13 ms·

The last day

320 points by rpsubhub 14y ago

Udo 14y ago
This story mirrors my startup experience exactly, including the moment where I had to lay off my friends, took a last long look at "our place" before turning the lights off, remembering that this was what I had sacrificed my relationship for, including the ending where I thought of nothing but the crushing mountain of personal debt. In some ways, this is the archetypical founder's nightmare, and it's happening every day in a lot of places. If you're doing a startup, this should be the one scenario that haunts you and motivates you to do better.
- fatbird 14y ago
  What it should do is motivate founders to 1) read the 'sunk cost fallacy' article on Wikipedia, and 2) set clear lines well before 'mountain of personal debt' and 'ruined relationships', where you call it over. I walked away from a startup when it ran out of money. The founders were floating a proposal to guarantee a business loan with their houses. That, to me, was a bridge too far, an inability to recognize too much sacrifice in the making. Yes, there's such a thing as 'too much sacrifice'. Businesses are ultimately, as said in the linked article, run by the math, not the CEO. Overcoming the math with a foolhardy level of commitment is a mistake. It's gambling, not math. You'll learn the same lessons about commitment and failure before maxing out every credit card you can get your hands on.
  - Udo 14y ago
    I agree, but I do think there is more to it than a sunk cost fallacy at work, though that part certainly plays a large role. In my case, the first year doing the startup was absolutely miserable, it was indescribably bad from an economical standpoint. Then, things picked up and for the first time we got the feeling that we could actually accomplish our ambitious plans. We identified personally with our "specialness", behind it all was the idea that somehow we had the right stuff. After a period of good profits and rapid expansion, several huge projects suddenly fell through. If we had never been borderline successful (albeit for a short while) I wouldn't have had this manic pipe dream of a possible recovery in the first place. That hubris was fatal. Of course, there is never just one reason for anything. Of course, there was a lot riding on making the startup work, not only in terms of financial commitments (that death spiral only appeared towards the end times) but also a large part of my personal reputation. Failing with a startup in rural Germany is simply different than, say, falling through an incubator in Silicon Valley. There is a lot of stigma involved and everyone knows your name. It's also a bitter experience when your own family and friends start seeing you personally as a disappointing failure. The deeper lesson here I think is to watch out for this type of creeping overcommitment as well as keep a watchful eye on what it actually means to fail. The level of personal commitment I mistakenly applied to my startup was simply toxic, to the point where I couldn't do my job anymore. While maybe trivial for some, it's a huge and complex lesson for people like me who are too quick to put too much behind their ideas.
    - fatbird 14y ago
      I absolutely agree that there's a swirling mess of emotions and impulses around giving up and walking away and declaring it over. I was, rationally, absolutely in the clear that it was time to walk away from my own experience. But I still deal with a certain emotional residue around doubts about my decision and worries about how the others think of me.
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- luke_s 14y ago
  Ouch! Two questions: 1 - Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently? 2 - After you turn off the lights and walk out, what happens next? Have you managed to bounce back? I would imagine that the skills that enabled you to run a startup (even an unsuccessful one) would be highly in demand.
  - Udo 14y ago
    1 - Absolutely, there is a huge list of things I would have done differently - and there's a huge list of failure modes I now know how to look for. The most obvious thing: I would never again borrow money personally to invest in a failing business, that was just unspeakably arrogant and stupid. But there are also a lot of operational and technical details that I would never screw up like this again. 2 - I took a job pretty much immediately. I consolidated my debt into a more manageable package, I'm still paying it off though (it's really huge). The alternative would have been declaring personal bankruptcy, which in hindsight might have been a much better move, but at least I am taking responsibility this way. I did bounce back in a sense that my life is in order and I'm financially sound again. I have a good job (yes, my crisis management experience paid off), I travel a lot on business, I have a nice car. But it's not the same as succeeding with your own company. On the other hand, my job has taught me several key things I should have known when I did the startup, so I'm really thankful for the opportunities I got. I'm pretty sure I'll try this again, in a safer and saner environment. It will definitely involve less dreams and more math.
typicalrunt 14y ago
Nicely written and invokes a bit of an emotional response from me. But just a bit... And then I realize that this person (whoever s/he is, real or fictional) has suffered from the fundamental problem of all business: profit. For some reason, the IT industry as of late has dismissed profits and traditional business rules for the sake of fictional ideals like pageviews, user signups, and such. And while the latter things matter somewhat, there must be a directed line from those metrics to dollars and cents, because utility companies (electricity, Internet, water) like to be paid in dollars and cents, not promises and wishes.
- drivingmenuts 14y ago
  Many technical people are uncomfortable with business because it's too organic. It would be really nice if X amount of effort guaranteed Y amount of dollars, but that's only somewhat predictable some of the time. There's also that whole marketing thing (which I understand the need for, but will never understand the thing itself) that can drive tech people batshit.
- jasonshen 14y ago
  Profit is every bit as fictional of an ideal as a pageview or user signup. Most business activity do not take into account the externalities (corn is "profitable" but heavily subsidized by the government and most manufactured goods end up in a landfill that's not paid for by the company) that are created but not accounted for in the "Profit and Loss Statement"
  - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
    You can't pay your employees with page views. Profits (or revenue, to be a bit more precise), on the other hand, are directly exchangeable for rent, food, payroll, keeping the lights on, and other such necessities. The dollars a farmer uses to make payroll are fungible. It doesn't matter if they came from a stupid government subsidy or a sale at a farmer's market.
    - jasonshen 14y ago
Kaedon 14y ago
It's interesting to think about what can happen after the collapse of a startup, particularly when we tend to give so much of ourselves to the process. I think it's inherently a regenerative process, though. A company may disappear but the lessons stick with you. I'd guess it's not easier but perhaps more familiar the next go around. That's comforting.
