I borrowed money from my parents to make rent in my late twenties after my startup failed, and the silence in my father's voice when he said yes taught me more about love than any conversation we've ever had - Silicon Canals

"My second startup had collapsed about six weeks earlier. Eighteen months of burning through investor cash, of believing my own narrative, of being so emotionally unavailable that my girlfriend had already left because I couldn't be present for a single conversation that wasn't about runway or burn rate. All of it - gone. And the wreckage wasn't just professional. I was staring down roughly $47,000 in combined credit card and personal debt, a number I couldn't even say out loud at the time."

"My father is sixty-seven years old. He ran the same small business for thirty years. Not a startup. Not a scale-up. A business. The kind where you show up every day and do the thing and come home and eat dinner with your family. He never had a Series A. He never had a pitch deck. He had customers and expenses and a quiet, almost stubborn belief that consistency was its own kind of courage."

A twenty-eight-year-old entrepreneur faced eviction in San Francisco and had to call his father for rent money after his second startup collapsed. Eighteen months of burning investor cash left him emotionally unavailable, driving away his partner and producing roughly $47,000 in combined credit card and personal debt. He purchased luxury items to perform success while underlying finances deteriorated. His father, who ran a small, steady business for thirty years, embodied consistency and pragmatic courage. The phone call requesting help felt different, contrasting startup instability with the reliability of steady work and parental support.

Read at Silicon Canals