Managing Partner at Dragonfly. Effective Altruist. Airbnb, Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase) alum. Writer. Former poker pro. Donate 33% of my income to charity.
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A founder just informed me that they ran out of runway and have to wind down their business.
Paying himself $212k a year, in a bear market, with a pre revenue startup.
And somehow it’s “the market’s fault.”
Can’t make this shit up.
People often ask what makes Silicon Valley culture so special and hard to replicate.
It’s not the talent or the capital. There are many places with both.
The secret sauce of Silicon Valley is that it doesn’t punish failure. This is rare to the point of being basically unique.
Failure is already its own punishment. Spending years of your life trying to build something that goes nowhere is a deep and unforgiving grief. The time, the energy, the money, the opportunity cost, it’s impossible to erase that.
But what SV startup culture strips away is that second layer of punishment: the shame that society stacks on top. The whispers at the next party, that you’ve embarrassed yourself, that you should have known better. In SV, there’s no shame in winding down a startup, it’s the mark of having entered the arena and taken a swing.
But then there’s stuff like this. This is how it works almost everywhere else in the world. This founder failed, therefore the salary he paid himself is a disgrace (if he did OK, no one would ever bring it up).
Silicon Valley VCs would never post anything like this about a wound down startup. No mention of the founder’s background either: Was $200K a paycut for them? Do they live in NYC/SF where $200K is ~$100K take-home? Do they have kids, a mortgage? And come on, no seed-stage company is running out of money because the founder is paying themselves $200K~, seed rounds are in the millions. $200K/yr is like a single engineer’s salary. Yeah $200K is on the high side, but really? If you think this founder embezzled from the company, then sue them. If you thought $200K was unconscionable, did you mention that when you invested? Otherwise what is the point of this?
This is why in Silicon Valley (and China and Israel too), startup culture is a gem that’s almost impossible to replicate anywhere else in the world. People can’t help themselves to rub salt in the wounds of failure, and they don’t think about the wider culture reverberations of that attitude.
Originally published on X, June 2026.
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