- rhizome 14y ago
  One lesson that can be learned is to give less of yourself to a startup until they prove their worth, and that they're worth it.
  - tjic 14y ago
    I guarantee you that people who avoid working hard at their startups will never have any success that tempts them to work harder.
    - aes256 14y ago
      It depends. There's working 'hard' (maximum hours, maximum effort, maximum stress, etc.) and there's working smart. There's no point working hard if you're not working smart; if your priorities are wrong, you're trying to do too much, or ultimately, you're pouring your heart and soul into a business that just isn't viable.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      By "hard," do you mean 80hrs a week for half-price?
  - NathanKP 14y ago
    The argument could be made that giving as much of yourself as possible is a crucial ingredient to making the startup worth it. After all if you are holding back the product and business isn't building itself. Of course it probably isn't healthy to make a business the center of your life, but people who do will likely have a higher chance of success in that business because they are willing to put forth a lot more effort to keep it going than someone who isn't as committed, and therefore not as concerned if the business fails.
ForrestN 14y ago
I'm sorry for being negative but I must say this is pretty hard to take. This narrative is cliche in both in form and content. It's painfully melodramatic and offers almost no insight whatsoever. Yes, major losses in any sphere of life can be poignant (in a way this text surely is not). So what? Where's the value?
- saraid216 14y ago
  It's always nice to know that you're not the only one who felt this way.
- Udo 14y ago
  The problem is not that you're negative, it's that you're unwilling to see the potential of learning from other people's mistakes. Just shutting yourself off from the prospect and consequences of failure does not automatically make you immune to those mistakes. Smart people fail every day, and sometimes those failures are personal disasters. It's a good idea to remind yourself what's at stake sometimes. Winning the startup lottery is also a cliche, but I don't see anyone complaining when random successful people relate their accounts (some of which could not possibly translate to anyone else).
  - ForrestN 14y ago
    This isn't about anyone's mistakes, it's about the emotional scenery surrounding some generic failure. What is there to learn? That completely devoting one's self to a single project requires sacrifice? That betting your emotional life on that project means, uh, risking your emotional life? If the point of this is to remind me that catastrophic failure is catastrophic then it can easily be edited to a single sentence. Your latter argument just doesn't make any sense. The fact that I haven't happened to read and respond similarly to a banal description of how it feels to succeed isn't evidence of anything.
    - Udo 14y ago
      It's not generic failure, it's very specific - it's an accurate description of a failure scenario that affects many startup founders. In a lot of cases, these sacrifices happen creepingly and gradually. The lesson in this case is recognizing the signs of overcommitment and a preview of what failure can look like. Apparently, you didn't need this lesson, and that's totally fine. I for my part would have considered myself very fortunate if somebody had given me this kind of preview before everything actually turned to shit. You complain about banality, and maybe that's an accurate label. Anything that doesn't concern or engage you could be considered banal. Maybe life is largely banal, in hindsight at least.
electic 14y ago
I am a co-founder and when I bootstrapped my company we made a pact to make sure the startup had to support its own weight. It had to pay its own bills. It had to grow its own customer base. It was a person. Everything we did, everything we made, everything we said, everything we coded, made the startup stand on its own feet. Granted, things change after series A but I say this because if you find yourself using your own credit cards, your own savings, then you need to think different.
- lmm 14y ago
  Where did you get the money from to start it? No-one's going to buy anything from a startup that does nothing, and doing anything means at a minimum some labour (and usually buying some stuff as well). Unless you're very well-connected, if you're not investing yourself why would anyone else do so? If you happen to be wealthy already then great (I suspect most successful startups are founded by children of rich families), but if not your choices are either spend time acquiring money to put into it, or use the money/credit you have.
courtewing 14y ago
I find this story extremely tragic -- not because this man's company, his dreams, failed so tremendously, but that he allowed two fundamental aspects of his adult life to fail with it. Is it the prevailing opinion in the startup community these days that building up personal debt and letting your relationships fail are worthwhile parts of starting a company, or is this, as I suspect, just a sad story about misaligned priorities? I don't mean to attack any premise of the story; I'm honestly curious what startup founders think of this article. I personally have no goals of huge buy-outs nor IPOs, but I would like to start my own business some day. I can't imagine being willing to give up my significant other to focus on the business, and I would hope that about the time I start thinking about using personal credit cards to finance the company I also stop and realize that the company is dead already. I sincerely don't know what I'm suppose to take from this article, but I have the feeling based on some of the comments in this thread that the parts I find important are not the same parts that others find important.
- obviouslygreen 14y ago
  While it isn't me now -- I learned this lesson while I was still working in other people's startups, before actually building my own -- this kind of heads-down, work is life, look up at the end and realize "wow, what was I thinking" is very familiar. I suspect a lot of people here have gone through the period of compulsive overwork that comes after learning skills but before gaining perspective.
- Swizec 14y ago
  For me personal debt came simply because I wanted the startup to succeed. Doing whatever it takes was simply taken for granted (by me). Oh, money is needed? Sure, I'll just take out a loan I'm betting my life on this startup, what could possibly go wrong if I bet a tiny bit more? The personal relatinoship part ... what personal relationship part? I had a serious girlfriend that I got to see one hour a week or less. And even then I was so distracted by the mountain of worry and stress from the startup that I barely even noticed she was there. It took a year or two to properly bounce back from all that. But I think all in all I'm a better bloke for it. Much more able to make sure things happen in such a way they don't cause too much stress. Actually, the biggest lesson was that working too much produces more extra work than it solves. These days I take plenty of breaks. I also make sure I stop working the moment I don't feel at 100% anymore ... people aren't paying me to work when I'm tired.
