I used to work in VC and have seen a few teams in this type of situation. It sucks to be in the middle of it, but it's actually quite normal. 1) Your VC is not

I used to work in VC and have seen a few teams in this type of situation. It sucks to be in the middle of it, but it's actually quite normal. 1) Your VC is not the main issue VC can cause a lot of harm. They often give bad advice and it's your job to decide when to ignore their advice. But if you're counting on your VC to drive your business, then I think you've gone into the relationship with the wrong assumptions. VCs provide capital. They sell cash for a stake in your company. Once they sign the cheque they've delivered 80%-90% of their value. They don't really have any significant insights into problems, simply because they're not really exposed to customers. VCs hear a lot of hypotheses from startups, but most of them are wrong/bullshit and difficult to interpret in context of what you're building. A VC's network may be useful if you already have something that works, have a sales/marketing strategy, and need warmer intros to potential customers/partners. But VCs are not there to discover problems for you ... So I think it's important for you to readjust your expectations from VCs and investors in general. If they were good operators they'd be building their own companies ... 2) You are lost I think it's good to have a candid conversation with your co-founder on not understanding any problems well enough to build a company. In this scenario, it's important to go into discovery mode, if you still want to build a company, and use your engineering skillsets to work on temporary measures for cashflow (like consulting, dev contracts, etc). You'll also need to manage your personal expenses to survival levels. Given your prior experiences at large tech companies, and the compensation associated with them, it'll be really hard to do mentally but not insurmountable. 3) Startups may not be your thing I generally encourage people to try starting their own companies, but it's not for everyone. You really have to enjoy the "multi-hattedness" of being a founder and the early-stage experience. If you're not enjoying the company-building process, and would rather just build products, then you're likely better off going back to working at a more stable startup/company. You likely learned a lot of skills in trying to build a new company, and other startups will look favourably on that. So I think you have to re-evaluate whether you'd want to keep going. The problems you're dealing with only gets worse as the startup grows. Pivoting at your current stage is the easiest it'll ever get. But the main question is whether you want to be in the game, so to speak, to begin with.