Or they can start you down the wrong road.Īs The Verge reported on Inboard Technology‘s failed pivot: Pivots like Burbn to Instagram or ThePoint to Groupon can go extraordinarily well. “Ultimately we shut down because our team is ready to move on to something new.” The problem, as CEO Daniel Conway put it, was that there wasn’t massive growth or enough interest in running the business: The company appeared to be doing well, with 36% gross margins and 12% net profit at the time it shut down. However, we have realised that the risk of no longer being able to keep up is simply too big.”ĭoughbies, which raised $670,000 for an on-demand cookie delivery service in 2013, also cited a lack of passion from its founders and team as one of the reasons for its failure. At the same time, we had to admit that our growth is stagnating and that we can hardly manage by our own efforts to grow the number of sales on our platform to the desired extent – even our restructuring last year could not change this … Additionally, we haven’t managed to implement enough innovative new ideas over the past few years.ĭaWanda is not insolvent. “In the last quarter of 2017 we reached profitability and have since been working to cover our costs. Founder and CEO Claudia Helming shared this message on the company’s website: I certainly was.”Īt DaWanda, stagnation in both growth and team interest led to the company’s eventual closure. “I think people are unprepared for how hard and awful it is going to be to start a company. Various founders have spoken up about how damaging burnout can be. “The prevalent view of startup founders in Silicon Valley is a delusion that in order to succeed, in order to build a high-growth company, you need to burn out.”Īmid the pandemic, burnout became even more prevalent among tech workers: 68% of tech employees said they felt more burned out working from home, according to a survey by Blind. As former Uber board member and CEO of Thrive Global Arianna Huffington puts it: What can make conversations about burnout difficult, especially in Silicon Valley, is the widespread belief that building a successful company will always involve some degree of possibly hazardous overwork. The ability to cut your losses where necessary and redirect your efforts when you see a dead end - or lack passion for a domain - was deemed important to succeeding and avoiding burnout, as was having a solid, diverse, and driven team so that responsibilities can be shared. Burnout was given as a reason for failure 5% of the time. Work-life balance is not something that startup founders often get, so the risk of burning out is high. It’s worth noting that this type of data-driven analysis would not be possible without a number of founders being courageous enough to share stories of their startup’s demise with the world. But many very relevant lessons for anyone in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. There is certainly no survivorship bias here.