Yeah. The implicit assumptions of the "live in poverty" of the OP, are wrong.
I'm 54, and I was financially wiped out at 51. I will not ever recover from this. No family wealth to fall back on. I do not believe I will ever be able to retire. And noting that there is a bit of ageism in this space, makes the threat of potential long term unemployment even worse for folks like me.
Sort of an inverse Ozymandias. Gaze upon my flaming cratered company, and beware. Here be demons. That you cannot control.
I had skin in the game. And I lost it.
You need a fighting spirit to achieve great things. Many people have overcome far greater problems. Never give up you are only one transaction away from financial success. Good luck
Thanks. I'm aware of others struggles. I figure that my story could be a cautionary tale for some, and others may take lessons from it.
When I say in other fora, never, ever take debt financing of anything if you can avoid it, this is coming from personal agonizing experience.
If I go back into the startup world, I'm going with a very clear perception of what is what. No rose colored glasses. No "if you build a better mousetrap" mentality. I know how things can go horribly wrong. I know where the traps and mines are.
I did say, you have to be at the right place, at the right time. And be lucky. We got 2 of 3. Luck eluded us.
[2] https://scalability.org/2017/03/requiem/
[3] https://scalability.org/2005/10/venture-capital-and-high-per...
We've been in similar situations several times. We're serving a niche, but this niche is a core piece of our customers business. Without software like ours, their whole operation stops.
Anyway, we'd have demos. Department heads were on fire, wondering if we could install same day we had demo, all smiles, everything looked great. And then we lost because someone higher up decided we were "too small". We're small, but we're pretty much the best in our niche and we have had very solid financials for decades.
Those we lost went with bigger, supposedly "safer" competitors and had some very sub-par years with them before they had to pay their way out of those contracts and come back to us.
My response was simple. No.
I invited them to throw away the crap they bought and buy the right thing from us, but that was politically untenable. Turns out spending multiple millions of dollars for crappy half baked "solutions" versus a lower sum of money for something that actually worked, would likely get some people fired.
The world isn't fair, and sometimes not even sane. The people who made these decisions, despite being disastrous ones, were promoted. Enough of these built up that we couldn't survive.
Incredibly frustrating.
I still write, albeit less frequently, and I have to keep to a narrower range of topics.
I really hate this condescending "if you really wanted it the money shouldn't matter" coming from millionaires.
In the vast majority of circumstances that's an extreme exaggeration.
Speaking from past personal experience with poverty (ie being "poorer folk"), you can default on every possible type of debt - wait about seven years (can vary slightly by state, but it's typically around that), and you're free from it. My credit rating went from 800, to 480, back to 760 in that process over eight years, without requiring any special effort. I defaulted on numerous credit cards, I defaulted on medical debt; it all vanished, one after another as time ticked by, and my credit rating jumped as each item fell off. Every negative mark falls off your credit report after N years.
It's very unpleasant to have your credit rating wrecked for years. To say that it will ruin you for decades, that's reaching into the land of absurdity. I'm sure it happens, some people get stuck in a vicious cycle for ... decades, however it's not rocket science to properly utilize the negative mark credit cycling to your advantage and reboot. It doesn't take more than an hour or two of reading to self-educate at zero cost about how the system works.