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It's hard to "provide insight" because it's different for everybody. My story is in the last two posts here: http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/ Basically, I sucked it up, felt depressed and aimless for about 3 months, and then went and got a job at Google and moved out to California. Had a very successful 5+ year career there where I generally felt that my startup experience was an advantage, although there were definitely a few moments where I thought "I wish I'd joined Google in 2005 instead of wasting 4 years with this startup dream." Such is life though - I remember talking to a Google coworker (who later become a 2-time YC founder with a successful exit) who said "Dude, pretty much everyone at Google wishes they joined 4 years earlier." Now gearing up to try it all again. I suspect that a major factor that accounted for that was that I founded my startup thinking it was an experiment and not a goal - I needed to know, myself, what I was capable of. If the answer was "Not founding a company, apparently", well, then I had my answer, and I could be happy in a regular company. If the answer was "You're rich now", well, so much the better. At no point did I feel I had to get rich, or that it was my destiny, or that I was worthless if I didn't succeed. I've also seen some of the posts you mention that describe how years spent on a failed startup do not improve their career options, and the thing that's jumped out about most of them is that the founders there founded a company to escape having a real job, and then continued working on it long past the point where it would be rational to quit and do something else. Of course that'll hurt your prospects - you are losing time that can be spent developing skills and working on projects that actually will have an impact, and it also shows that you're not entirely rational. I also know a number of startup founders who tried it, realized their business concept was flawed (or in some, it was even successful but they just didn't want to do it anymore), and then went to work for Google. You typically don't hear about them on Hacker News, however, because they close that chapter of their life and feel no need to dwell on it and no bitterness to it, and so they don't post. |