I joined a business someone started, personally invested $200k, and forwent income for a year. This is after leaving a prestigious finance job after 5-6 years in the industry and quitting a senior role at a Fintech.
Company’s sales is flat, and it’s running out of money. If this doesn’t work out, I’m a guy who quit the previous start-up (not doing very well rn) after 1 year, blew money, and joined another one that’s also not doing well.
I feel like I’m not employable and that maybe my judgment is poor. Has anyone experienced or gone through this?
Yeah, I have. I got the offer of a ~1% share of a company I worked for in exchange for my overtime payout, and turned them down. Joke’s on me. I left some half-year later or so, and the product I built for them worked so good and reliable that they could successfully scale up. Being honest, at the time I gave that company 50:50 of crashing vs. succeeding, because I thought it might as well go south for reasons beyond my control. They are quite healthy still and growing, so I made a bad coin flip on this one as it would have been a share nice-to-have.
Don’t beat yourself up over failure like this. Figure out what’s inside your control and what’s outside of your control, and take ownership over what you can do.
Everything outside of that, it’s always good to seek council. You must have someone with a law-degree in your circle, right? Perhaps friends or family you can trust? Talk to them, and ask for guidance. I found that lawyers make excellent dialogue partners when it comes to situations like that. I didn’t do that. If I had talked to literally anybody about it, who knows what could have been negotiated instead.
Perhaps there is something you can do to turn it around. Like they say, a chip and a chair. You still got that. You’re not out of business yet.
Hope this helps to lift your mood a bit!