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Ask HN: what has been the personal & financial cost of your failed ventures?

6 points by hoodoof ↗ HN
I'm interested in hearing what has been the personal and financial cost to you of when your entrepreneurial venture failed.

How do these outcomes make you feel emotionally?

Edit: anyone been bankrupted or financially broken? What do you intend to do about it?

7 comments

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brk
I'm out about $500K of my own money, but I haven't kept close track. It was the most enjoyable $500K I ever spent, all things considered.

Emotional/personal cost? None really, other than some slight stress imposed on my marriage at a couple of points, but nothing that would have ever come close to the "drugs and therapy" kind of personal costs, or lost friends kind of personal costs.

keefe
It depends on how everything plays out. My first sensei used to say that success was falling down 99 times and getting up 100. if I don't pick up a win and end up being a corporate monkey? Then it cost me my 20s and all the experiences most people enjoy during that time.
hoodoof
Why do you feel you have to trade off having happy "20-something" experiences for being an entrepreneur?
keefe
I'm 30, so my 20s are in the past. It's probably not fair to put everything on the excessive time I spent on algo/eng/coding/bizdev but there's a fucking lot of skills involved in startups. I picked a couple wrong projects, spent my time and money on them (I come from a far-from-rich background) and so that was that.

edit - that is to say to you guys in your 20s, be efficient and maybe you can do both

exline
I went through about 80K in savings. There was some extra stress on the marriage (wife, 2 kids, mortgage payments.) But I was working from home mostly except when pitching VC's. My wife was very supportive.

When the startup died, I moved into contracting. I was doing quite well contracting and then one of guys who was on our board of advisors needed some development work and that led to me having substantial equity in the company and still working from home.

So the start up was a total failure, but I learned a lot and it lead me to where I am today which is much better than where I started.

matdwyer
Back in school I pumped about 10k into a venture that hasn't panned out.

Was incredibly stressful, and disappointing, but it helped me learn. Hopefully will push that forward and build upon it if I tried something like that again - for now I'm focusing on other areas.

Nikkki
I lost over USD75K of personal financial resources in the failed start-ups I founded.