Something similar happened to my dad. He had a pretty successful company providing security guard services mostly on government contracts. It wasn't very lucrative. He wasn't rich. But, it paid the mortgage and the bills and my siblings and I were well taken care of. Then, when I was around 9 or 10 or so, Wackenhut kind of raised a lot of money and became the Amazon of security guard services. They Amazon'd his company and everything he built just kind of slowly disappeared over the next couple years. He could have done OK getting a job as a security guard himself and working his way up or even changing careers (he was reasonably intelligent). But, something about his company failing broke him and he just kind of never did anything after that. My teen years were absolute chaos until I dropped out of high school and got a job driving a fork lift around 17 and moved out. I remember there being absolutely no food in the house for days and days. It was crazy.

I've had a bunch of friends/acquaintances that killed themselves (hung/shot/jumped off the GG) after their start-ups failed. But, they all did it during the first boom (90's). I haven't personally known anyone that's done it during this boom, yet. I think the difference might be that the bubble hasn't popped yet this time. People who fail can still easily go find work. Back then all the companies were laying people off. So, if your start-up failed there was basically no where to go but back home. Probably the majority of the people I knew in SFBA back when the bubble popped did that. It was crazy how suddenly highways that were packed with traffic could just be cruised down at the speed limit during rush hour with out touching your breaks until you got to your exit. It seemed surreal.