Yeah, this is what I don't understand. so when do you cut your losses, close down the company, and move on to your next venture? I mean, I understand about p

Yeah, this is what I don't understand. so when do you cut your losses, close down the company, and move on to your next venture? I mean, I understand about pivoting. when I first started I blew a bunch of money building a setup to sell storage, then amazon s3 turned that market upside down. (as an aside, I'm considering that market again. S3 is still here, and it's still pretty good, but it's prices are way higher now, relative to hardware and bandwidth costs, than they were then.) I pivoted fairly quickly to FreeBSD chroot jails, which also didn't do so well, and then to Xen VPSs, which worked okay, though it took me another few years before I got the formula completely right. The thing was, I blew through a significant amount of money (well, significant to me; we're probably not talking about more than two porsches of consulting income) but if I had used other people's money, they would have owned quite a lot of the company. and other than my own experience and knowledge, the money spent before a pivot doesn't really help after a pivot. (I mean, the experience and knowledge matter a lot, but bankruptcy court can't take that away) Now, from my perspective (I own my company wholly; no investors, any company commitments and/or debit are co-signed by me personally) unless I'm willing to declare personal bankruptcy, there isn't much difference between shutting down the company and starting a new every pivot, vs. keeping the company the same every pivot. However, I did spend some significant money. If I was using investor money, wouldn't it make sense for me the founder to close the business and start a new one, thus either retaining more equity or gaining more capital (if I got new investors) I mean, obviously, if you do that from one very similar business to another, you are going to probably have legal problems, and at the very least damage your reputation amongst potential investors. But, take for example, my first pivot. Going from selling raw storage to selling shell accounts could reasonably be said to be a completely different business. I don't think investors would blame me for failing to anticipate amazon would swoop in with a price point I couldn't beat, and I don't think they'd hold it against me if I decided to start another company later, selling chroot shell accounts. How does that usually work? what motivates the founder to stick with the existing investors when the business must 'pivot' to something unrelated to it's original intent?