Ask HN: What happens to failed founders?

Hi, "failed" founder here. I didn't make a million dollars but basically got acquired for about 3 years of not taking a salary.

One thing many people forget about startups is that you're building assets, not revenue. The company, the code, the whole customer acquisition process, customer loyalty... all that is worth something to someone and can be sold at a price. We were acquired by a startup that just wanted to grow faster. It was another sales channel for them and far cheaper/faster than putting marketing dollars.

So there's rarely ever truly a failure. Just waiting for the right buyer if you've built something decent. This is usually what they mean by "don't die". I found that it's easier to sell a company than get investors, though.

After that,

1. A VC who didn't invest gave me several fun jobs teaching programming (his core background was education). I've been doing it on and off for 3 years now, training for programming certifications, and it's been a good portion of my income and connections.

2. Joined a couple of startups as a CTO, all fellow founders who I met in accelerators. They didn't go well and maybe I was not competent enough for them. Maybe they just had limited resources.

3. Joined a Big Corp. Friends thought it was not part of my personality to do so. But really, it was trying something I hadn't done, and proving to a relative that I could. It seemed like a step down, so I stopped after half a year.

4. I regularly get and turn down CTO offers, sometimes two a month. Many were more established and well funded, but I'm not willing to commit to them.

5. I went back to freelancing. I make about 5x more than I did before my startup. I specialize in MVPs, so my startup experience is essential to current income.

But notably, I didn't have a lot of options when starting a startup. Had I gone the non-startup route, I'd be working for a company in some large team, making $1000/month in a developing country.

> "keep going, don't get demoralized"

You can keep going and never make it. Statistically speaking you're more likely to not make it. This isn't much more than the typical hustler propaganda we see all the time in tech. "If you didn't make it you didn't try hard enough"

> What happens to founders afterwards?

Founders are people, people chose different paths. Depends if you managed to save a big chunk of money, have the will to start again, have kids, location, visas, etc ... I don't think there is a stereotypical path.

> The opportunity cost of starting a startup instead of continuing in your career can be significant (5+ years "lost").

If you create a company that survives for 5 years you have to fuck up really bad to lose everything. Unless you go for one of these business models relying purely on investors cash, in which case you're doomed from the get go 99% of the time.

Startups are usually a gamble at good odds. "Keep going" means you're just rolling the dice at those odds again. But those who learn something improve their odds for next time. People rarely do an "all or nothing" bet, so they can often try again. And often investors prefer someone who has tried and failed rather than someone whose trying the first time.

> Startups are usually a gamble at good odds

Good odds for who ? The investors putting money in 100s of startups and making 10.000% ROI once in a while ? Sure

What about the founders / early employees who fail 90% of the time after putting in countless hours of overtime ?

When the dice you play with is a 1d20000 and you need <= 2 to succeed you have to be real tough, have a strong support network and know what you're getting into. I guess it's part of the game but we should stop romanticising the startup life, it's far from being a matter of "keep trying".

https://s3.amazonaws.com/startupcompass-public/StartupGenome...

It's also not a fail/succeed binary. Failures bring in experience and skills.

Also, you have to compare with the alternative. Someone who applies to Google also has a high chance of failure - it's still a 3 month investment in studying for interviews, with about a 5% chance of getting in.

Someone can apply to work with a moderate sized company at much higher odds and lower pay, but there's a good chance the project may fail and they get fired.

In this case you still get paid even if you get fired. With startups, failure means you lose money and time, but the process rapidly levels up your value as an individual. You build more elite connections, develop a lot of soft skills. Spending 100 hours a week programming something has a side effect of improving your programming skill much faster than someone who put in 40 hours.

If you studied months for an interview at Google and failed, your best next move would be to apply at the next company at a slightly higher rate of success. You can also choose to settle for something easy, with no interview process, but then you lose your investment. This is the same logic as "keep trying" at a startup. When you fail with one idea, you get feedback for what other ideas would work better.

I personally chose the startup path because the alternate path is spending 13 years trying to get a $25,000 job. Someone getting offers for $200,000 jobs would have a very different decision matrix.

Smart people who put in months of studying don't have a 5% chance of making it into a large company after those few months.

Google might have a 5% hire rate but it's not 5% of qualified and heavily prepared people. And you can just multiply your chances by applying to more companies.

With skill and determination you will make it.

With skill and determination, starting a startup you're just buying a ticket to potentially making it.

As you said, it only makes sense if your alternative doesn't offer you enough money to live comfortably and save as well, or you are, well, atypically non-risk-averse.

I think we need to stop using the word fail for things like this---expressions like "fail fast" and "learning from failure" and "embrace failure" often give people the wrong impression. Instead I prefer to re-calibrate success. If you are doing a startup, or anything else (borrowing Ries' definition here) under extreme uncertainty, your goal can't possibly be to succeed. This could very well be an impossible goal, and you could fail for reasons entirely outside your control and outside your visibility.

Instead, you should identify the unknowns where possible (your hypotheses) and set your goal as de-risking these unknowns. For example, your startup idea might be "Uber Eats for umbrellas" where you deliver umbrellas to people at the push of a button. Can you build a successful company around this? Who knows. I certainly wouldn't measure myself on my ability to build a successful company on this. But I might measure myself on my ability to determine whether there is a market for it. I might be successful in determining there isn't a market for it and then decide not to continue any further, and I wouldn't call myself a failure for it. And even if there is a market, then there's a question of whether the economics make sense. Again, your goal now is to determine the answer to this question regardless of the yes/no outcome.

Failure is a part of the game. If you get demoralized this game is not for you. Simple as that. It's OK to feel bad for a while, however.

Typically failed founders found something new. Targeted, simple, niche. Learn from your failure.

"if you get demoralised this game is not for you..." ultimate answer. Love it.

Getting demoralized is typical; real founders are the ones who get back up and come looking for more.

As I announced the failure and closure of my previous startup, I was invited to be CEO of three other startups looking for direction.

I had a COO offer available too as well as a couple of less appealing job offers.

I watched some job boards just out of interest and saw a number of roles either as CMO, product manager or director that I would have been a good fit for.

As it stands, I ended up co-founding a new company with an old partner.

No one seemed to think that failure under my belt was a black mark.

I think it really depends on what stage you "fail" and what causes the failure. In my own experience, I was really young and tried something for about 6 months. It didn't pan out because those who I was working with weren't committed to it. We just went our separate ways after and I ended up working as as a senior dev at a bunch of places. I'd love to see data about this, as we always end up seeing only the survivors and their success stories.

I’ve been messing around with an idea of starting something like failedfounders.com. Basically an online repo of stories, learnings and the like. It’s too taboo to talk about and I wish that’d change. 99.99% (made up, don’t quote me) of people don’t hit it big on the first thing they do. Or second. Some people just start earlier. Aka build programs and sell them in HS vs at 28. If you find forward thinking execs they usually will love talking to you and consider hiring you. I’ve found most everyone in TA/Recruiting to be unable to process how you could have skills across multiple disciplines and this doesn’t score well on their interview sheet. Relationships end up helping a ton here.

I think there's a good demand for this. You should do it.

> The opportunity cost of starting a startup instead of continuing in your career can be significant (5+ years "lost")

Every year of your career, and life, is "lost" ... you can't save those years and you can't get them back.