I Watched My Startup Die and Nobody Talks About What That Is Like as an Employee

I had joined the healthtech startup in Columbus at 25 as one of their early hires, drawn by the mission, the compensation structure, and the particular energy of a company that believed it was going to matter. I was not a founder. I had no equity that was going to make me rich.

I had a salary and a title and a genuine investment in the work that was as real as anyone's in the building, even if the financial stakes were different.

The company ran through its Series A within eighteen months of raising it, which was faster than anyone had expected and slower than the deterioration that preceded it had suggested was possible.

The final three months were the specific experience of watching something die in real time from the inside - the rounds of layoffs that came in three tranches, the communication from leadership that became gradually more optimistic in inverse proportion to the actual situation, the Friday all-hands where the CEO said things that everyone in the room understood were the last version of the story before the ending.

I was in the second tranche of layoffs rather than the third, which I understood at the time as a misfortune and understand now as a mercy. What nobody had told me was how long the specific grief of that experience would take to process. I had not founded the company.

I had not lost personal savings or the defining years of my career. But I had given two years of genuine effort and genuine belief to something that no longer existed, and the colleagues who had become genuinely important to me were now scattered across other companies in a way that the company's death had made irreversible.

The professional restart also contained a specific difficulty I had not anticipated: the startup experience on my resume produced a set of assumptions in interviews about what I had been doing and why I was available that required more explanation than a conventional job change.

I did not know how to describe the experience without either underselling what it had been or performing a resilience I was still working on. At 29, in a role at a company with more conventional stability, I carry the experience as one of the more complete educations of my career.

Not in any single lesson but in the combination of things you can only learn from watching something you cared about end before it was finished.