Ask HN: WWYD? Built a company valued at $1B and may walk away with nothing
So basically I&#x27;m responding to this ask, what would you do by Susan Wise, 27% owner of an unmentioned startup, a company worth over one billion dollars. Anyway, so yeah. Let&#x27;s go.<p>So yeah, like she&#x27;s really at the end of her tether. She&#x27;s really desperate. She&#x27;s really gone. Obviously, what she should do depends on what she really wants. First, I&#x27;ll be kind of humorous and I&#x27;ll say, what would I do? Well, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m particularly smart, clever, or sensible. So what I would probably do is just be like, I&#x27;m starting to feel burned out. Fuck this. I&#x27;m gonna walk away right now with as much as possible. And I do whatever I could to do that.<p>But you know, that&#x27;s probably not you. I&#x27;d be like, I&#x27;m getting out, taking this golden parachute, going somewhere else and taking the me time, you know, take care of myself. And I&#x27;m walking away with enough money that I can start again and do something else. That&#x27;s what I would do, right? But I think you&#x27;re probably really asking for ideas about what you should do.<p>And what you should do, I guess, depends on what you really want. Sounds like you really don&#x27;t know what you want to do. And you&#x27;re really stressed out at the end of your tether. Like at the point of collapse, and I really feel for you and I just, you know, I hope everything works out okay for you. I hope you take care of yourself and really make it through this.<p>Because I know it seems like, you know, the possibility of maybe you won&#x27;t even make it through this, you know, it seems so scary. Probably just I&#x27;ll say one like sensible thing here. And then I&#x27;ll just launch into sort of my analysis for you. The sensible thing is you should be talking to an accountant and a lawyer and just going, how do I maximize what I want? So let&#x27;s just say, how do I maximize my money and get out as quickly as possible? Like ideally, I want to walk away with 27% of a billion and walk away tomorrow. You know, say, let&#x27;s just say that&#x27;s some kind of line in the sand type of benchmark thing and talk to an accountant or a lawyer and see, get me as close to that as possible. What should I do? You know what I mean? So I think that&#x27;s the sensible thing to say.<p>Now let&#x27;s move on to my analysis for you. And you may judge, I have absolutely no qualifications to help you in this regard and that&#x27;s fine. I&#x27;m just trying to help. So thank you and good luck anyway. I&#x27;m going to assume your trajectory was &quot;10 years&quot; in what follows. And here&#x27;s what I think. You really poured your heart and soul into this business and maybe you had to pivot for halfway through and things looked really great for the first couple of years and then you realized you had to change things and things haven&#x27;t gone as you expected, but they&#x27;ve still been good, but sort of feels like things have got out of your control in some sense.<p>And maybe you feel this momentum, this job, whatever has been too big for you, but you felt like that for maybe more than the last six years or whatever. And so I guess a constant kind of fear has been part of your daily experience there. And now on some level, you&#x27;re probably just realizing you can&#x27;t do this anymore. You don&#x27;t wanna do this anymore. There&#x27;s other things important in your life. And maybe you don&#x27;t know what they are necessarily, but you know there&#x27;s something there. You care about it, but not like you used to.<p>Because basically after the first three years, you realize even if you didn&#x27;t admit it to yourself, that things were not gonna go the way you really wanted them to go with this. You had a clear vision and a dream and reality disappointed you essentially. Maybe you feel your own skill or whatever disappointed you, but at the end of the day, you&#x27;ve been running on the realization, on the fumes of the realization that things didn&#x27;t go as you really envisioned for this. And too bad, that sucks and that hurts. And there hasn&#x27;t been any resolution to that kind of pain essentially. Lots of small wins, but nothing has kind of captured your enthusiasm for this business like it did in the first three, three and a half years. After which you&#x27;ve basically been on a trajectory leading you I guess to where you are now.<p>So this has been a long time coming. Perhaps what you&#x27;re about to do will be easier, realizing that this is not just being irrational, spur of the moment. It may not share the logic of other people or even of the business as a whole, but for you, the trajectory you&#x27;re on has its own internal logic that personally makes sense to you when you look at it and understand your journey. And in effect, grappling with the minor choice you have to try to get as much as you want, as much as you could is sort of harkening back to that already shattered dream of the first three years. And if you look at it, you&#x27;ll know that.<p>But what realization you&#x27;ve come to over the last six years hasn&#x27;t all been bad. There is a silver lining and that silver lining is that you&#x27;ve realized that, you know what, even though you feel you haven&#x27;t sort of accepted this new path because in some ways you&#x27;re harkening back and perfectly find out mixed feelings, of course, it seems a larger part of you has realized that what you really want is you want to leave something behind. You want to do something best for the business. And so in that sense, you don&#x27;t really care about the money. As strange as that sounds and irrational as that sounds compared to the vision you had for the first three years of this kind of super rich, incredible business, not to say that by some standards you have not achieved a measure, even great measure of success, yet you know it is disappointed those first three years&#x27; vision.<p>All I&#x27;m saying is that like, strange as it sounds, you&#x27;ve already kind of realized and accepted that you don&#x27;t care about the money so much. You just want to do something good for this business. So you will not, if you try to grab as much as you want now, you know, do the economically rational thing. And maybe there are some actors in your life who don&#x27;t share your values or your trajectory and they&#x27;re pushing you or thinking that you should do that or whatever, but their goals are not your goals and you must live and live with the consequences of your own decisions.<p>Anyway, so as strange as it sounds compared to that earlier version of you in the first three years, you don&#x27;t care about the money now, right? So I suppose the coming to a close of this chapter is really just a final acceptance and realization of all that you&#x27;ve lost, you know, of giving up that dream for this and of accepting that, you know, the trajectory has changed, not a terrible trajectory, but it wasn&#x27;t what you originally expected, but your passion is to do something for this business, to leave something good behind. You don&#x27;t care about what you get for yourself above a certain kind of minimum level of fairness, but that level is completely removed from and separate from and from a different source place of values than the version of you in the first three years.<p>And maybe one reason you&#x27;re confused and unsure right now is because you&#x27;re trying to balance between these two things, coming to an end of this chapter, you&#x27;re reflecting on your original vision and version of yourself and the company and maybe sort of reflecting on, but also resisting the present reality version of that in some sense, right? I&#x27;m sure you have multiple layers of thoughts and feelings and so it&#x27;s natural that there would be some in contradiction with each other. So it&#x27;s no surprise that it&#x27;s a difficult and somewhat confusing kind of time and you&#x27;re unsure right now what to do. But there&#x27;s more than that. It&#x27;s more than just do what&#x27;s good for the business as a general way, which of course, in the implementation of that policy, you will have many ideas about how that should be executed.<p>... continued below ...