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Hey! First of all, congrats for making it this far! I had a startup, but we never were able to secure funding before we folded. We got approached by a company that was both interested in our product and also wanted to invest. When this happened, we've already been doing the startup for 2.5 years, and I was already pretty tired, burnt out, often thinking about opportunity costs, esp. when having beer with "normal" friends. I had a pretty bad feeling about going into this negotiation for a number of reasons, mostly because I was already pretty tired, and at this point we learned a lot about the downsides of the business we were in (enterprise software sales). But despite this feeling, we agreed with my cofounder that we'd go for it, after all, this is what we had worked towards! It wasn't a bad decision---it was a gamble, and we took it. But for me it would have been better if we didn't take it. The negotiations went on for a year, it was very painful, I became pretty depressed, couldn't sleep, one time for a straight week (!). In the end the other party pulled out of the deal for totally unrelated external reasons, outside of our control, and we folded the company. But also my then-wife left me and I got divorced. I payed a big price for the gamble I took in that last year. I'm still happy that I did that startup (2009-2012), and I plan to do one again, this time much wiser. But today I would not take that last gamble, I'd call it quits there. If it doesn't work, if it doesn't feel right, then stop. One good thought experiment is this: imagine you continue on. Then you probably have to hire people at some point. Imagine hiring +3 people. Two have families, kids: they will quit their current job to come to work for you, on your project, at your company. Does it feel right? Imagine them showing up on the first day, and you're their leader, you have to motivate them, etc. Does it feel right? |