Burn Rate

Depression is the engine, mania the flight. Dunn describes depression not as sadness but as acute worthlessness so total that suicide feels like a logical exit from pain rather than a desire to die. He compares it to hunger: nobody wants to be full, they want to end the hunger. His depressive weekends meant sleeping thirty-eight of forty-eight hours, eating cereal, dodging his sister's texts.

Mania, he argues, is the sprint away from that void. After clawing out of depression, he would cling to any spark of good mood and rocket upward, terrified of sliding back. His psychiatrist frames mania as possibly the most extreme form of depression, a manic flight from a state too grim to re-enter.

The enemy you invent is you. For eighteen months Dunn waged war against his co-founder Brian Spaly, the fashionable, athletic, disciplined man who had actually invented Bonobos. Dunn collected a 360-degree review of Spaly, lobbied the board and investors, and eventually pushed him out, all while conducting no equivalent review of himself. Spaly left with grace, reading a poem to the company.

Only years later did Dunn see the projection. He borrows the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr's idea that we become a mirror image of whatever we fight too long. What Dunn hated in Spaly, the superiority and volatility, lived in himself. He fired Spaly for issues that went unexamined in his own conduct, then discovered the truly unpartnerable person was him.

Values are descriptive, not aspirational. Marc Lore, the entrepreneur who sold Diapers.com and Jet to Amazon and Walmart, taught Dunn that culture is not what you wish it were. It is the traits your first ten employees actually share, set permanently in the company's DNA. You cannot change it later. You can only hire and fire to protect it.

Dunn went home, sorted his roughly thirty employees into best, middle, and worst, and asked what the cultural carriers had in common. Five words emerged in sixty seconds: self-awareness, empathy, positive energy, intellectual honesty, and judgment. Lore also taught a passion test: offer two packages, one high-cash-low-equity, one low-cash-high-equity. Candidates who grab the cash believe less in the mission.

Blame the brain, not the calendar. For years Dunn blamed his depressions on Bonobos, on Spaly, on the cash crunch. Then in 2015 he engineered his own exit, handed the CEO role to a hire named Fran, and flew to Beijing for a six-week idyll with his girlfriend Manuela. Instead of bliss, he sank into the worst depression of his life, sleeping twenty hours a day, unable to walk to the bathroom, stuck for two hours on a single page of a novel.

The revelation: the grueling job had been keeping him tethered. Its relentless demands forced him out of bed, gave him purpose, and pulled him from the doldrums. Eighty-six days after leaving, he schemed to get his job back, then asked Fran to step aside.

Guard sleep like your life depends on it. Dunn's episodes share a signature: he stops sleeping, and within days the guardrails of sanity collapse. Before his 2000 college break he stayed up for three nights, believing he no longer needed to sleep. In 2017, a single all-nighter after his wife's bridal shower and a Holocaust remembrance service triggered a psychotic break on a Manhattan sidewalk, where he flung his five-foot mother into an iron fence.

His psychiatrist explains a manic brain can run four or five nights before crashing, the mind disconnecting from the body. Recovery's first step is always forced sleep via medication. Dunn's family later built a daily sleep report, tracked by a Fitbit and shared with his wife, mother, sister, and doctor, as an early-warning system.

"Differential diagnosis" became a life raft. When first diagnosed at twenty, Dunn was told that if he stayed episode-free for five years, it might have been a one-off psychotic event rather than bipolar disorder. That single word, differential (a diagnosis confirmed only by what the future reveals), gave his family a decade-long excuse for denial. He rejected the label, refused medication, and lectured an outpatient psychiatrist on why it did not apply to him.

Dunn explains why people abandon meds: early drugs like Depakote dulled his joie de vivre and creative spark, so he preferred rolling the dice as himself over being a stranger. Stigma compounds this. If the illness is shameful and unspeakable, why swallow a daily pill that internalizes that shame?

Stonewalling sank his partnerships. Dunn identifies his three early flaws: trusting his intuition about people blindly, acting incongruently with his true feelings, and dodging the candid conversations that are the bedrock of a CEO's job. Raised by a father who never returned fire and crossed his arms in silence, Dunn assumed any back-and-forth argument was the beginning of the end. In reality, he learned, the absence of that friction is what ends things.

He invokes relationship researcher John Gottman's Four Horsemen of doomed partnerships: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Dunn checked all four with Spaly. He also cites the trap of hiring an accounting firm without checking references, letting them steal from him, then flinching from confrontation until debt collectors in leather jackets confronted him at a restaurant.

Unconditional love is the actual medicine. After Dunn struck his girlfriend Manuela and kicked her mother during his 2016 break, he expected abandonment. Instead, Manuela stayed, and her mother Leni put her hand on his and compared the illness to diabetes: manageable if he took his medication and saw his doctor. That acceptance, from a family that had no obligation to keep him, was the stuff of redemption.

Manuela later told him that the passion he poured into managing his illness was the only reason she stayed. Acceptance was not unconditional in the sense of requiring nothing. It was conditional on his relentless commitment to treatment: daily pills, therapy up to three times a week, sleep reports, and radical transparency with everyone he loved.

The same episode, different outcomes. Walking out of Bellevue psychiatric ward, Dunn was met by four NYPD officers and charged with misdemeanor and felony assault. Yet at nearly every turn, privilege caught him: a booking officer who joked to ease his panic, a defense attorney his sister summoned, a family that flew in and set up indefinite lodging, a forgiving girlfriend, an accepting board, and no press leak. His case was adjourned, then dismissed and sealed.

Dunn repeatedly notes what he saw others lack. In the holding cell, he was one of two non-Black men. He watched men casually accept being sent to Rikers. His psychiatrist names a recurring quartet, mental illness, addiction, homelessness, and criminal justice, as an interwoven cluster of pain that swallows those without his advantages.

Discharge is the beginning, not the end. Dunn's stability rests on a permanent, non-negotiable regimen he built with his psychiatrist, Dr. Z. The anchor is Lamictal, a mood stabilizer originally developed for epilepsy that is both anti-manic and anti-depressive, narrowing his mood range without flattening him into numbness the way earlier drugs did. Because he has bipolar type I, standard antidepressants risk catapulting him into mania, so any use is cautious and supervised.

His maintenance system includes therapy multiple times weekly, daily sleep tracking, and total transparency with family. He frames the goal not as eliminating all highs but permitting controlled hypomania and rare peak experiences while shaving off the dangerous extremes. On his wedding day and at his son's birth, both classic mania triggers, he pre-medicated and monitored to stay grounded.