Hard call
There’s a story about Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived concentration camps.
An old doctor came to see him. Depressed for two years after his wife died. This doctor could prescribe himself anything, he knew pharmacology better than most. Pills weren’t helping at all.
Frankl didn’t give advice. Asked him one question: “What if you had died first? What if your wife had to survive you?”
The old doctor paused. “That would have been terrible. How she would have suffered.”
Frankl said: “She was spared that. By you. You’re paying the price so she didn’t have to.”
The doctor shook his hand and left. Depression didn’t vanish. But it transformed. Same pain, completely different experience of it.
I think about this when founders tell me they have to fold their startup .
The pain is real. Two years, three years, sometimes five, gone. Employees who trusted you. Investors believed you. That future that isn’t coming.
But the pain feels pointless because founders measure against the wrong counterfactual.
You’re comparing what happened to a version where you succeeded.
That’s not the right comparison.
The right comparison is the version where you didn’t call it.
Where you kept going another two years. Where your co-founder’s marriage fell apart. Where you burned every rupee of investor money instead of returning 40%. Where you finally shut down anyway, but with nothing left and everyone destroyed.
That was the other path. It was available to you.
Most founders take it because they can’t say out loud what’s obvious.
You didn’t.
There are two ways a startup dies.
One by drift: numbers aren’t moving, nobody says it, you burn another quarter, then another, best engineer leaves, runway runs out, decision made for you.
Another by decision: numbers aren’t moving, you look at it for a week, you make the call, you tell people, you help them land, you return what’s left, done in six weeks.
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Same outcome. Completely different founder on the other side.
First founder is broken. Startup failed because it happened to him. He’s a victim.
Second founder is sad but standing. Because he chose it.
This is the part that is never discussed.
You’re not “founder of X.” That’s a temporary label. It disappears when X disappears.
What remains is: “person who makes hard calls.”
That’s what experienced investors appreciate. That’s what co-founders sign up for. That’s what employees remember ten years later when they’re deciding whether to join your next thing.
The startup was a vehicle. You are not the vehicle.
Getting these two twisted is what kills founders. Not the failure. The identity collapse.
The old doctor’s depression didn’t lift because Frankl gave him a new fact. He already knew his wife was dead. Already knew he was in pain.
It lifted because Frankl gave him a new identity.
Not: “grieving widower.”
But: “the one who bears it so she didn’t have to.”
Same man. Same loss. Different way of holding it.
That’s the reframe for founders.
Not: “I failed.”
But: “I made the hard call. I protected people by ending it. I’m still here.”
Ones who come back aren’t the ones who “got over it” fast. They’re the ones who sat with it long enough to see what actually happened.
They stopped comparing themselves to imaginary success. Started comparing themselves to the version that dragged everyone through two more years of dying.
They realize: I made the call. Most people can’t.