sentiental 14y ago
One of the best decisions I ever made was to admit failure early when I saw it coming. It wasn't ambiguous or one of those "if I try hard enough, I can turn this ship around" situations. It was clear that my idea, project, marketing efforts -- all of it -- was essentially going down the tubes. The cash in my savings account burnt off like fog on the Golden Gate. These are standard pressures, but there were some systemic things that keyed me off to how clearly it had failed. For one, my heart wasn't in it. It was like I had spent months crafting an idea that I thought an audience of customers would receive happily - only to realize I wouldn't use it or care about it myself. It also had become a business proposition I couldn't succeed at myself. I needed more help than ever. So I packed up my stuff and killed it. It was painful, but I am glad I had the ability to see the truth before getting so bad as to be like the scene painted in this post. That said, it's not always obvious like it was in my case; I have tremendous respect for folks that go through this and fight to the bitter end.
- uahal 14y ago
  Had the same experience. Feel the same way. If it's not working but there's a chance you could make it something valuable, give it another go. If it's not going to work and you know it's not going to work, it's time to shut it down and move on. (edited for clarity)
technotony 14y ago
I've experienced my own version of this once before, where I lost a girlfriend (and distanced myself from friends and family) but ultimately it didn't work out. My advice is to remember that it's a marathon, not a sprint. Unless you nurture and protect the important relationships around you you will burn out and the recovery from failure if it comes will be that much longer. If you are 22 or 23 a girlfriend may be less important, but remember to invest time in seeing your friends (non-company!) and family. Prioritize time as a concrete thing that will keep you refreshed and energized over the long haul.
F_J_H 14y ago
"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." ~ Socrates
jmmcd 14y ago
Two bizarre comments on that page. One is (paraphrasing) "we don't do maudlin stuff like this -- that's for people across the pond" and the other "here in the US we don't go to debtors' prison". From this end of the pond, I would've guessed that Europeans were the jaded cynical ones and USians the heart-on-sleeve maudlin primary-colour-emotions ones. If I had to choose, that is. And startup founders don't go to prison here either.
knowtheory 14y ago
> Someone with dreams untainted by failure. This sentiment is frustrating to hear because of it's misconception about what success is. Those who have never faced failure are not good, they are just lucky. Replicable success requires contact with failure.
rowdyrabbit 14y ago
Loved this piece, I haven't been in that position, but I could feel the pain.
OldSchool 14y ago
Hopefully this is a fictional account of at least the emotions felt by the subject, Mr. "CEO." If you're going to be in business, I suggest throw out your hockey sticks, pivots, titles, and other nomenclature associated with any romantic fiction you think you're embarking upon. All business is about profit - the "math." Most often that means selling something that costs you less to acquire/produce. Sometimes for a savvy few, that means the business itself is the product. If you generate substantial profit, you'll be a hero who can do no wrong, with admirers in proportion. If instead you run out of money, you quietly close up shop and start over or take a real job for a while. If you're really cut out for business you have to be thick-skinned and rational. Any emotional attachment you have to the business will likely just impair your judgement and cause you to miss opportunity or worse take you down with it someday.
bencxr 14y ago
Great piece. What is important to know is that it is not over. I hope there will be a part 2 somewhere in the future - telling of the comeback!
neovive 14y ago
This reminds me strongly of the original dot-com boom/bust around 2000. Working at a venture-funded startup with flashy launch parties, huge payroll and sprawling office space on Park Avenue. We knew it wouldn't last, so we enjoyed the moment while we could.
opendomain 14y ago
This is EXACTLY how I felt with my first start-up Free.TV It took me years to get over the failure and actually learn from it. But while I am more wise now in my new startups, it makes me realize maybe they may not be as a "big Idea" or that perhaps I am now too cautious and so may not be as successful. Thank you for putting my feelings in such a clear story.
tptacek 14y ago
The amount of privilege built into this "painful failure" is disquieting. Here's a person whose biggest problem in life appears to be that he's in debt and, for the moment, unemployed. But: he was the CEO of a company funded to the tune of 8xFTE, and can thus almost certainly walk into hundreds of VP/Product Management or Business Development roles immediately, all of which will pay him more than any of his technical employees. Employees who are also, let's please face it, immensely privileged. I wouldn't care, except that towards the end someone texts him and he angrily pouts that nobody can know his pain. Well, it's not for me to judge, right. But as someone who does in fact believe that people have an immortal soul, I would say that that whatever the universal spirit or cosmic order or divine intent that unites our existance is, it should probably not be taunted with statements like "you cannot know the pain of someone who was the CEO of a tech company shutting down his office for the last time before hunting for a job in the hottest sector of the entire economy", because that universal whatever might take the time to show you what it's like to be the 48-year-old employee of a midwest factory being shut down. I had a neighbor who's kid --- a great kid, from what I can tell --- brought a pocketknife to school to show other kids. He was zero-tolerance expelled. My neighbor was doing OK for himself, but not OK to the extent of "could swing private school". From what I understand, that event killed it for them: they had to move, the mom and kids to one state (where the extended family lived and the school district would admit the boy) and the dad to a neighboring state to work and commute back on weekends. Do you know a lot of tech people that have had to do that? Then I'd like to suggest those people have standing to at least commiserate with the founder of a failed startup. And this is just something I saw personally; my inclination is, shit like this happens. Shit that is too boring to be the topic of a news story at the top of HN. Shit that happens to people who aren't lucky enough to be in the middle of the startup economy, and that happens approximately all the time. Grand projects fail all the time. Open source projects die. Web communities die. Clubs wind down. Sporting teams disband. I write this so you can angrily tell me that I'm wrong: tell me what's so bad about a tech startup failing in 2012? (Let me preempt one obvious angry barb by saying that was a cofounder and investor in a VC-funded startup that failed in 2001, the "nuclear winter"). Please: I'm not saying that startup people are so lucky that they're not allowed to be unhappy when their companies fail. I am saying something else that is more subtle than that.
