
The last day - rpsubhub
http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/20/the-last-day/
======
courtewing
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.

~~~
Permit
>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?

Ultimately, whether or not it was "worth it" will always be decided based on
the final outcome of the company coupled with a large dose of hindsight bias.
A startup founder who sacrificed relationships to build a successful company
will be recognized as having made the correct decision amidst the company of
those who couldn't understand his/her vision.

A startup founder who fails having sacrificed relationships and friendships
will be recognized as foolish and overly ambitious.

If you want a story that aspiring founders responded positively to: "How
credit card arbitrage funded my first company."[1] fared pretty well on
Reddit/HN when it was first written. From the comfort of success it's easy to
judge one's decisions as the correct decisions. It's just as easy to condemn
the same decisions made by a failed founder.

[1][http://www.humbledmba.com/dont-try-this-at-home-how-
credit-c...](http://www.humbledmba.com/dont-try-this-at-home-how-credit-card-
arbitra)

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Regardless of whether my business succeeds or fails, if my personal
relationships with my wife and kids fail, I am a failure.

Personally, I don't care if everybody in the world thinks I succeeded, if
those relationships fail, I am a failure. Priorities are important.

~~~
robryan
They are, they are also different for different people. There is no right
answer to whether sacrificing person relationships for company success is
worth it.

~~~
cookiecaper
There is a right answer. As some other commenters are saying, there is an
objective right and wrong. If someone trusts and commits to you as fully as
they do when they marry you (or common law marry by prolonged cohabitation),
there is absolutely no excuse to damage that trust and that love for a selfish
satisfaction of running a successful startup.

When you enter that type of relationship with someone, you commit, at the very
least implicitly, to make your SO the primary priority in your life. If you
want to run a startup, you have to work it around your relationship and not
vice-versa. The amount of pain that's inflicted on many different people when
a relationship that has all the trappings of permanence, lacking only the
discipline of the participants to enforce that permanence, is extreme, and far
worse and farther reaching than having a company fail or losing a bunch of
investor money.

I understand that over the last several decades, individual "fulfillment" (aka
undisciplined selfishness) has become the primary attainment for people,
regardless of any social structure or moral definition. Marriage has been
nullified and diminished to the point where most youth don't even see a point
in it anymore. People have been taught, essentially, to worship themselves --
to put temporary individual interests above permanent social cohesion and the
good of the whole, and really, the long-term interests of the individual as
well. But that doesn't make this correct, and it definitely doesn't make a
valid excuse to betray the trust of those closest to you -- _triple
especially_ if children are involved. True familial love is worth more than
all the money in the world could purchase, including the money your startup
may or may not generate, and this is an objective reality.

------
tptacek
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.

~~~
chernevik
Fuck you.

I daresay my problems are somewhat worse than those of the OP's CEO. He isn't
in a divorce, doesn't have kids, does he? And yeah, even if my problems are
worse, they're still distinctly First World. It isn't as if I have trouble
finding potable water for my kids, or have to worry about teenager "soldiers"
raping my daughter. So maybe I too am Entitled. And perhaps I too should just
Shut Up.

But I don't think so. I can tell you for an absolutely fucking fact that my
problems have hurt like hell. And I am pretty goddam sure that those of this
guy hurt pretty damn hard too. This guy put his ass out there on the line,
everything he had, and came up LOSER. That's going to sting for any one with
an ounce of pride. Yes, yes, yes, he'll land some VP Biz Dev job and he'll be
All Right but the dream of being his own man has kind of taken a turn for the
worse, hasn't it? I daresay that he and I both would drop our crying towels
and head for the recruiters' office if the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor
tomorrow, and our current problems would seem pretty fucking silly when viewed
atop some modern day Iwo Jima. Nevertheless we don't at this exact moment have
the benefit of all that perspective and holy shit, this hurts.

I have SEEN with my own two eyes people with whom I would not trade places for
a single second. I have seen the people with the serious wrist scars, the
verticals-along-the-veins of the suicides who mean business. I have talked
with men so schizophrenic I almost cried to see a human mind so shattered
before me. I have slept with a woman for no other purpose than to hear her
rise "to go to the bathroom" so I could follow her and ensure she wasn't going
to the kitchen to do the serious wrist thing. I have heard a mother wailing at
the death of her only child.

So I know what Pain looks like and I know I am damn sight removed from how
fucking Bad It Can Get. Okay? And I still know that were I have been hurt like
hell, and it made no sense to me. And the last goddam thing I needed was some
asshole sneering about how much worse it could be. I mean, no shit, Sherlock.

