Jessica Wu, Co-Founder & CEO of Sola, on the emotional whiplash of being a founder and how to survive it: "Building a startup is really really unimaginably difficult." @jess123555 describes the founder's journey as a compressed cycle of extreme highs and lows that can unfold within hours of each other: "You're on a roller coaster and you're constantly experiencing very high highs and very low lows and then it's also compressed. Morning might be your best day ever and then 2 hours later you're suffering from probably the worst news you've ever heard." And this isn't a rare occurrence. It happens "pretty much every day," maybe every week. So how do founders survive this? According to Jessica, they eventually develop a mental anchor: "As a founder you really just learn that things sort of return to the norm. You have this comfort in your head that things will be okay even if they don't feel okay because they always end up being okay." But she adds two important conditions to this resilience: "Provided that you are building in the right market and also that you have the right people around you." The takeaway: the volatility of startup life never really goes away. What changes is your relationship to it. Founders who persist learn to trust that the lows are temporary, but that trust only holds if the fundamentals are right: a viable market and a strong support network.