Why did I emotionally implode after raising $4.2M?

Within days of closing my first real round of capital — a $4.2M seed — I remember pacing back and forth in my apartment, stomach in knots, rehearsing how I was going to convince one of our lead investors to sit on my board.

Yes. Convince them.

“Hey investors who never asked to be on my board. Will you please be on my board?”
Said no founder, ever.

Except me.

I thought it would signal trust and transparency.
I thought it made me look like a “high EQ” founder.

What it really was:

Me subconsciously trying to outsource emotional responsibility before I even realized what I’d signed up for.

It didn’t hit me until two years later when they called a meeting to tell me they were stepping off the board and backing away entirely.

The call was short. Measured. No warmth.
Like something had already calcified…6+ months ago.

That’s when it started to hit me:
They hadn’t just lost faith in the company.
They’d lost conviction in me.

I felt it in my body before I let myself admit it to my brain.
This wasn’t a temporary wobble.
This was them exiting the relationship and not looking back.

And here’s the truth that still makes me physically nauseous:
I unknowingly gave them a lot of reasons to.

I thought I was being transparent.
I thought I was being coachable.
I thought I was building trust.

But I wasn’t.
What I was actually doing was emotionally outsourcing every decision, every uncomfortable emotion, every ounce of uncertainty…to the people who funded me…

And once they realized I couldn’t carry my own emotional weight, they stopped wanting to be in the room.

This isn’t a story about failure.
Most startups fail. Venture capital expects that.

This is about something worse:
being the founder investors don’t want to keep backing no matter what.

Over time, several of my investors stopped responding altogether.
Then one day, after a year of silence, one of them reached out to ask if I’d be open to shutting down the company and returning the remaining capital.

I said no.

So they said they'd rather forfeit their shares entirely.

Not sell.
Not wait it out.
Forfeit.

And they reiterated that stance for 20 months.

That level of rejection doesn’t come from a bad CAC curve.
It comes from something deeper. Something behavioral.
Something about me.

So I’ve spent the past 6 months unpacking it. Not just what happened to me, but what happened in me.

And from that came something I now call The Squirrel Framework.

I chased emotions like a golden retriever chases squirrels then proudly dropped them at my investors’ feet like, look what I found! please give me a treat and pat my head!

It’s not a leadership framework. It’s not branding.
It’s a self-autopsy.

It’s how I finally learned to ask:

• Should I have been trusted with capital?

• Have I actually earned the right to hold other people’s risk?

• And if not, what would it take to get there?

Let me walk you through it.
Not as the expert. As the body on the table.

Stage 1: 🐿 Wild Forager

This was me for the first year after raising our seed round.

I'd wake up with an anxious knot in my chest and immediately start scanning:
Which investor should I loop in?
Who can make this feeling make sense?

And if I couldn’t get a response or didn’t get the right tone, I unraveled.

I’d write emails that were way too long.
I’d ask “gut check” questions I already knew the answer to.
I’d fish for reassurance dressed up as strategic updates.

What I meant every time was:

It wasn’t manipulation. It was emotional dependency.
I didn’t know how to hold tension so I exported it.

And over time, they stopped backing a founder.
They were managing a person’s inner child.

And they didn’t want the job.
Nor should they have.

They told me this, multiple times.
But I wasn’t hearing them.

Truthfully? I think I only started hearing them three years later.

Stage 2: 🤝 The Ritualistic Handoff

Eventually, I found “safe” people.
A board member. A friend. A partner.
People whose presence regulated me.

And I clung to them like a baby bird who never fledged.
No, worse. Like a 29-year-old toddler in Patagonia.

I needed their voice tone. Their phrasing. Their energy.

I built emotional shortcuts:

• If they feel calm, I must be okay.

• If they take too long to reply, I must’ve fucked up.

• If they seem confused, the company must be in free fall.

I wasn’t self-regulating.
I was plugging into someone else’s nervous system and calling it “stability.”

Even worse:
I called that board management.
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

What it really was:
Emotional dependency in a blazer.

I don’t know what they said behind closed doors.
But if I had to guess?

They weren’t talking about the business.

They were talking about me.

Stage 3: 🌱 Hesitant Homecoming

This is the most vulnerable part, not because it’s traumatic.
Because it’s current.

I’m here now.

I’ve started learning to pause.
To journal before I spiral.
To wait 48 hours before sending the email.

Some days I still don’t catch it in time. But more and more, I do.

For the first time, I feel safe inside myself.
Which means, for the first time, I might be safe to trust from the outside again, too.

Stage 4: 👑 Squirrel Sovereign

I’m not here yet.
Maybe 60%. On a good day.

But I know what it feels like now.

I’ve had moments where I made a hard call without polling 4 people first.
Where I got a terse investor reply and didn’t spiral.
Where I felt real fear and didn’t try to offload it.

Here’s the bar I’m working toward:

• Can I feel what I feel without making someone else responsible for it?

• Can I receive support without becoming dependent on it?

• Can I lead without needing a mirror to believe in myself?

That, to me, is the actual job of a founder.
Not vision. Not fundraising. Not recruiting.

Emotional containment.
Without that, nothing else sticks.

Stage 5: 🛖 Sacred Den

This is the culture I’m building now.

No one is responsible for regulating me.
And I’m not responsible for regulating them.

We metabolize our feelings before we share them.
We speak from ownership, not from panic.
We don’t confuse silence with abandonment.
We don’t confuse over-communication with care.

Because that’s what broke me last time.
And I’m not rebuilding from those blueprints again.

The Real Takeaway

I didn’t implode because I was incompetent.
I imploded because I hadn’t built the internal scaffolding to carry what I took on.

And no one warns you when you raise your first check that money isn’t just capital.

It’s relational gravity.

If you’re not anchored, you will drift.
If you’re not self-responsible, you will burn trust.
If you’re not emotionally sovereign, you will build a company that exists only to stabilize you and it will collapse under the weight.

If you haven’t learned to bring the squirrel home to yourself, you might still build something.

But it won’t be a company.
It’ll be a coping mechanism.

And if you’re a founder reading this, ask yourself:

Are you building a business?

Or are you asking someone else to hold the parts of you that you haven’t learned to hold yet?

Only one of those is fundable.

This piece is dedicated to two people. I won’t name you.
You don’t get these emails.
You also don’t know each other but you know of each other through me.
But if you ever stumble on this, you’ll know exactly who you are.
Thank you for teaching me this lesson.

Kaeya