Never Hated Anything More Than Shutting Down My YC Startup
Over 4 years, I had built 2 startups. We sold one but had to shut down the other.
After finally calling it quits, I was burnt out. All I wanted was a clean break, but instead, what I got was a metric ton of the world’s worst chores.
It was the never-ending long tail of dissolution. Another email to our lawyers, doc to sign, government to pay, service to cancel, asset to liquidate, tax form to file. It was like being anchored to a manipulative ex who wouldn’t let me move on.
I just wanted to dissolve a company that no longer “existed” (at least in my mind). Genuinely just wanted closure from the whole thing.
In the end, the dissolution process took over 6 months of my life to complete.
I’ve sat with this pain/frustration for a while. At one of my lowest points in life, this process kept knocking me down further.
Hence me writing this — I'm helping out a few YC founders shut down their startups. Some clear flaws with this being a potential business (not recurring revenue, insolvent companies, etc.) but have been enjoying helping out founders who were in the same position I was in.
Wanted to get HNs thoughts on this - what do y'all think? Did you have to shut down a startup before? And if so, what was your process like?
I threw up a quick landing page to learn a little bit more about what I'm playing around with here: https://www.sunsethq.co/