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Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, it could have been considered a great success — at 24 I’d raised $1m in investment, built a team and a tech product which operated at relative scale, I’d learnt an enormous amount and I had an incredible network in the UK startup ecosystem.

None of that is success. Success is taking in enough money to pay your employees, your expenses, and have something left over to put in a bank.

I get so tired of these flimsy companies touting their "success" which is nothing more than money from investors buying things they haven't earned. Just because you aren't profitable doesn't make you a failure, but neither does having investor money in your bank account make you successful.

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I think the key word is "personally". That stuff doesn't equal a successful company, but it does look nice on a resume.

I don't disagree with that, but your bullet point cost somebody a million bucks and from the sound of things, a few people are out a livelihood too while he's off to his next big adventure. It doesn't seem like the Author is owning any of the fallout from it.

I don't know, sounds like he went through nine pretty miserable months dealing with the failure, and now is starting a mental health startup to help others manage the mental challenge of startups. Feels to me like he felt the weight of this failure, my read is that the statement about success was himself still trying to tell himself he's ok. Failing in a startup sucks. People kill themselves over that (including a friend of mine). I think we should forgive those who fail, it's a necessary part of the startup ecosystem, and let them move on with their lives.

The way I read it he's building a support group for other CEO's of failed startups, other people with new adventures, flush bank accounts and the kind of folks who write these mostly self serving "what I learned" things. Granted this one isn't nearly as self serving as most, but what about the engineers scrambling to get a job so they can feed their kids? How about the marketing people searching for work to cover their mortgage? How about everyone else scrambling to not lose a car?

We never hear about those people because they're too busy scrambling for a life raft to write long sappy "what I learned" medium posts.

You clearly haven't read any of my other posts. Dealing with failure is the hardest thing I've ever done and seriously affected my mental health. Everyone who worked for us went into better jobs than previously and all I'm doing is trying to help more and more people. You are far too quick to judge and seem very bitter about a lot of the startup BS, which I can understand.

When I talk about the fact that the business could have been seen as a success for me, that is because success and failure are completely relative. Many of the people around me would laugh when I said I'd failed, because they were judging it by how far I'd come and the experience I'd gained.

You're absolutely right the business was a complete failure and we spent $800k of someone else's money to get those learnings', but just because someone was a founder/CEO you shouldn't think they're in a different position to anybody else - both financially and emotionally.

I think the Sanctus idea of treating (in both senses) mental health like physical health has much broader scope:

http://mentalhealthinstartups.com/introducing-sanctus-59a8b4...

It is unfortunate that the current domain name reflects the first niche market for the Sanctus idea, rather than the nature of the service itself, or the more revolutionary ambitions.

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