- 14y ago
ChristianMarks 14y ago
The ending is wrong. The former CEO should not just sulk in darkness. He should be consumed with terror and overwhelming anxiety as he sinks with his gutted office into to the sulphurous underworld, while low-level demon-bureaucrats from Hades emerge from the pit to jab at him with their pitchforks.
forrestkyle 14y ago
Boo hoo. This is emo nonsense. Life is a brutal war for survival you are going to get severely beaten down a few dozen times before you ever make it to the top. 1% of 1% have an easy route to the top. The rest take it on the chin a few times, spit out their teeth, and keep throwing punches. You seriously can't let that much negativity into your own life. Your business failed? Cool. That same day, 30,000 kids starved to death in Africa. You learned a lot about running a business and discovered that your specific idea didn't work out. Move on and find a new adventure. Live in the windshield, not the rear view mirror.
marshray 14y ago
"It was over now. Two years of work and dreams replaced by a landing page." Two years...that's it? Developing tech products is an exercise in walking away. The vast majority of code written is a total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala no longer in regular use by anyone within a few years. It used to be said that most software projects were canceled due to overruns before completion. "Even the t-shirts had been given away." Serious question...what else was anyone going to do with them? "8 IKEA desks = $1,200, 8 Aeron chairs (used) = $4,000" I don't think I've ever written a line of code while sitting at a $150 desk in a $500 (used) chair. "Nobody ever told him the hockey stick of user growth might look more like a baseball bat laying in an empty field." B. S. This piece is weird. I don't get it.
marshray 14y ago
There's a way to read this piece that's neither "suffering entrepreneur" nor "first world privilege". Pouring all one's hopes and years of effort into a startup is certainly an emotional rollercoaster. If you are the last one out to turn out the lights, it's going to be a poignant moment. If that happened to me, I'd probably consider writing a blog post about it too. But we don't have to react to it as if it means anything deeper than that.
endlessvoid94 14y ago
nowhere to go but up.
patio11 14y ago
If this is in the general vicinity of "Worst. Day. Ever." for you, your life is pretty effing awesome now isn't it. One Thanksgiving a year seems inadequate under the circumstances. (I respectfully suggest that anyone unable to put death of a startup in perspective invest some effort in rekindling ties with folks outside our little bubble. Again, it's Thanksgiving, so you've got a built-in excuse.)
- pbiggar 14y ago
  That's a little callous, no (even if it is a fictional character)? Imagine if everything you worked for over the last 5 year dried up, and you had for some reason to go back to life as a salaryman. Not the end of the world probably, but you'd be pretty depressed. The lack of empathy in this thread bothers me.
  - rmc 14y ago
    Now imagine everything dries up, and there is nothing to go back to. No possibility of a job to fall back on.
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      Now imagine they killed our families and razed our crops and burned our villages - leaving desolation and famine in their wake! We can imagine any kind of nightmarish scenario we like, but that doesn't mean we should ignore all the people who are doing better. Imagine if our social policy was to only help people who had escaped war-torn famine, and tell everyone else to suck it up! So the protagonist in the story could be in a much worse place, but it still sucks for him. You have to be pretty callous not to have some empathy for him.
Tichy 14y ago
First World Problems...
MrJagil 14y ago
I am not an entrepreneur in the HN-sense, so i may just be naive but... Why do you have to shut down you web company once you run out of money? I mesn, can't you just lay off the employees, close the office, take the servers to your basement, get a 'real' job and turn your startup into a hobby? I mean, the only really necessary expense there is to running a wep-app or whatever, is the electrical bill, right? I assume you've build something in those two years, why flush it away? Honest question, hope to learn more about the nuances of being a founder!
Sarien 14y ago
While this story is sad I think it is super important for YC. This page is usually crowded with stories and posts of people telling you how they made it and what you can do to be super successful yourself. Stories like this one serve the important purpose of unskewing our views on how easy it is to start a company and get rich. There are reasons why people like 9-5 jobs at big companies (first and foremost probably safety) and it is important not to lose track of them reading all those "you just need to write everything on pink flashcards and your startup is going to make millions next week" stories. :)
duiker101 14y ago
A sad story, but if you start by getting 4000$ of chairs you are doing something wrong, no wonder your expenses were bigger than the revenues.
- rwallace 14y ago
  The cost of buying eight chairs is negligible compared to the other costs associated with hiring eight people. It may be that the company's expenses were too high, but if so, they needed to be cut by hiring fewer people. Buying cheaper chairs is a piss-poor way to save money.
daniel-cussen 14y ago
>> When he started the company, he had a girlfriend. She was a sweet girl, who actually got his Isaac Asimov references. What have you done!?
b1daly 14y ago
The comments criticizing the protagonist are somewhat churlish. If someone shares painful emotions with the a comment like "how could they know my pain," he is demonstrating that he has some awareness that his emotions include self pity, that his feelings are subjective. Generally, in the the US anyway, people know that sharing such feelings is not cool. (People start with snarky comments along the lines of "call the waaahbmulance") The author is trying to buck the huge social pressure against admitting such feelings. Therefore, to ridicule such a person is re-enforcing the paradigms which drive the feelings in the first place. On a personal note, I have never been comforted in times of unhappiness to have it pointed out that many people have it far worse. I guess if you are someone who derives a sense of well being based on how well you are doing relative to others, being reminded of how much better off you than the hordes of wretched who walk this earth could give you some happiness.
lifeformed 14y ago
Haha geeze, the crowd here is brutal. I don't think the writer is saying that he has the objectively worst life, and everyone should feel bad for him. It's just a microcosm of the human experience. This article is showing that, even in our prosperous country, a relatively successful person can feel the same pain of failure and rejection that everyone feels at some point. The rich and poor all struggle to find out who they are and what their place in life is. This isn't a contest of who suffered the most. Even though dying is common, it doesn't mean a death is trivial. Personal experiences should be able to be shared without marginalization.

