HACKER Q&A
📣 startup38

Best way to recover from startup burnout


Spent the last 5 years boostratpping multiple startups that all failed. I sit in a fog completely out of financial and emotional gas. Probably have some sort of mild depression and quickly approaching 40. I feel scorched.

I feel inept of obtaining or maintaining a job. It's been 6 or 7 years since working within a larger organization.

Do you have suggestions?

  👤 bridger3 Accepted Answer ✓
Went through something similar, and now I’ve been working in a corporate job for almost 3 years. It’s not mutually exclusive, you can have a corporate job and run a gig/startup on the side, it is possible with some tradeoffs. Over time, I actually prefer this approach over going all in at first. It let’s you earn money, gradually build/develop your idea( something I’m doing now). I find I’m also a bit more conscious now of optimizing my time and willing to delegate, pay for stuff to be done.

Regarding interviews, most tech role interviews tend to focus on looking for specialists vs generalists, this has stung me quite a bit. I’d say to favor this in early on when searching, and be very upfront with interviewers in breadth value depth of knowledge

👤 tsjq
Start interviewing

Be ready to face rejections

There's been a couple of good threads here about facing interviews.

Also: have you thought about conducting online training videos? Like, on PluralSight, Udemy, YouTube, etc ?