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Comment by hpcjoe | Hacker News Reader

Here here. When you empty your 401k to build your business, and don't contribute to it for 15 years while you are building, as you simply don't have the cash, and cannot afford it ...

Yeah. The implicit assumptions of the "live in poverty" of the OP, are wrong.

I'm 54, and I was financially wiped out at 51. I will not ever recover from this. No family wealth to fall back on. I do not believe I will ever be able to retire. And noting that there is a bit of ageism in this space, makes the threat of potential long term unemployment even worse for folks like me.

Sort of an inverse Ozymandias. Gaze upon my flaming cratered company, and beware. Here be demons. That you cannot control.

I had skin in the game. And I lost it.

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> ...I'm 54, and I was financially wiped out at 51. I will not ever recover from this....

You need a fighting spirit to achieve great things. Many people have overcome far greater problems. Never give up you are only one transaction away from financial success. Good luck

(really not sure why this was down voted ... it is a good comment)

Thanks. I'm aware of others struggles. I figure that my story could be a cautionary tale for some, and others may take lessons from it.

When I say in other fora, never, ever take debt financing of anything if you can avoid it, this is coming from personal agonizing experience.

If I go back into the startup world, I'm going with a very clear perception of what is what. No rose colored glasses. No "if you build a better mousetrap" mentality. I know how things can go horribly wrong. I know where the traps and mines are.

Have you blogged or told your story anywhere? I'm curious to learn more!

Not all of it. I blog here[1]. The post where I talked about the end is here[2]. Note the 'laws' I quote at the end of the post. My first post is here[3]. There I talk about the HPC market, accelerators, and some of our plans. We were working on board level inexpensive accelerators before these were a thing. We gave up trying to get funding for this in 2006.

I did say, you have to be at the right place, at the right time. And be lucky. We got 2 of 3. Luck eluded us.

[1] https://scalability.org

[2] https://scalability.org/2017/03/requiem/

[3] https://scalability.org/2005/10/venture-capital-and-high-per...

> Or when you go visit customers, they love your product, the benchmark results are mind blowing … and then the CIO/CFO kills the deal because, you know … you are too small.

We've been in similar situations several times. We're serving a niche, but this niche is a core piece of our customers business. Without software like ours, their whole operation stops.

Anyway, we'd have demos. Department heads were on fire, wondering if we could install same day we had demo, all smiles, everything looked great. And then we lost because someone higher up decided we were "too small". We're small, but we're pretty much the best in our niche and we have had very solid financials for decades.

Those we lost went with bigger, supposedly "safer" competitors and had some very sub-par years with them before they had to pay their way out of those contracts and come back to us.

We had a customer that POCed on our systems, then bought some crap from HP + one of the SSD card vendors in 2013. They then called us up in 2014 and asked to pay us to help them achieve the performance they saw on our system, on their 5x as expensive "low risk" HP + SSD card system.

My response was simple. No.

I invited them to throw away the crap they bought and buy the right thing from us, but that was politically untenable. Turns out spending multiple millions of dollars for crappy half baked "solutions" versus a lower sum of money for something that actually worked, would likely get some people fired.

The world isn't fair, and sometimes not even sane. The people who made these decisions, despite being disastrous ones, were promoted. Enough of these built up that we couldn't survive.

Incredibly frustrating.

Oh man, I remember reading your blog when I was in grad school (mid-2000s) doing molecular simulations on HPC systems (and not really enjoying the science aspect, but I did like working on the tools), thinking that you were a great example of being able to bootstrap a business in the HPC space. Sad to hear it didn't work out.

Thanks! I've gone to visit sites and heard a few people whispering near me "its the scalability.org guy". Blew me away.

I still write, albeit less frequently, and I have to keep to a narrower range of topics.

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