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Right, but you can always just walk away from it all. It's not the same as a student loan.

• chimi 14y ago
  You can, but some people have a big conscience and want to deliver on the expectations people have of them, so some people can't just "walk away." It's those people who are suicidal in failed startup scenarios.
  • tptacek 14y ago
    Do we have a lot of evidence that startup failure is actually a suicide trigger? And, more so than student loan debt, or job termination, or flunking out of school? I worry a little about enshrining this bit of conventional wisdom. Startup founders feel pretty exceptional as it is without adding the idea that they carry the weight of the world.
• bitcartel 14y ago
  Sure, you can walk away from a professionally managed fund, hopefully with your name intact, but I bet it's not so easy to walk away from friends, family, and small angel investors who believed in you. The mental burden of failure, of disappointing those closest to you, must weigh heavy.
  • rdouble 14y ago
    That's a good point.
  • tptacek 14y ago
    So don't take money from those people. I'm not trying to be facile here. I'm asking you to recognize that if failing to provide a return to a startup investor generates acute non-dischargeable guilt, that is probably a good sign that you rationalized away the arguments for not taking money from them in the first place. If you're a pro, you do the company thing with the clear and honest expectation that you are likely to fail. Companies going public spell this out in detail in their disclosures, which practically shout "do not put money into this". And those companies almost invariably have cracked 9 figures of revenue!
• wpietri 14y ago
  Yes and no. You can also walk away from a student loan; if you go teach English in small Asian villages for the rest of your life, it's not like they'll sent in a SEAL team to extract you. And you can certainly walk away from regular loans by declaring bankruptcy. Provided you're prepared to have that on your record and on your conscience. And deal with the many years of consequences. It's the same thing with investor money. Legally, at any point you can just shut down the company, return whatever's left in the bank, and call it a day. But there's more to it than the legality.
  • rdouble 14y ago
    It's not the same. Startups go south, the founders split, things get wound down, and everyone tries again, or gets other jobs. This happens all the time. Nobody involved gets exiled to a small asian village. Matt Maroon said it better elsewhere in this thread. Bitcartel also made a good point about letting down early friends & family investors, which seems like it would cause more emotional stress than letting down professional investors. That said, since it seems like half of hacker news imagines that VCs are something akin to loan sharks. Maybe the new breed of angel investors really are putting an emotional squeeze on founders these days? When I worked at startups, the investors were very hands off unless the founders were really mishandling things. However, I've been out of the scene for a few years, and there seem to be a whole lot more VCs, angels and incubators. Perhaps things have changed for the worse.
    • wpietri 14y ago
      I'm not saying it's the same; I'm saying they are points on a continuum. All of which you can walk away from at varying costs. I'm perfectly ok letting down professional investors. And also the people I hired. And the users. And myself. That's the game; sometimes you lose. But that doesn't mean I won't regret it when it happens. Or tell those people I'm sorry it didn't work. Or work hard to avert that outcome. That's also part of the game. At least that's the game I want to play. I have no idea why that's controversial here.
  • smky80 14y ago
    Predator drones instead of SEAL teams?