Well written. One thing I always find funny about the startup world is the idea that hardship is good. Hardship isn't good. Hardship sucks. Sometimes hardship is something you need to survive to accomplish your goals, but not always. While there are a lot of successful startups that went through a lot of hardship, there are a lot of them that didn't. It seems that based on a lot of factors that were outside of your control you were playing the startup game on "hard mode" and you gave it a pretty good run anyways.
Also a pretty good lesson that having a good job and comfortable life maybe isn't so bad after all (a very un-silicon valley lesson).
Hardship at a lot of startups is the result of entrepreneurs not respecting the old adage, "It takes money to make money." A lot of entrepreneurs don't really know how much money they need, and young ones often start their companies before they know where it's going to come from.
The good news is that now is a great time to be selling equity in a tech startup. The bad news is that even if you're successful in trading your company's equity for capital, there's no guarantee you'll get enough capital, or that you'll be able to get more of it when you run out.
Gotta agree, startup is not some glorified zero sum game. Losing two co-founders nearly threw me into "depression". A special hell I created around myself of self-doubt and why-me.
Personally taking time off startup helped and made mentally more stronger. I can't even imagine what she went through with so many big ups and downs.
I disagree. I think hardship is a valuable experience that everyone should endure.
1) You only really get to know yourself when you find yourself eating rice for the hundredth time in a row, and live on the floor of an abandoned building.
2) "never again" is one hell of a motivator
3) you gain the knowledge that all these things, all this crap we fill our lives with, is totally unnecessary
4) empathy. Live below the bottom rung for a while and you'll understand far more keenly what poverty is like. The idea of being in that situation and not having the skills, knowledge or gumption to not bootstrap out, or not having the vision to realise you already have, is terrifying.
Hardship in itself is crap. Hardship that leads somewhere might kinda be good in retrospect, maybe. The startup world seems intent on getting people to buy into the idea that all hardship is that sort of hardship.
Or as Lefty Gomez artfully pointed out, "I'd rather be lucky than good." The more time I spend working on my startup, the more I appreciate the wisdom of this quote.
The point is a bit more subtle. There is the russian roulette aspect of probability, and then there is failure from lack of character. Unfortunately, outsiders can't see or relate to the important distinctions. This makes dealling with use a bit more cognitive overhead--and that's what sucks. Explaining things to folks on the outside who don't have the inclination or understanding to care. That's a different kind of hardship vs. waking up everyday and doing difficult (but tractable) things like problem solving be it in math or marketing. But my guess is those are problems many will never have the privledge of having, for good or bad, one way or the other.
Also a pretty good lesson that having a good job and comfortable life maybe isn't so bad after all (a very un-silicon valley lesson).