I trust you've run a funded start-up that failed because you could no longer meet payroll yourself? No? Ok, let me give you a bit of my history then and we'll see if you feel that it is humble enough.

When the .com crash hit we got within a hair of going down. Fortunately we did not have any investors that I could not have paid back from my private pocket (which I eventually did, I bought them all out). If not for a little bit of foresight and a 3 month warning something really bad was going to happen (24x7 missing a check payment) we'd have been absolute toast. And with 25 people on the payroll that would have been totally devastating.

At that time we'd spent a lot more on our ramp-up than Erica ever did. And blogging had not yet come into fashion, but I'm sure that if I had written about it at the time you'd have made it sound like I was callous or had too much ego because it was other people's money and trust that I was playing with.

But the big factor that counters that is that if it is a success you get to own it, if it is a failure you own it even more. For Erica to come out about this publicly takes a lot guts, probably more than I would have if I would fail making payroll. That's brave, it is the absolute opposite of ego, the fact that others trusted her and gave her money would have made them part of the success, inevitably, if it goes wrong then they are also part of the failure.

Start-ups are risky, everybody in this game should know that by now. So embrace the failure, learn from it what you can and move on, and by all means, don't sit down and mope. That would really be a loss.