320 points by rpsubhub 14y ago

Udo 14y ago

This story mirrors my startup experience exactly, including the moment where I had to lay off my friends, took a last long look at "our place" before turning the lights off, remembering that this was what I had sacrificed my relationship for, including the ending where I thought of nothing but the crushing mountain of personal debt. In some ways, this is the archetypical founder's nightmare, and it's happening every day in a lot of places. If you're doing a startup, this should be the one scenario that haunts you and motivates you to do better.

fatbird 14y ago
What it should do is motivate founders to 1) read the 'sunk cost fallacy' article on Wikipedia, and 2) set clear lines well before 'mountain of personal debt' and 'ruined relationships', where you call it over. I walked away from a startup when it ran out of money. The founders were floating a proposal to guarantee a business loan with their houses. That, to me, was a bridge too far, an inability to recognize too much sacrifice in the making. Yes, there's such a thing as 'too much sacrifice'. Businesses are ultimately, as said in the linked article, run by the math, not the CEO. Overcoming the math with a foolhardy level of commitment is a mistake. It's gambling, not math. You'll learn the same lessons about commitment and failure before maxing out every credit card you can get your hands on.
- Udo 14y ago
  I agree, but I do think there is more to it than a sunk cost fallacy at work, though that part certainly plays a large role. In my case, the first year doing the startup was absolutely miserable, it was indescribably bad from an economical standpoint. Then, things picked up and for the first time we got the feeling that we could actually accomplish our ambitious plans. We identified personally with our "specialness", behind it all was the idea that somehow we had the right stuff. After a period of good profits and rapid expansion, several huge projects suddenly fell through. If we had never been borderline successful (albeit for a short while) I wouldn't have had this manic pipe dream of a possible recovery in the first place. That hubris was fatal. Of course, there is never just one reason for anything. Of course, there was a lot riding on making the startup work, not only in terms of financial commitments (that death spiral only appeared towards the end times) but also a large part of my personal reputation. Failing with a startup in rural Germany is simply different than, say, falling through an incubator in Silicon Valley. There is a lot of stigma involved and everyone knows your name. It's also a bitter experience when your own family and friends start seeing you personally as a disappointing failure. The deeper lesson here I think is to watch out for this type of creeping overcommitment as well as keep a watchful eye on what it actually means to fail. The level of personal commitment I mistakenly applied to my startup was simply toxic, to the point where I couldn't do my job anymore. While maybe trivial for some, it's a huge and complex lesson for people like me who are too quick to put too much behind their ideas.
  - fatbird 14y ago
    I absolutely agree that there's a swirling mess of emotions and impulses around giving up and walking away and declaring it over. I was, rationally, absolutely in the clear that it was time to walk away from my own experience. But I still deal with a certain emotional residue around doubts about my decision and worries about how the others think of me.
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luke_s 14y ago
Ouch! Two questions: 1 - Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently? 2 - After you turn off the lights and walk out, what happens next? Have you managed to bounce back? I would imagine that the skills that enabled you to run a startup (even an unsuccessful one) would be highly in demand.
- Udo 14y ago
  1 - Absolutely, there is a huge list of things I would have done differently - and there's a huge list of failure modes I now know how to look for. The most obvious thing: I would never again borrow money personally to invest in a failing business, that was just unspeakably arrogant and stupid. But there are also a lot of operational and technical details that I would never screw up like this again. 2 - I took a job pretty much immediately. I consolidated my debt into a more manageable package, I'm still paying it off though (it's really huge). The alternative would have been declaring personal bankruptcy, which in hindsight might have been a much better move, but at least I am taking responsibility this way. I did bounce back in a sense that my life is in order and I'm financially sound again. I have a good job (yes, my crisis management experience paid off), I travel a lot on business, I have a nice car. But it's not the same as succeeding with your own company. On the other hand, my job has taught me several key things I should have known when I did the startup, so I'm really thankful for the opportunities I got. I'm pretty sure I'll try this again, in a safer and saner environment. It will definitely involve less dreams and more math.

typicalrunt 14y ago

Nicely written and invokes a bit of an emotional response from me. But just a bit... And then I realize that this person (whoever s/he is, real or fictional) has suffered from the fundamental problem of all business: profit. For some reason, the IT industry as of late has dismissed profits and traditional business rules for the sake of fictional ideals like pageviews, user signups, and such. And while the latter things matter somewhat, there must be a directed line from those metrics to dollars and cents, because utility companies (electricity, Internet, water) like to be paid in dollars and cents, not promises and wishes.

drivingmenuts 14y ago
Many technical people are uncomfortable with business because it's too organic. It would be really nice if X amount of effort guaranteed Y amount of dollars, but that's only somewhat predictable some of the time. There's also that whole marketing thing (which I understand the need for, but will never understand the thing itself) that can drive tech people batshit.
jasonshen 14y ago
Profit is every bit as fictional of an ideal as a pageview or user signup. Most business activity do not take into account the externalities (corn is "profitable" but heavily subsidized by the government and most manufactured goods end up in a landfill that's not paid for by the company) that are created but not accounted for in the "Profit and Loss Statement"
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  You can't pay your employees with page views. Profits (or revenue, to be a bit more precise), on the other hand, are directly exchangeable for rent, food, payroll, keeping the lights on, and other such necessities. The dollars a farmer uses to make payroll are fungible. It doesn't matter if they came from a stupid government subsidy or a sale at a farmer's market.
  - jasonshen 14y ago

Kaedon 14y ago

It's interesting to think about what can happen after the collapse of a startup, particularly when we tend to give so much of ourselves to the process. I think it's inherently a regenerative process, though. A company may disappear but the lessons stick with you. I'd guess it's not easier but perhaps more familiar the next go around. That's comforting.

