[seagull]

> Unless you have an endless supply of conviction, it’s time to admit your company’s pivot probably isn’t going to work.

The dynamics around shutting down a company in Silicon Valley today are fascinating. YC and the market forces underlying the VC ecosystem as a whole have pushed things in the "founder-friendly" direction to a degree that's pretty amazing. Seed-stage VCs will tell you they invest in people, not ideas, and as a founder if you go to your investors and tell them that you've decided that your business isn't viable, the default response you're likely to get is "Got any other ideas you want to work on?" I think the list of hard pivot success stories (Slack, Twitter, Soylent, etc) and the general SV ethos of never admitting defeat drive this glorification of the hard pivot as well, but what I don't think gets talked about enough is just how psychologically difficult they are to execute properly. If you have an idea, develop enough conviction about it to quit your job, and spend the next several years of your life throwing everything you have into building a startup around that idea, then end up reaching the conclusion that your hypothesis was wrong, it's incredibly hard to switch gears within a few weeks and reach that same level of conviction about a completely new idea (unless you have Steve Jobs levels of confidence) -- but that seems to be the expected outcome today.

I think Fred Wilson's take on this is the right one: https://www.inc.com/fred-wilson/pivot-business-failure-start... -- failure is the norm when building a startup and we should encourage a culture of failing fast and moving on from it.