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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

These stories should be required reading. To that end the community would benefit massively from you documenting it.

Just as there are Journals of Negative results [1][2] so too should there be a journal of failed startups. Your detailing of what caused the failures could save thousands of man hours and potentially someone falling into the same traps.

Goal #1 for you right now is to get your family in order and steel the troops for tough times ahead as you get back on your feet.

In short order though you should start simply documenting the process that led to your company failing. Not only will you learn from it but it will help others.

If you are in the DC area don't hesitate to reach out to myself and my family. We have kiddos the same ages as yours so they would have a ball.

[1] http://www.jnrbm.com/ [2] http://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr

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I'm sure that would be nice to have. I'm can relate to OP, I'm out of pretty my all of my savings and trying to think of ways to shutter my co. I already have four kids. When a friend of mine said to me, "perhaps we should disect this failure", the zing from that made it all that much worse.

I'm sure there's plenty of lessons to be learned from failed startups, but even 5 years after my first failed startup, I still don't like thinking about it, least of all documenting what went wrong.

Now, fortunately I do have a venture that's been somewhat of a runaway success, in spite of me. The only truth I can relate do what you must and then get lucky. There isn't some secret method to success(despite what your methodical brain tells you).

It may be survivor bias or whatever, but I still don't like harping on my failures. I know the severe guilty feeling that I get knowing that I not only risked my own but my family's well being possibly, but then again, at least I tried. Life's tough, live to fight another day & survive long enough till you get lucky. I for one am not looking to revisit my failure any more than I already do, it's too traumatic to relive.

I can't speak for your situation so don't take this as a goad, only my thoughts on the idea of doing a triage/after action/autopsy.

I know that feeling. I have failed before and hard. I did however resolve to ensure that it wasn't for nothing by, as your co-founder suggested, dissecting it. What I found was that instead of it just being a downer, I realized how many good things were done and how many exciting developments, both personally and professionally came out of what was at the end of the day a failure.

In the end the margin of failure can be tiny - but I would guarantee that you will also be able to find some massive successes in there as well. Adding to that the benefit that others would take away and I think it would be of great benefit.

> Just as there are Journals of Negative results [1][2] so too should there be a journal of failed startups.

We used to have something like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

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