rhizome 14y ago
One lesson that can be learned is to give less of yourself to a startup until they prove their worth, and that they're worth it.
- tjic 14y ago
  I guarantee you that people who avoid working hard at their startups will never have any success that tempts them to work harder.
  - aes256 14y ago
    It depends. There's working 'hard' (maximum hours, maximum effort, maximum stress, etc.) and there's working smart. There's no point working hard if you're not working smart; if your priorities are wrong, you're trying to do too much, or ultimately, you're pouring your heart and soul into a business that just isn't viable.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    By "hard," do you mean 80hrs a week for half-price?
- NathanKP 14y ago
  The argument could be made that giving as much of yourself as possible is a crucial ingredient to making the startup worth it. After all if you are holding back the product and business isn't building itself. Of course it probably isn't healthy to make a business the center of your life, but people who do will likely have a higher chance of success in that business because they are willing to put forth a lot more effort to keep it going than someone who isn't as committed, and therefore not as concerned if the business fails.

ForrestN 14y ago

I'm sorry for being negative but I must say this is pretty hard to take. This narrative is cliche in both in form and content. It's painfully melodramatic and offers almost no insight whatsoever. Yes, major losses in any sphere of life can be poignant (in a way this text surely is not). So what? Where's the value?

saraid216 14y ago
It's always nice to know that you're not the only one who felt this way.
Udo 14y ago
The problem is not that you're negative, it's that you're unwilling to see the potential of learning from other people's mistakes. Just shutting yourself off from the prospect and consequences of failure does not automatically make you immune to those mistakes. Smart people fail every day, and sometimes those failures are personal disasters. It's a good idea to remind yourself what's at stake sometimes. Winning the startup lottery is also a cliche, but I don't see anyone complaining when random successful people relate their accounts (some of which could not possibly translate to anyone else).
- ForrestN 14y ago
  This isn't about anyone's mistakes, it's about the emotional scenery surrounding some generic failure. What is there to learn? That completely devoting one's self to a single project requires sacrifice? That betting your emotional life on that project means, uh, risking your emotional life? If the point of this is to remind me that catastrophic failure is catastrophic then it can easily be edited to a single sentence. Your latter argument just doesn't make any sense. The fact that I haven't happened to read and respond similarly to a banal description of how it feels to succeed isn't evidence of anything.
  - Udo 14y ago
    It's not generic failure, it's very specific - it's an accurate description of a failure scenario that affects many startup founders. In a lot of cases, these sacrifices happen creepingly and gradually. The lesson in this case is recognizing the signs of overcommitment and a preview of what failure can look like. Apparently, you didn't need this lesson, and that's totally fine. I for my part would have considered myself very fortunate if somebody had given me this kind of preview before everything actually turned to shit. You complain about banality, and maybe that's an accurate label. Anything that doesn't concern or engage you could be considered banal. Maybe life is largely banal, in hindsight at least.

electic 14y ago

I am a co-founder and when I bootstrapped my company we made a pact to make sure the startup had to support its own weight. It had to pay its own bills. It had to grow its own customer base. It was a person. Everything we did, everything we made, everything we said, everything we coded, made the startup stand on its own feet. Granted, things change after series A but I say this because if you find yourself using your own credit cards, your own savings, then you need to think different.

lmm 14y ago
Where did you get the money from to start it? No-one's going to buy anything from a startup that does nothing, and doing anything means at a minimum some labour (and usually buying some stuff as well). Unless you're very well-connected, if you're not investing yourself why would anyone else do so? If you happen to be wealthy already then great (I suspect most successful startups are founded by children of rich families), but if not your choices are either spend time acquiring money to put into it, or use the money/credit you have.

courtewing 14y ago

I find this story extremely tragic -- not because this man's company, his dreams, failed so tremendously, but that he allowed two fundamental aspects of his adult life to fail with it. Is it the prevailing opinion in the startup community these days that building up personal debt and letting your relationships fail are worthwhile parts of starting a company, or is this, as I suspect, just a sad story about misaligned priorities? I don't mean to attack any premise of the story; I'm honestly curious what startup founders think of this article. I personally have no goals of huge buy-outs nor IPOs, but I would like to start my own business some day. I can't imagine being willing to give up my significant other to focus on the business, and I would hope that about the time I start thinking about using personal credit cards to finance the company I also stop and realize that the company is dead already. I sincerely don't know what I'm suppose to take from this article, but I have the feeling based on some of the comments in this thread that the parts I find important are not the same parts that others find important.

obviouslygreen 14y ago
While it isn't me now -- I learned this lesson while I was still working in other people's startups, before actually building my own -- this kind of heads-down, work is life, look up at the end and realize "wow, what was I thinking" is very familiar. I suspect a lot of people here have gone through the period of compulsive overwork that comes after learning skills but before gaining perspective.
Swizec 14y ago
For me personal debt came simply because I wanted the startup to succeed. Doing whatever it takes was simply taken for granted (by me). Oh, money is needed? Sure, I'll just take out a loan I'm betting my life on this startup, what could possibly go wrong if I bet a tiny bit more? The personal relatinoship part ... what personal relationship part? I had a serious girlfriend that I got to see one hour a week or less. And even then I was so distracted by the mountain of worry and stress from the startup that I barely even noticed she was there. It took a year or two to properly bounce back from all that. But I think all in all I'm a better bloke for it. Much more able to make sure things happen in such a way they don't cause too much stress. Actually, the biggest lesson was that working too much produces more extra work than it solves. These days I take plenty of breaks. I also make sure I stop working the moment I don't feel at 100% anymore ... people aren't paying me to work when I'm tired.