See thing about perspective is, it's _rational_. It's detached from a moment
and a circumstance. The thing about pain is, it is _not_ rational. It is
emotional and is about you and your moment. And no one who ever cared enough
about anything to accomplish something did it without emotion.

Someone put their ass out on the line. They Failed. It hurts. First World
problem? Absolutely. Guess what, here in the first world, we're people too,
and we hurt too. We will get over it, we will move on, we will acquire the
perspective you so generously commend to us.

But hopefully we'll retain enough knowledge of the pain to have a little
sympathy for those going through it.

~~~
tptacek
Again: it's not that there are people in the world who are worse off. There
are always people in the world that are worse off. Most people in the world
are much worse off than most Americans.

It's that _most Americans_ are worse off than this person.

This is startup exceptionalism. It is the intersection between nerd
exceptionalism and the myth of the heroic entrepreneur, both of which are
virulent memes in our culture right now. And how I think I know that is, I
imagine the kinds of comments that would be on HN if we were writing about an
investment banker's dashed dreams. They'd start with "fuck you", too, but
they'd be aimed at the author of the article.

I'm sorry that the way I articulated this perspective offends you. I probably
wrote it carelessly and offensively. _But it is the right perspective_.

~~~
intenex
Wow, I'm with chernevik on this one. Both perspectives were great to be
brought up, but frankly, what's the difference with _most Americans_ being
worse off than this person and most of the people in the world being worse
off? You are in fact saying the same thing - this guy has less right than he
feels to be so sorry for himself.

Hacker News fosters a prominent startup community. Of course we're going to
commiserate with this guy - we can identify with him. It's like posting an
article about some dude going through a divorce on a marriage forum. People
will commiserate with him. You wouldn't post about an investment banker there.
If you posted about an investment banker on an investment banking forum
however, I'm sure they would commiserate with him just as we are with this
guy.

But that's another point entirely, because the investment banker's sorrow for
his situation is just as valid as this failed entrepreneur's. Hell, I bet
Hitler felt sorry for himself after losing WWII and killing millions of
people, and that was just as valid. It is fully understandable for them to
feel great pain at their condition, as they poured their hearts and lives into
one thing or another, no matter how great or how small, how right or how wrong
- they led their lives as they thought best, and it ended in failure or
catastrophe - no matter how fleeting. You don't tell a grieving mother who
just lost their child that it gets better, that they can just have a new one
and really it's not as bad as it could have been, some poor mother just lost
all three of her kids! And even though you're right - it does get better, and
it could be worse, just as it is in this case, that mother will still grieve
the loss of her child and this entrepreneur will still mourn the failure of
his company. And deep down inside, I'm sure they know logically that it will
get better, that it's not as bad as it could have been - but emotionally,
right now, it still feels like the end of the world.

This story could easily end one of three ways that I see presently - one, he
kills himself now in the height of his emotional sorrow, two, he gets back on
the hill and starts another company that either succeeds or fails (in which
case, repeat these three cases), or three, he takes a steady job giving a
steady income for a stable life but never achieves the great dreams he hoped
to (or he starts another company at a later date in which case repeat scenario
2).

However, regardless of which path he takes, his pain in the present moment is
valid. It is not made any less valid by the fact that he is better off than
most people in one of his resultant possible scenarios.

Moreover, is it valid for him to want more than his peers? What if he's really
not satisfied by leading a stable life with a stable income? Is that okay? Or
should we slap him in the face and tell him he's fucking lucky to be where he
is and he needs to stop acting so privileged and ungrateful? And if the answer
is no, it's not valid for him to want more, then it's equally invalid for us
to want anything as well. Where do you draw the line? Are we ungrateful and
overly privileged for wanting more than some bland minimally nutritious food
and a roof over our heads? Are we ungrateful and overly privileged to want
basic plumbing, a nice hot shower, a family that loves us, to be valued in our
society and to be able to contribute to our society, anything at all? How is
it up to us to judge what others want to accomplish with their lives and
consequently impugn their sorrow and pain at failing to achieve what they had
hoped to?

Another thought - are you going to slap a suicidal middle-class teenager in
the face and tell them to grow the fuck up and realize how privileged they
are, how _most Americans_ and in fact almost all teenagers in the world are
worse off than them? Why not?

It's because their pain is valid. Our emotions normalize to our situation -
always, no matter how high or low we get in life, and they're just as valid
regardless of where they're normalized to. Just because this guy isn't going
to be broke for the rest of his life and have his family made homeless doesn't
mean he doesn't feel pain, and that pain isn't valid. He poured his heart and
soul into something, and it died on him - because of him.

