The founders of startup share how they bounced back from failure

The founders of Startup are faced with immense pressure to succeed, but it can be even more difficult to drop a failed business and find success afterwards.

Building a startup has always been risky. Since 1994, the five-year survival rate of small businesses in the United States has oscillated around just over 50%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2018, the five -year survival rate was 57.3%.

The serial entrepreneur Ismael Dainehine knows what it is to fail, having been in the game for more than a decade.

He founded several companies – two who failed, then three who succeeded – and recently co -founded his new company, Evergive, a non -profit organization that invests in Bitcoin to worsen donations.

Dainehine described its first failures, which saw its first two companies close in a few years, as painful.

“I had definitely this pressure that I put myself because of the financial constraints that I had in my personal life … There is no one who could not have put more pressure at the time that I did not put on myself,” he said.

Dainehine said he had been able to learn from these failures, and his next companies have reported millions of income before taking them out. But even working on these companies began to feel “soulless and hollow after a while,” he added.

Entrepreneurship is often sold as something of a utopia – not backed by bureaucracy and corporate life policy. But in recent decades, founding life has also become synonymous with agitation culture.

The Silicon Valley Mythology Startup scene for seven days of work weeks, while Chinese technological companies are sadly famous for culture 996 – working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

So, how are the founders – who are used to this overall life and high pressure – bounce back failure?

Going from a failed company may require to have errors and disappointing people, including employees and investors.

Klaas Ardois founded Commonvision in 2024, a software development company based in the United Kingdom which closed a year later. He said that the greatest emotional challenge of failure was disappointing investors who were putting money in the company and put employees whose life was turned upside down.

Ardinese, which reduces the failure of a degreen of the market and was misleaded by a venture capital company, said that he had persuaded the employees of a previous company to join Commvision.

“Emotionally, it was really difficult to get to this point: admit that your business fails. Then, b: having to face the fallout of ‘I am about to upset people’s lives in a fairly spectacular way,” he said.

“It’s not like:” Hey, we could work something. “It is:” You have four weeks, and I know that you are financially stretched because you bought a house and that you are about to have a baby, “so it was really difficult.” “

Meanwhile, Ainars Klavin, based in Latvia, founded an overly augmented reality agency in 2013, which almost went bankrupt twice. But despite the fact that the overthrow and the realization of 1.5 million euros (1.75 million dollars) in 2022, Klavins resigned following the professional exhaustion.

He then gave the startup Life another chance and paid 500,000 euros in his next startup, which he left in 2024 while he was struggling.

Now product manager at the Startup Proptech Giraffe360, Klavins told CNBC that he had experienced an identity crisis during the founder’s transition to a company employee.

“When you leave an unsuccessful business, you really start to question: what are you good at? Because at that time, it seemed that I am good for anything,” he said.

“I sacrificed so much to succeed in this success that I lost a lot of my identity … It is very scary to lose your identity, because you have sacrificed many other things that were part of your identity to make it work, and if you lose it, you have nothing.”

The founders who return to corporate life as an employee may feel ashamed or stigma attached to the transition, and employers could even discriminate their counter-bonus.

A study in 2024, led by Rutgers Business School, sent false curriculum vitae to 219 people with business recruitment experience. The fictitious applications had identical qualifications, but some were former business owners.

He found that recruiters were less likely to recommend former business owners for a role, in what is described as a “entrepreneurship penalty” in the study. The recruiters seemed more hesitant to hire someone who is used to being their own boss and working independently.

However, the specialist in public relations Alain Rapallo said that the founders can really make the best employees.

Rapallo left his company role as director of public relations to start his own agency in 2021, but returned to the life of employees three years later.

Entrepreneurship is an advantage, he said, “because when you are a founder and you work alone, if you spend beyond this first year, you’ve almost played all the role that any business plays on a smaller scale, but you’ve almost done it.”

Rapallo has said that managing a business also sharpens skills such as multitasking and time management.

“Startups are disjointed, but you [as an employee] Do not necessarily do all the work. You do not have the mentality to develop the business. You usually have the mentality to take care of the customer or the account, “he added.

The Klavin product manager agreed that his understanding of many commercial functions was what made him his current role.

Being an employee was also an important lesson in humility, he said, because she eliminated her ego and allowed him to start again.

The Dainehine serial entrepreneur said it was important to redefine what success and failure meant for him to move forward.

“The greatest risk is not a failure, the greatest risk is success without clarity,” he said, saying that without a set of clear principles, success will always be elusive.

“The biggest advice I have for entrepreneurs at this stage is to develop or engage in something that has a very deep meaning and put on mission to you. A weak or opportunistic mission cannot transport you in the most difficult days,” he said.

“Once I focused on a mission in which I actually believed, the same setbacks have become survivable. So, if they can be rotated in something that adheres to this or see that in their current companies, I think that will strengthen their resilience to food and to crop failure.”