sentiental 14y ago

One of the best decisions I ever made was to admit failure early when I saw it coming. It wasn't ambiguous or one of those "if I try hard enough, I can turn this ship around" situations. It was clear that my idea, project, marketing efforts -- all of it -- was essentially going down the tubes. The cash in my savings account burnt off like fog on the Golden Gate. These are standard pressures, but there were some systemic things that keyed me off to how clearly it had failed. For one, my heart wasn't in it. It was like I had spent months crafting an idea that I thought an audience of customers would receive happily - only to realize I wouldn't use it or care about it myself. It also had become a business proposition I couldn't succeed at myself. I needed more help than ever. So I packed up my stuff and killed it. It was painful, but I am glad I had the ability to see the truth before getting so bad as to be like the scene painted in this post. That said, it's not always obvious like it was in my case; I have tremendous respect for folks that go through this and fight to the bitter end.

uahal 14y ago
Had the same experience. Feel the same way. If it's not working but there's a chance you could make it something valuable, give it another go. If it's not going to work and you know it's not going to work, it's time to shut it down and move on. (edited for clarity)

technotony 14y ago

I've experienced my own version of this once before, where I lost a girlfriend (and distanced myself from friends and family) but ultimately it didn't work out. My advice is to remember that it's a marathon, not a sprint. Unless you nurture and protect the important relationships around you you will burn out and the recovery from failure if it comes will be that much longer. If you are 22 or 23 a girlfriend may be less important, but remember to invest time in seeing your friends (non-company!) and family. Prioritize time as a concrete thing that will keep you refreshed and energized over the long haul.

F_J_H 14y ago

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." ~ Socrates

jmmcd 14y ago

Two bizarre comments on that page. One is (paraphrasing) "we don't do maudlin stuff like this -- that's for people across the pond" and the other "here in the US we don't go to debtors' prison". From this end of the pond, I would've guessed that Europeans were the jaded cynical ones and USians the heart-on-sleeve maudlin primary-colour-emotions ones. If I had to choose, that is. And startup founders don't go to prison here either.

knowtheory 14y ago

> Someone with dreams untainted by failure. This sentiment is frustrating to hear because of it's misconception about what success is. Those who have never faced failure are not good, they are just lucky. Replicable success requires contact with failure.

rowdyrabbit 14y ago

Loved this piece, I haven't been in that position, but I could feel the pain.

OldSchool 14y ago

Hopefully this is a fictional account of at least the emotions felt by the subject, Mr. "CEO." If you're going to be in business, I suggest throw out your hockey sticks, pivots, titles, and other nomenclature associated with any romantic fiction you think you're embarking upon. All business is about profit - the "math." Most often that means selling something that costs you less to acquire/produce. Sometimes for a savvy few, that means the business itself is the product. If you generate substantial profit, you'll be a hero who can do no wrong, with admirers in proportion. If instead you run out of money, you quietly close up shop and start over or take a real job for a while. If you're really cut out for business you have to be thick-skinned and rational. Any emotional attachment you have to the business will likely just impair your judgement and cause you to miss opportunity or worse take you down with it someday.

bencxr 14y ago

Great piece. What is important to know is that it is not over. I hope there will be a part 2 somewhere in the future - telling of the comeback!

neovive 14y ago

This reminds me strongly of the original dot-com boom/bust around 2000. Working at a venture-funded startup with flashy launch parties, huge payroll and sprawling office space on Park Avenue. We knew it wouldn't last, so we enjoyed the moment while we could.

opendomain 14y ago

This is EXACTLY how I felt with my first start-up Free.TV It took me years to get over the failure and actually learn from it. But while I am more wise now in my new startups, it makes me realize maybe they may not be as a "big Idea" or that perhaps I am now too cautious and so may not be as successful. Thank you for putting my feelings in such a clear story.

tptacek 14y ago

The amount of privilege built into this "painful failure" is disquieting. Here's a person whose biggest problem in life appears to be that he's in debt and, for the moment, unemployed. But: he was the CEO of a company funded to the tune of 8xFTE, and can thus almost certainly walk into hundreds of VP/Product Management or Business Development roles immediately, all of which will pay him more than any of his technical employees. Employees who are also, let's please face it, immensely privileged. I wouldn't care, except that towards the end someone texts him and he angrily pouts that nobody can know his pain. Well, it's not for me to judge, right. But as someone who does in fact believe that people have an immortal soul, I would say that that whatever the universal spirit or cosmic order or divine intent that unites our existance is, it should probably not be taunted with statements like "you cannot know the pain of someone who was the CEO of a tech company shutting down his office for the last time before hunting for a job in the hottest sector of the entire economy", because that universal whatever might take the time to show you what it's like to be the 48-year-old employee of a midwest factory being shut down. I had a neighbor who's kid --- a great kid, from what I can tell --- brought a pocketknife to school to show other kids. He was zero-tolerance expelled. My neighbor was doing OK for himself, but not OK to the extent of "could swing private school". From what I understand, that event killed it for them: they had to move, the mom and kids to one state (where the extended family lived and the school district would admit the boy) and the dad to a neighboring state to work and commute back on weekends. Do you know a lot of tech people that have had to do that? Then I'd like to suggest those people have standing to at least commiserate with the founder of a failed startup. And this is just something I saw personally; my inclination is, shit like this happens. Shit that is too boring to be the topic of a news story at the top of HN. Shit that happens to people who aren't lucky enough to be in the middle of the startup economy, and that happens approximately all the time. Grand projects fail all the time. Open source projects die. Web communities die. Clubs wind down. Sporting teams disband. I write this so you can angrily tell me that I'm wrong: tell me what's so bad about a tech startup failing in 2012? (Let me preempt one obvious angry barb by saying that was a cofounder and investor in a VC-funded startup that failed in 2001, the "nuclear winter"). Please: I'm not saying that startup people are so lucky that they're not allowed to be unhappy when their companies fail. I am saying something else that is more subtle than that.

