In April, I left my job at a hedge fund. This was, admittedly, not the best time to leave a job in New York, but I needed out because the lack of purpose in my work was starting to affect my health.

Even though we didn't "technically" know ourselves to be in a recession, I knew something bizarre was going on that summer. I had some really surprising rejections. I never find rejection to be shocking, because even if you're really good, you might not be a fit... but I got turned down for in-person interviews at companies that would have been slam-dunks (for in-person interview) in mid-2007.

Anyway, I found my way to a really cool startup and began working there, the only downside being that pay would be deferred until we had funding. I was told that we'd probably have funding by November. I figured January - March was more likely, since PG's essays have educated me on the fact that funding matters are always a lot worse than expected, but I had enough savings from the hedge fund days to hold out that far.

It's January. I enjoy the work a lot more than I have at prior companies. The problem is that I have no control over the funding situation, and it's started to scare the shit out of me the minute we crossed into 2009. I only have 5-7 months of living expenses now (fuck New York's ridiculous housing costs). I honestly have no idea what I'll do if this doesn't pan out. I don't want to go back to Wall Street and might not be able to (there may not be a Wall Street). With an imploded economy, even a traditional job search is going to be risky and time-consuming. I don't have any contacts that could lead into consulting projects, and taking a typical software job (Java to implement some business guy's lame vision) is about as palatable as selling out and getting an MBA. I want to stay in technology, but working on cool projects and using decent languages (e.g. Lisp, ML, Haskell... or Python/Ruby at the very least).

If the startup gets funding, and it probably will, I'm fine. However, I'm worried about that 1-in-20 (?) chance that we don't manage to line up funding in time, in which I need to do a crash job search in an imploded economy and on shaky ground (and I don't want to do any job search, because I really like the startup and the projects I am working on). It's getting to the point where I hate spending money and I'm delaying necessary expenditures.

So, I'm staring down a 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 risk of utter disaster and now that it's 2009 I'm starting to get scared. Has anyone here been through disaster before? How did it pan out?