairing one drifted friendship before adding new social commitments, since repair tends to matter more than expansion.
Name one thing, honestly
- Which friendship has quietly gone dormant since the company started, and would a short honest message change that? - Are the people closest to you also financially tied to your business, and who exists outside that circle?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Send one direct message naming the gap honestly and asking to reconnect, without over-explaining the business reasons behind it.