14y ago

ChristianMarks 14y ago

The ending is wrong. The former CEO should not just sulk in darkness. He should be consumed with terror and overwhelming anxiety as he sinks with his gutted office into to the sulphurous underworld, while low-level demon-bureaucrats from Hades emerge from the pit to jab at him with their pitchforks.

forrestkyle 14y ago

Boo hoo. This is emo nonsense. Life is a brutal war for survival you are going to get severely beaten down a few dozen times before you ever make it to the top. 1% of 1% have an easy route to the top. The rest take it on the chin a few times, spit out their teeth, and keep throwing punches. You seriously can't let that much negativity into your own life. Your business failed? Cool. That same day, 30,000 kids starved to death in Africa. You learned a lot about running a business and discovered that your specific idea didn't work out. Move on and find a new adventure. Live in the windshield, not the rear view mirror.

marshray 14y ago

"It was over now. Two years of work and dreams replaced by a landing page." Two years...that's it? Developing tech products is an exercise in walking away. The vast majority of code written is a total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala no longer in regular use by anyone within a few years. It used to be said that most software projects were canceled due to overruns before completion. "Even the t-shirts had been given away." Serious question...what else was anyone going to do with them? "8 IKEA desks = $1,200, 8 Aeron chairs (used) = $4,000" I don't think I've ever written a line of code while sitting at a $150 desk in a $500 (used) chair. "Nobody ever told him the hockey stick of user growth might look more like a baseball bat laying in an empty field." B. S. This piece is weird. I don't get it.

marshray 14y ago

There's a way to read this piece that's neither "suffering entrepreneur" nor "first world privilege". Pouring all one's hopes and years of effort into a startup is certainly an emotional rollercoaster. If you are the last one out to turn out the lights, it's going to be a poignant moment. If that happened to me, I'd probably consider writing a blog post about it too. But we don't have to react to it as if it means anything deeper than that.

endlessvoid94 14y ago

nowhere to go but up.

patio11 14y ago

If this is in the general vicinity of "Worst. Day. Ever." for you, your life is pretty effing awesome now isn't it. One Thanksgiving a year seems inadequate under the circumstances. (I respectfully suggest that anyone unable to put death of a startup in perspective invest some effort in rekindling ties with folks outside our little bubble. Again, it's Thanksgiving, so you've got a built-in excuse.)

pbiggar 14y ago
That's a little callous, no (even if it is a fictional character)? Imagine if everything you worked for over the last 5 year dried up, and you had for some reason to go back to life as a salaryman. Not the end of the world probably, but you'd be pretty depressed. The lack of empathy in this thread bothers me.
- rmc 14y ago
  Now imagine everything dries up, and there is nothing to go back to. No possibility of a job to fall back on.
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    Now imagine they killed our families and razed our crops and burned our villages - leaving desolation and famine in their wake! We can imagine any kind of nightmarish scenario we like, but that doesn't mean we should ignore all the people who are doing better. Imagine if our social policy was to only help people who had escaped war-torn famine, and tell everyone else to suck it up! So the protagonist in the story could be in a much worse place, but it still sucks for him. You have to be pretty callous not to have some empathy for him.

Tichy 14y ago

First World Problems...

MrJagil 14y ago

I am not an entrepreneur in the HN-sense, so i may just be naive but... Why do you have to shut down you web company once you run out of money? I mesn, can't you just lay off the employees, close the office, take the servers to your basement, get a 'real' job and turn your startup into a hobby? I mean, the only really necessary expense there is to running a wep-app or whatever, is the electrical bill, right? I assume you've build something in those two years, why flush it away? Honest question, hope to learn more about the nuances of being a founder!

Sarien 14y ago

While this story is sad I think it is super important for YC. This page is usually crowded with stories and posts of people telling you how they made it and what you can do to be super successful yourself. Stories like this one serve the important purpose of unskewing our views on how easy it is to start a company and get rich. There are reasons why people like 9-5 jobs at big companies (first and foremost probably safety) and it is important not to lose track of them reading all those "you just need to write everything on pink flashcards and your startup is going to make millions next week" stories. :)

duiker101 14y ago

A sad story, but if you start by getting 4000$ of chairs you are doing something wrong, no wonder your expenses were bigger than the revenues.

rwallace 14y ago
The cost of buying eight chairs is negligible compared to the other costs associated with hiring eight people. It may be that the company's expenses were too high, but if so, they needed to be cut by hiring fewer people. Buying cheaper chairs is a piss-poor way to save money.

daniel-cussen 14y ago

>> When he started the company, he had a girlfriend. She was a sweet girl, who actually got his Isaac Asimov references. What have you done!?

b1daly 14y ago

The comments criticizing the protagonist are somewhat churlish. If someone shares painful emotions with the a comment like "how could they know my pain," he is demonstrating that he has some awareness that his emotions include self pity, that his feelings are subjective. Generally, in the the US anyway, people know that sharing such feelings is not cool. (People start with snarky comments along the lines of "call the waaahbmulance") The author is trying to buck the huge social pressure against admitting such feelings. Therefore, to ridicule such a person is re-enforcing the paradigms which drive the feelings in the first place. On a personal note, I have never been comforted in times of unhappiness to have it pointed out that many people have it far worse. I guess if you are someone who derives a sense of well being based on how well you are doing relative to others, being reminded of how much better off you than the hordes of wretched who walk this earth could give you some happiness.

lifeformed 14y ago

Haha geeze, the crowd here is brutal. I don't think the writer is saying that he has the objectively worst life, and everyone should feel bad for him. It's just a microcosm of the human experience. This article is showing that, even in our prosperous country, a relatively successful person can feel the same pain of failure and rejection that everyone feels at some point. The rich and poor all struggle to find out who they are and what their place in life is. This isn't a contest of who suffered the most. Even though dying is common, it doesn't mean a death is trivial. Personal experiences should be able to be shared without marginalization.