Leading a startup towards success is no easy feat. Leading a startup through success is even harder. But, that is the life founders sign up for. They are constantly pulled in different directions, from finding a viable idea to fundraising, hiring, and scaling.

Throughout (nearly) 15 years in Silicon Valley, with countless fails and a few successes, I’ve learned the hard way that in order to be the best CEO I can be, I need to make time for deliberate actions and habits to find balance in my life, this includes (but isn’t limited to):

1. Defining what your passion is
2. Focusing on balance and self-awareness
3. Finding great mentors and asking for help

Frankly, these are not something a first-time founder or CEO usually makes time to focus on (I didn’t), but I encourage you to do so. The sooner you can understand how to be your best self, the more you can focus on building a well-rounded company and team.
Next, I’ll dive into how to find balance and build a viable product and successful company, while you and your employees remain happy and growing.

Define what your passion is
We tend to think about finding our passion in terms of happiness and pleasure, but there’s also another side to it. Passion can come from hardships and struggles as well–perhaps even more so. In order to be a good founder and (potentially) see the success you’re hoping for, you need to have some level of personal investment and experience in the actual problem you’re setting out to solve. You need to understand the problem, and believe that you have the best solution out there for it.

My first company, Kiko, was a web calendaring tool (before Google launched its Gmail Calendar). My co-founder and I were college students whose schedules consisted of two classes a week. We were not the ideal users of our product, and therefore, didn’t fully understand what someone needed in an online calendar, much less know the best way to build it.

Whether an idea is good or bad is dependent on a multitude of dynamic variables, and one of those variables is you, the person holding the idea, and your relationship to the problem it’s solving. Seeing and investing in hundreds of ideas as a partner at YC, I’ve watched a lot of the good ones fail because of a lack of passion or closeness to the issue. This is one of the biggest reasons I started Atrium.

I like to call myself an “involuntary power user” of legal services–through starting many companies, I’ve experienced a wide range of service quality. I investigated the reason behind that and discovered that even some of the biggest players …