I turned down $500k, pissed off my investors, and shut down my startup (2016)
Hi, author here.<p>I'm surprised (and delighted) to see this back on Hacker News. I'm happy that people find value in the article, and the process writing it forced me to put my thoughts together and helped get me through an emotionally difficult time.<p>To address a few questions from the comments.<p>1) A common opinion is that I gave up too quickly, that I was just burned out, or taking the money would have let me figure things out later. This was simply not the case. An experienced mountaineer knows if a mountain is climbable with the team, gear, and weather he has. This one was not.<p>2) I would have been 100% fine with the team and investors going ahead without me, but AFAIK, neither side ever discussed it.<p>3) We were absolutely not viewing contract information, and would not have been able to do so even if we wanted to. We anonymously logged when functions were called without storing user or input data of any kind.<p>4) Six years later, I'm doing well. The Disrupting Japan podcast is going strong.  I took a senior role in corporate VC for a while, and ended up at Google.<p>I was overwhelmed by the attention and positive response I got from this article. The asymmetry of value of money and time was one of my main learnings, and I'm glad to see it resonates with so many other founders.