Five Things to Do After the Startup Stops

“So you guys just get together and drink then?” Yuriy asked over beers on Dale’s patio.

“No” I said.

Yes, my inner critic responded.

“We’ve actually made some good progress. We’re going to a fitness conference next week and we’re pretty close to a working prototype.”

You have a bunch of sensors in a desk drawer and a raspberry pi your kids will be using to play MAME roms in a month or two. The voice in the back of my skull continued.

“We had an offshore dev team build the prototype for us. We looked at this Ukrainian team, but went with these Romanians instead.”

“Good thing too. I wouldn’t trust those Ukrainians.” Yuriy said dead pan.

I half smiled. I couldn’t tell what he meant when he did the dead pan voice. He told me a story once about throwing bricks up in the air as a kid in the Ukraine. He said they would draw a circle on the ground, stand in it holding a brick, throw the bricks up and finally step out of the way. The winner stood closest to the circle without getting hit by a brick. He had laughed while he had described it. If he laughed, then I assumed he thought what he said was funny; not whether he believed it or not.

Yuriy and I met at the MBA. We were at a post-MBA get together at Dale’s. I tried a startup with two friends from the MBA. We started classes in the fall of 2017, finished in the fall of 2018 and graduated in the spring of 2019. Our little startup had been running since we finished the main coursework. It was summer 2019 on Dale’s patio. We had ten months of effort and $30,000 invested in the startup. To show for it, we had a semi-working hardware prototype and were a few months away from a pivot to software.

My therapist used to ask me why I constantly put myself down, instead of building myself up. I’m sure more talk about that would have been helpful, but I went in with one problem: the electric cord running up and down my spine that had me jumping at every rustle in the bushes. I stopped going when I mostly fixed that. The self doubt never left and never got dealt with. This conversation with Yuriy did not help that feeling . If my inner critic had a game from his childhood, he would describe a game where he and I would throw bricks up in the air, then try to step out of the way.

Two years after starting up, we shut down and the MBA had yet to provide a tangible ROI. The self-made opportunity dried up and all I had to show for it was drinking buddies. My inner critic stood outside the impact circle of falling bricks and he pointed at me and said loser.

1. Deal With your Mental Health

Like everyone, I’m sometimes about 20 hit points away from a mental KO. Shutting down the startup was a low point, but also a relief because it wasn’t working. I think we could have taken it further, but its chances of being what we wanted (a better opportunity than the ones our full-time careers provided) were slim. Building yourself up after something doesn’t immediately work is hard. It’s hard to do when exercising. It’s hard to do on a project. It’s hard all the time. If your habits steer toward the familiar shores of criticism, nitpicking, and self doubt, then you might as well throw a brick in the air and try and step out of the way. If it hits you, it will probably hurt less than the damage done by the incessant putdowns you inflict on yourself. Deal with your mental health. No one is immune to doubt, to self criticism, and anxiety. Take a holiday, a break, a retrospective, a fancy dinner, a wrap party; find a thing to do that separates you from what you did. And do it because unless you intend to quit altogether (don’t do that), your future you needs the current you to deal with the past and move on.

2. Find Something to Fill the Void

January 2021 I found I had a lot of free time all of a sudden as we had closed up the startup just before Christmas. I looked into writing, pushing my day job forward, renovating the house, and joining a book club. Then I did them all. I don’t know if I’m doing any of it well nor if any of it will pay dividends, but finding things to do that I wanted to do proved much easier than I thought it would be. I am fortunate to have opportunities: a job to devote energy into, a network to find a book club. Take stock of where you are post startup and evaluate what you want out of life. I wanted to read more. I wanted to write more. I wanted to do something with my hands and I wanted to get ahead at work. Go to the fundamentals and figure out what will bring you joy, then take the first step. Momentum comes from motion. Find the destinations you want, then move toward them.

3. Take Stock of What You Accomplished

We all deserve a medal for the things we do and have done (even if it is making breakfast). Recognize the efforts of those around you and also what you have personally done. Recognize your own accomplishments. In Holland, I found every step through the streets of Leiden magical. My Dutch friends said it’s nice, I guess. Appreciating your everyday takes energy. The struggles of your earlier efforts turned into accomplishments have become your everyday. We all go through life optimizing for efficiency. Fragment your hard disk a little and take the time to appreciate the good things be it the breakfast you made, or the journey that brought you to a field of tulips.

4. Move Forward with Positivity

The future should never look worse to you than the past. The future is infinite and full of possibilities. The past is stagnant and finite. Maybe your current situation is bad and the future looks pretty bleak. Going forward, no one really knows especially you. What you do know of risks and pitfalls and problems should inform you of what to do to survive and strive. Some things will definitely be bad. Others not so much. Work for future you want. Pick your outlook and plan and mitigate what you can. A wise snowman once told me, you can’t control everything, but what you can is how you take control of what comes next.

5. Relax and Get off Social Media including LinkedIn

Social media browsing is one of my vices. My two time sinks of choice are LinkedIn and Reddit. I don’t think Reddit has any defenders, but many HR and career-minded people will tell you posting and being active on LinkedIn boosts your career profile and will help your career. To them, I say I agree, but there is a flip side. Like any other social media, it’s a ripe to play on your insecurities and self doubts about what differentiates you from everyone else. Breathing and relaxing requires distance from all the users vying for most successful, most desirable, most knowledgeable candidate profile out there. Breathe, relax, and disconnect.

I don’t regret the time we spent trying to make the startup work. Maybe we got lucky and didn’t risk too much. Maybe we lied to ourselves and spent the whole time drinking and talking without any concrete action. When we shut down, all the effort we put into the build, all the grand plans we had on pivoting, and all those lessons we learned along the way added up to a collection of lessons to inform the next thing. It would have been nice to have accomplished the goal and brought a commercial product to market that encapsulated our vision. Instead we got lessons in failure, but those lessons, objectively, have equally as much value as the success that might have been. It’s all just a matter of perspective, and how we (me, you, everyone) move forward. Criticism and self doubt after something like this is easy, especially for those of us (like me) prone to it. Stepping back and stepping away and thinking about it over the course of journalizing the experience, I’ve found it necessary to remind myself, sometimes daily, that failure is a thing that happened, not who I am. I’ve also found that I’m mostly doing things I want to do in my free time now, as opposed to struggling with what turned out to be a dead horse… possibly killed by a falling brick.