479: What To Do After Your Startup Failed?

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what founders should do after their startup has failed.

We hear a lot about startups that succeed and do very well, however, what is not talked about very much is the number of startups that fail and how these failures can affect a founder negatively.

So in this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what you should do after your startup has failed, why letting go is super important, why you shouldn’t make instantly massive life decisions on that day your startup fails and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About the topic of today’s episode

00:16 Why this topic was chosen.

02:24 Hiten’s thoughts on what you should do after your startup has failed.

03:13 Why you should write stuff down.

04:02 How we’re supposed to fail.

04:55 Why letting go is super important. 

06:30 Why you should talk to people that were involved in the startup and ask them what they think went wrong.

08:19 Why you shouldn’t make instantly massive life decisions on that day.

09:03 Why you should take some time off.

10:00 What you should do if your startup fails or is failing.

3 Key Points:

• Write a post mortem as soon as you can.
• You gotta find closure.
• We are supposed to fail.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti

[0:00:04]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:05]

Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about what founders should do right after their startup has failed. So here’s the reason why I want to quickly talk about this with you. I realized this is actually a really important point. I’m not sure how much content is out there around this. This is not like what should you do as your next venture, but this is what did you do the day that you close up shop, right? The day that you stop service or the day of bankruptcy of the day where you officially have failed with your startup. What do you do the next day? And the reason I wanted to talk to you about this is that I have two good friends that are currently going through this where a startup that they’ve been working on for a long time, they had a lot of ups and downs. They fought very hard this year to try to turn things around and now they’re kind of in the final, final week of running the business and then closing up shop. And this is a journey that has taken them, I don’t know, five or six years. So they’ve poured a lot into this business and they are definitely more along the burned out, exhausted side of the spectrum and they’ve been having a lot of conversations individually. One-on-one with both of them on what should come next. And I think that it might be an interesting episode for the two of us to kind of unpack this for people either that go through this right now or just for people to have heard this in case they have to go through this at some point in the future. Typically when a founder comes to you Hiten that has just failed and just closed up shop and is now wondering, what the hell do I do next? Should I go try to find a job? Should I start my next project? Should I, I don’t know, go meditate at a retreat for a couple of weeks and find the meaning of life. I know that it is a very individual question that depends on so many different factors but typically guide me through kind of your approach or your experience or your general philosophy when it comes to advising or helping founders that have just kind of failed with a grim style.

[0:02:21]

Hiten Shah: Write up post-mortem. As soon as you can get that shit out of your head, period. That’s the first thing you have to do. I think you have to get it o