If you want to know more about happiness from a scientific point of view, read or listen to experts like Daniel Kahneman. For example:
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...
"My theory is that a founder’s happiness is tied to the rate of change of their startup’s success. In other words, your happiness graph is the first derivative of your success graph."
He is stating a theory, not a peer reviewed scientific journal. He isn't saying it is a fact, just a theory.
Personally I found his first derivative theory to be interesting and in many ways true of my life.
I know when things feel like they are about to go well, that is as enjoyable as when things are actually going well, but when they slow down I become unhappy.
If you have concrete evidence his theory is total garbage, by all means post it, but providing a random link and saying that anecdotal evidence is complete garbage is obnoxious.
Maybe someone who has the time to spend to prove the OP's theory or disproves it sees this post and it becomes a landmark paper you feel comfortable citing or reading.
It isn't the OP's job to prove it. His job is just to provide something interesting and insightful for people to read which helps get his startup's name out there. In my mind he accomplished both parts flawlessly.
I'm a startup founder myself and I naturally know many others. This is the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Yes, it's stressful. No, I don't know what will happen tomorrow. Yes, it's a lot of work.
But I can tell you one thing. I wake up every day wanting to do one thing: go to the office and work until midnight. Again, this is the best thing that has ever happened to me.
And every other startup founder that I know is the same way.
Keeping track of daily or weekly progress (even as simple as iDoneThis), can help minimize the amplitude of the downswing. It will still be there. It's inevitable. But this can help take some of the sting out of the low points.
I have stress or anxiety when things are up in the air (positive or negative), but happiness or unhappiness has a lot more to do with factors other than the startup. Mostly because I believe in expected value and statistics -- there's a lot of randomness in everything, and you can do things which influence probabilities substantially, but if you've done that and there's an 80% chance of a good outcome, the actual result doesn't mean you're doing well or poorly as much as whether the odds were 80% or 30%.
My goal is to try to use skill, connections, effort, etc. to raise the expected returns as much as possible, then just take a lot of shots to get the right returns. Worry before things are resolved, not after.
- Vladimir Taltos (http://dragaera.wikia.com/wiki/Vlad_Taltos, see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/)
I would chalk this up to the human tendency to always want the next thing, or always want what one doesn't have. And that personality type I think is a perfect fit for a self driven risk taker entrepreneur types.
"Ambition is a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the present - Emanuel Derman"
Are founders less happy than population as a whole? Or is it that we expect founders of successful companies to be happy?
I have no idea how it averages out compared to non-founders and non-startup-employees, but it's a nasty roller-coaster to be sure.
