Sorry, But Startup Shutdowns Are F*ing Weak

I don’t care how many lessons you learned.

I don’t care how many “thank you’s” you squeezed into your LinkedIn post.

And I sure as hell don’t care about your list of investors…rattle off your VC’s names one last time in your shutdown post and I’ll want to reach through the screen and slap you almost as desperately as they want to get as far away from you as possible (they’ll never say it to your face, but that’s exactly what they’re thinking. Don’t ask me how I know).

If you’re a seed-stage venture-backed founder and you shut your company down, let’s be clear:

It’s not because you had to. It’s because you chose to.

You took the money.
You got the time, the network, the credibility.
That means you had the option to live in pivot purgatory as long as it took to break out.

Instead, you burned $x million and quit.

⏪ Rewind: It’s the day you closed your seed.

Congratulations.
Welcome to pivot purgatory.

Living hell with a fat bank account.

Your account’s fat enough to keep you alive. Everything else is dogshit.
You get no food.
No praise.
No validation.
No love.

You wake up every day knowing you’re not “there” yet.
Your product’s wrong. Your market’s wrong. Your team might be wrong.
Every win feels fake. Every loss feels like confirmation you’re a fraud.

That’s the job.

What seed funding really buys

Seed funding affords you the ability to, in Jensen Huang’s words “suffer with great glee” for a living.
And by living I mean:
Not pass through. Not visit. Live here.

You live in pivot purgatory.

You get better and better at figuring out how to leave and don’t you dare leave until you’re actually ready.

Ready isn’t “I’m tired of this.”
Ready isn’t “the runway’s getting tight.”
Ready isn’t “my VC’s are forcing me to move fast.”
Ready is “what I’ve built can take the market’s best punch and stay standing.”

No.

You’ve got the capital to keep going. The network to try again. The brand halo to still get meetings.

If you walk out before the breakout, don’t fool yourself.
That’s not necessity. That’s quitting dressed up as excuses.

Pivot purgatory is the ultimate privilege.

Pivot purgatory is the most prime real estate property in the world and naturally, the most expensive one.

Why? 

Because it’s the only place where you get to do what almost no one else gets to do:

burn an entire product to the ground, rewire your whole business, and run infinite experiments until something finally sticks.

Something inevitably sticks.

Nearly everyone on the planet wants to be an entrepreneur and only 1% get to try.
There is only one type of entrepreneur who gets to be in pivot purgatory.

• Not bootstrapped founders: One wrong turn and they’re out of the game.

• Not debt-funded founders: One slow quarter and the repayment clock eats them alive.

• Not grant-funded founders: When the program ends, so does the runway.

• Not friends-and-family founders: Every failed experiment burns personal trust you can’t buy back.

• Not part-time founders: The clock runs out before the market even notices you exist.

Only venture-backed seed founders get to stay in the padded cell long enough to burn it all down, rebuild, and still keep playing.

And if they keep at it, they can damn near guarantee at least a $20M company.

Call it what it is: privilege.

And if you throw it away because “it’s hard,” you didn’t want it bad enough.

It’s that simple.

Why 99% of founders shut their companies down anyway

It’s not the money that runs out first.
It’s the guts.

• Ego erosion: Admitting you were wrong, again and again, until you start to believe you’re just wrong.

• Shame: Building in public when there’s nothing to brag about.

• Investor disengagement: The people who wrote the check now won’t even write you back.

• Comfort creep: You want a family, you want to get married, you want a kid, you want stability and you convince yourself you can’t have both. YOU CAN. You just don’t want to.

Most founders don’t survive this part. They find a respectable excuse and get the hell out.

For any venture-backed founders reading who announced your startup shut down acquihire with glee, STFU.

You’re the kind of founder I respect the least.

And for any venture-backed founders reading this who announced you’re departing or quitting your company and hiring another person to run it:

You’re the kind of founder I respect the second least, because at least you didn’t try to dress your exit up as a win.

To the ones too weak to stay in pivot purgatory for as long as necessary, eat shit and enjoy it, swallow those lessons, chew on the glass, and keep going — but then go out of your way to package your decision as some kind of noble, strategic “next chapter”?

GTFO.

My favorite founder to follow on Twitter, Hiten Shah (CrazyEgg founder) shared this tweet that offers a much more graceful perspective:

My living testament:

I stayed in pivot purgatory from 2020 to 2024. Four years in the cage.

4 different brand names marked 4 major pivots:
Alcamy → Swaypay → Cray → SwayID (exit pivot purgatory).

Countless 50+ micro pivots underneath each.

Several different co-founders.
Monthly sales pitch tear downs and rebuilds.
Changed markets.
$4M+ in legal threats.

I repeat: 4 years in pivot hell.
1 reason: Because I had more cash.

Therefore I had more shots on goal.
And I used them until I earned my way out of needing them.

Your living testament TBD:

If you’re seed stage venture-backed, your floor is higher than 99.9999% of founders’ ceilings.

Your only job is to not leave purgatory until you’ve earned your exit.

Stay.
Suffer.
Get fluent in the pain.

Breakout is inevitable if you learn how to, as Harry Stebbings tweeted:

Maybe one day this post becomes the greatest irony because I have to shut my own venture-backed company down, but only for an extraordinary circumstance no one could have seen coming. Exception to the rule.

Barring that, I rest my case.

Kaeya