The author isn't expressing implicit approval of this entrepreneur's reaction
to that text - he's telling a story in its full color, as it so often plays
out. This is a universally common response to some sort of suffering. It could
easily have been written about a mother who's kid just died of cancer:

"She heard the ping of her phone, someone late hearing the news sending a text
to offer their condolences. She knew they meant well, but their encouraging
platitudes filled her with contempt. What did they know of her pain?"

It has nothing to do with his perceived privilege, him being better off than
others, etc. If you accept his pain as valid, this is a valid response to that
pain.

And if you don't accept his pain as valid, then none of us should ever have
valid pains - or joys, for that matter, since our joy clearly cannot match the
joy of a man given a morsel of bread after having starved for weeks on end, or
any other emotion that someone else has experienced as a consequence of a more
extreme causative factor.

~~~
marshray
_Hell, I bet Hitler felt sorry for himself after losing WWII and killing
millions of people, and that was just as valid._

So do we have a link to a _Downfall_ parody for HN startups?

~~~
intenex
Haha I knew someone was going to latch on to the Hitler comment.

And also, that would be hilarious. Why _hasn't_ that been done yet?

There's this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-mviqUn95s>

~~~
marshray
Dude, that comment has seriously made my night.

So, to summarize what I've learned from this thread:

Next time I sleep with a schizophrenic woman who brought a pocketknife to her
failed startup, when I hear her go to the bathroom at night I'll be like "Hey
baby, no need to get all slashy-slashy doing the serious wrist thing, I mean,
just look at Hitler, he had problems too."

~~~
chmike
The point is made. One will always find people with worse situation than us
and who suffer more. Does this help ? Of course not.

Does it mean that if something hurt us we can't tell it, share it or complain
about it ? It's not an easy question.

My impression is that saying that something hurts you provides some relief,
especially if the people around you have some empathy or offer help. On the
other hand, if the people you say it to, suffer as much or more, than it will
hurt them. This is the short term effect.

On the long term, the real benefit of sharing such types of feeling is that
other people get prepared for the hurting feeling in a similar situation. This
generates an inhibition effect which is today best transmitted by films. This
is not entertainment. We learn from it and get prepared and accustomed to it.

This doesn't address the question if the hurting situation is unfair, could be
avoided and how. There are very hurting situations we can't avoid like cancer
or an invalidating accident. But there are hurting situations we could have
avoided and so sharing the experience has an education effect. You might not
benefit from it, but there will always be one that will profit from the
education effect.

------
Udo
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
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
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
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.

------
patio11
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
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
Now imagine everything dries up, and there is nothing to go back to. No
possibility of a job to fall back on.

~~~
pbiggar
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.

------
ForrestN
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?

~~~
Udo
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
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
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.

~~~
hnriot
>It's not generic failure, it's very specific - it's an accurate description
of a failure scenario that affects many startup founders.

You just described "generic failure". If it happens to many startups, its
generic to startups, which was the point. There's nothing here to learn except
it sucks to fail. Which anyone that's ever done anything in life is already
aware of.

------
typicalrunt
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.

~~~
jasonshen
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
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
You pay your employees with capital, which can come from customers, the
government, banks, credit card companies or investors.

Most tech startups do not generate a lot of cash in their early stages, which
is why they raise capital from investors who purchase equity stake in the
company because they believe the company will be valuable down the road. Page
views (and more so user signups/engagement) are one metric by which investors
make the decision to invest capital.

Guys, this is what modern capitalism is all about.

~~~
pebb
Sure, and I bet you buy your food with stock options.

------
electic
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
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.

------
sentiental
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
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)

------
marshray
"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> 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.

------
Kaedon
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
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
I guarantee you that people who avoid working hard at their startups will
never have any success that tempts them to work harder.

~~~
aes256
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.

------
OldSchool
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.

------
technotony
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.

------
opendomain
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.

------
b1daly
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.

------
daniel-cussen
>> 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!?

------
ChristianMarks
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.

------
lifeformed
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.

------
Sarien
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. :)

------
forrestkyle
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.

------
MrJagil
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!

------
jmmcd
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.

------
marshray
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.

------
duiker101
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
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.

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

------
neovive
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.

------
knowtheory
> _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.

------
bencxr
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!

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

------
Tichy
First World Problems...

------
endlessvoid94
nowhere to go but up.

