Take half and invest it in a safe and boring way so you don't have to worry about day-to-day expenses for a while even if your next venture fails horrifically.

Take half and invest it in a safe and boring way so you don't have to worry about day-to-day expenses for a while even if your next venture fails horrifically. Pay off any outstanding debts. Help your parents out if they need help with anything (within reason). Take 20K and spend it on a four month vacation where you don't have to stress about anything and unwind from running a startup. Use the rest of the money to start a new project where you don't have to raise any money until you have a solid proof of concept or even positive cash flow. Or don't. jwz bought a nightclub instead of staying in software, and he seems quite happy with his decision. Read Derek Sivers' blog post on what he did after selling cdbaby: http://sivers.org/laboratory http://sivers.org/laboratory Just because you had one startup exit successfully doesn't mean your next one is guaranteed success. Just because you have no guarantee of further success, does not mean you should not try again. Congratulations, and good luck!