Long story short, i worked at seed funded startup, the product that I was heading failed ( not sufficient differentiation, capabilities took too long to build and needed too much investment, founder decided to exit). In my current role, i feel like an imposter, double and triple guessing my decisions and not giving my 100%( I really gave it my all in my last startup, including a lot of my personal life, time with kids, health and all). Especially folks who work in a startup, how do you deal with a product failure, when you have been to a large extent responsible for the direction. Also, how is it viewed in interviews? I have plenty of decent experiences before this startup and i almost want to remove it from my resume, though it will seem like there was a gap of a year or so. #startupfailure
Actually it sounds like a great learning experience. If you interview for the next position probably they’d love you expand on the reasons behind “capabilities took too long to build and needed too much investment”. Is it because eng failed to execute? Or because your team failed to prioritize? Or failed to hire in the most efficient way? Or maybe too many existing players that required you to have a lot of feature parity?
We had an AdTech product and the data acquisition for true product differentiation and the algo building was tougher than we expected. Without it we were just another advertising agency.
People know that startups are a gamble. If you have any metrics that could show that you learned stuff that can be applied to the job, most companies will view it as professional experience still (need to weed out the startup vacationers somehow).
What do you mean by start up vacationers
Everyone and their mothers used to "do a startup" or was a "CEO". These people may have started with the intention of running a business, but ultimately they saw how daunting of a task it was and just never worked. They use it as a way to take a year off before they feel the pressure to interview/work again
When i have spoken about it in the past in interviews, folks have almost been dismissive as the tech stack was not at scale, for eg, the no of transactions we processed were minuscule compared to say FAANG, or there was no need for real time pipelines of Kafka etc. I am just thinking how much is it worth as an experience if what I have done is very simplistic compared to enterprise scale.
Sometimes it's not all about the tech stack. Technical skills are assessed with the technical interview. The way you talk about the experience demonstrates other qualities
You’ve learned a valuable lesson of something that didn’t work without spending any potential employer’s money doing it