When the Dream Doesn’t Deliver: On Closing, Pivoting, and Plan B

Founders are usually excellent at preparing for success. They build spreadsheets full of upside scenarios, draw hockey-stick revenue projections with understated confidence, and design pitch decks that glide over risks like a politician avoiding hard questions. What they are less prepared for—what few accelerators, advisors, or glossy startup handbooks truly address—is what to do when things simply don’t work.

Depending on which data set you believe, somewhere between two-thirds and nine out of ten startups fail. Most fold quietly. Some spectacularly. Others linger in a state of unacknowledged stasis—technically alive, but functionally inert. According to CB Insights, the common causes are predictable: running out of cash, poor product-market fit, team breakdowns. But beneath these tidy labels is a more sobering reality. Sometimes, despite doing most things right, the business doesn’t click. The vision doesn’t land. The investor doesn’t wire. The customer doesn’t convert. Timing, as they say, is everything—and often, it’s wrong.

In these moments, founders face a question with no KPI and no metric to guide them: Is it time to stop?

There is no single right answer, which is what makes it so brutal. What looks like grit from one angle is sunk-cost fallacy from another. There’s a temptation—especially in startup culture—to dignify stagnation with the word “pivot.” It’s a term that suggests agency and adaptation. And yes, some pivots are brilliant. Slack started life as a failed video game. Shopify was a snowboard store. The stories abound.

But not every product contains a hidden gem waiting to be discovered. Sometimes, a pivot is just a euphemism for prolonging the inevitable. A new coat of paint on a fundamentally flawed structure. It takes clarity—and not a small amount of courage—to admit when the underlying value just isn’t there anymore.

I’ve had to make that call. I closed down my first startup, a consultancy, after a decent run. It wasn’t a disaster. We had clients. We got paid. But I could feel it plateauing. The energy sagged. The strategic rationale thinned. Eventually, I went back into a corporate job. It paid the bills. It offered structure. It also reminded me how allergic I am to meetings about meetings, performative alignment sessions, and the silent wars waged by middle management over calendar slots and credit.

It wasn’t a failure. But it wasn’t liberation either. What it offered, though, was space. Space to think. Space to retool. Space to remember why I had started in the first place. Sometimes, Plan B is not surrender—it’s just a shift in tempo. A recalibration. A quieter chapter before the next big push.

What people don’t tell you is that shutting down a company is harder than starting one. Founding is full of momentum, optimism, and caffeine-fuelled whiteboarding. Closing, by contrast, is a death by a thousand admin tasks. You reconcile the accounts. You wind down contracts. You call the lawyer. You explain, again, to your team why things didn’t go the way you hoped. There’s no offsite. No closing ceremony. Just forms, hard conversations, and a very quiet Slack channel.

But there’s dignity in doing it right. Founders who close with honesty and order—who communicate early, treat people fairly, and preserve relationships—tend to raise again. Investors remember that. So do employees. Your reputation, in many cases, outlives your startup.

The emotional side is another matter entirely. Founders are conditioned to push. To persevere. To grind. There’s a mythology around resilience: that if you just keep going, the universe will reward your belief. But there’s a fine line between conviction and delusion. When your inbox fills you with dread, your calendar feels like a punishment, and your primary emotion is fatigue—not frustration, not drive, but fatigue—that’s often a signal. Not to quit necessarily. But to pause. To step back and ask: “Would I fund this if I weren’t already in it?”

Burnout isn’t a strategy. It’s a symptom. And in biotech especially—where timelines are long, capital is scarce, and belief must precede evidence—the psychological toll can be immense. You’re selling a future that doesn’t exist yet, to people who want traction now. That dissonance eats at even the most resolute personalities. It’s no surprise that substance abuse, mental health struggles, and quiet breakdowns are common among founders, even if they rarely make the conference stage.

But here’s the thing. Companies die. Products flop. Ideas get overtaken by better ones, faster ones, or luckier ones. But the founder—the you—remains. What survives is not the cap table. It’s the capability. The learning. The sharper instincts. The scars, yes, but also the pattern recognition that will make the next venture smarter. Less naive. More formidable.

The world does not need more zombie startups. It needs more self-aware founders. If your venture is running on fumes, if the roadmap has become wishful thinking, and the investor interest is more inertia than intent—it may be time. Not to give up. But to exit gracefully, preserve your energy, and redeploy it when the moment is right.

Because stopping isn’t failure. It’s part of the craft. And knowing when to stop? That’s one of the few unfair advantages that can’t be copied.