The last 4 years

I’ve been chatting with a bunch of folks leaving their jobs because they are just simply burnt out from the last few years. It’s been an eventful 4 years for us in the startup world.

We had COVID in 2020 which impacted everyone, but by nature being smaller companies with a burn rate, many startups went through a brutal time. And of course, dealing with COVID was not fun either.

Then we went into 2021 which was a boom year in startup world. The free money effectively made things incredibly good… unfortunately too good. We were having fun. We were growing. But that comes at a cost of working your ass off. I know I was personally exhausted.

Then we went into 2022 when the wheels started coming off the ZIRP train. Startups were bloated and growth came to a screeching halt. The layoffs came hard.

2023 was another tough year with companies adapting to the new reality and VC funding largely dried up. More companies went through layoffs and it was a stressful period for startup builders.

In 2024, things have started to stabilize but it’s been yet another tough year. There’s lots of optimism and glimmers of hope, but most companies are forecasting a much slower growth year.

While these things are cyclical and we can expect more tough years in the future, I’d imagine the last 4 were exceptionally difficult especially those are that are earlier in their careers and have never gone through a downturn like this.

I know I’ve been impacted personally. I feel much more negative at times and I have to catch myself when my mind starts to spiral through negative and worse case scenarios. I often have to remind myself of what I’ve accomplished and learned personally over the years. These tough years will be a blip in the radar in our careers once all said and done.

I’ve done a lot more work on my mental mindset recently. I know that I’m lucky and have things good at the end of the day. I also need to remind myself to celebrate the wins and take breaks to enjoy life.

Today, I did just that. With a stressful morning of 4+ hours of calls, I had a big window in my afternoon and I decided to take a few hours off to relax and enjoy the sunny day here in San Francisco. I’m making up for the lost time now, but those hours in the sun were well worth it.