Startup founders share how they bouncing off their mistakes

Startup founders face great pressure to succeed, but it is even more difficult to let go of a failed business and then find success.

Building a startup is always dangerous. Since 1994, the five-year survival rate for US small and medium-sized businesses has exceeded approximately 50% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2018, the five-year survival rate was 57.3%.

Serial entrepreneur Ismael Dainhine knows how it feels to fail after being in the game for over a decade.

He has founded multiple businesses – two failed and three successful – recently co-founded his latest company, Evergive.

Dyinhine described his early failures. It considered his first two companies to be shut down within a few years and painful.

“There was definitely that pressure in my personal life that I put on myself due to financial constraints. No one at that point couldn’t put more pressure on me than I put on myself,” he said.

Dainehine said he could learn from these mistakes and that his next company had brought millions of income before he left them. But even working on these companies, I began to feel “after some time I was soulless and hollow.”

Entrepreneurship is often sold as a kind of utopia. This is not overturned by the bureaucracy and politics of corporate life. However, over the past few decades, the founder’s life has become a synonymous word with the culture of hustle.

The Silicon Valley startup scene mythologizes a seven-day work week, but Chinese tech companies are notorious in the 996 culture – working six days a week, from 9am to 9pm.

So how does founders get used to this comprehensive, high-pressure lifestyle bounce back from failure?

To move out of a failed business, you need to own people who are mistaken and disappointed, including employees and investors.

Klaas Ardinois founded Commvision in 2024, a UK-based software development company that closed a year later. He said the biggest emotional challenge of failure is disappointing investors who put money in the company and firing employees whose lives have faded.

Piinyin’s failure to market mismatch and the misunderstanding of venture capital companies, Aldinoy said he persuaded his employees to join Commvision from his previous company.

“Emotionally, it was really tough to admit that your business is failing. Then B: “I have to deal with the fallout of trying to disrupt people’s lives so dramatically,” he said.

“It’s not like this: “Hey, we managed to solve something.” “You have four weeks. I know you’re growing financially because you’re buying a house and you’re about to have a baby. That was really tough.”

Meanwhile, Latvian-based Einer Kravin overestimated the Augormendre reality agency in 2013, nearly bankrupting twice. However, despite its revenues of 1.5 million euros ($1.75 million) in 2022, Clavins left as a result of burnout.

He then gave his startup life another chance, pouring 500,000 euros into the next startup.

Klavins, the lead product manager for Proptech Startup Giraffe360, tells CNBC that he experienced an identity crisis while transitioning from founder to corporate employee.

“When you close a business that has failed, you really start asking questions: what are you good at? Because at that point it seemed like I wasn’t good at anything,” he said.

“I have lost so many of my identity because I have made so many sacrifices to make this a success… Losing your identity is very scary.

Founders returning to corporate life as employees may find the transition embarrassing or stigmatized. Employers can even discriminate against them.

A 2024 survey led by Rutgers Business School sent fake resumes to 219 people with experience hiring for companies. The fictitious application had the same qualifications, but some were former business owners.

Recruiters found that in what they called the “entrepreneurship penalty” in the study, they were unlikely to recommend the former business owner for their role. The recruiter seemed hesitant to hire someone who was his boss and who was used to working autonomously.

However, public relations expert Alain Rapallo said founders can actually create the best employees.

Laparo left the company’s role as PR director in 2021 to start his own agency, but returned to workforce life just three years later.

Entrepreneurship has its benefits, he said, “If you’re the founder and you’re working for yourself, and you’re going to accomplish it after that first year, you did most of all the roles that any company does on a small scale, but you did most of it.”

Rapallo said running a business will also sharpen skills such as multitasking and time management.

“The startup is crude, but you (as an employee) don’t necessarily do all the work. You don’t have the mindset of growing your business. Usually you have the mindset of taking care of your clients and accounts,” he added.

Product Manager Klavins agreed that his understanding of numerous business functions has acquired his current role.

Being an employee is also an important lesson in humility, he said.

Serial entrepreneur Dainehine said it was important to redefine what success and failure meant to him in order to move forward.

“The biggest risk is not failure, the biggest risk is success without being clear,” he explained, noting that success is always elusive without a clear set of principles.

“The biggest advice I had for entrepreneurs at that stage is to develop or commit something to you that has a very deep sense of purpose and mission.

“When I focused on the mission I actually believed in, the same set-off became viable. So if they could pivot to something they would adhere to, or find it within the current company, I think it would enhance their resilience and reconfigure the breakdown.”