#startup-failure

#startup-failure

I used to think I was over my startup failure. That was three years ago, ancient history, right? Yet every time I pitched a new idea to someone, my hands would shake. Every investor meeting felt like walking into that same room where I had to tell my team we were shutting down. My body remembered what my mind tried to forget. That's when Bruce Springsteen's words hit me like a freight train: "The past is never the past. It is always present. And you'd better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad."

I remember standing in a boutique in San Francisco, sliding my credit card across the counter for a pair of $400 sneakers I absolutely could not afford. My second startup had just folded-eighteen months of burning through investor money, eighteen months of watching something I built crumble in slow motion-and I was drowning in debt. But there I was, walking out with a shopping bag and a receipt that made my stomach turn, telling myself this was an investment in how people perceived me.

Ever wonder why some people seem to crush it in every area of life while others stay stuck in the same patterns year after year? According to Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist and author of "12 Rules for Life," the difference comes down to one brutal practice: Telling yourself the truth about your weaknesses. Not the comfortable half-truths we usually feed ourselves. The real, uncomfortable, sometimes painful truth.

But after years of chasing success in all the wrong places, I finally get what he meant. My first startup was everything I thought I wanted. We had funding, a slick office, and all the right buzzwords in our pitch deck. I was working 80-hour weeks, convinced that grinding harder would somehow make me love what I was doing. Spoiler alert: it didn't.

Kyte has shut down nearly one year after slashing staff and exiting most of its cities in the United States. The company sold its customer list to Turo in July, which indicates significant operational struggles leading up to its closure.