March 2026
Everyone loves to talk about starting a company. No one talks about ending one.
We shut down Ryft. After months of pouring everything I had into it, my co-founder and I decided to stop. And the part no one tells you? Honestly, I felt relief.
That sounds wrong. You're supposed to feel like a failure. You're supposed to grieve the thing you built. And maybe part of me did. But mostly, for the first time in a long time, I could breathe.
For months, I was carrying something I couldn't put down. Every day felt like pushing a rock uphill and watching it roll back down every night. The stress of not being able to make it work followed me everywhere. Into class, into the gym, into every conversation where someone asked, "So how's the startup going?"
I wrote before about conviction. That belief is everything. That if you can't believe when there's nothing to believe in, you're not a founder, you're an employee. I still believe that. But I learned something the hard way that I didn't understand when I wrote it.
Conviction isn't just about starting. It's about being honest with yourself about whether you can carry the thing for years.
And I couldn't. Not because I didn't care. I cared more than I've cared about anything. But when I looked at the road ahead, five years, ten years, of living inside this one problem, I realized I didn't know enough. I didn't have the depth in this space to keep making the right calls. And forcing myself to fake that for years wasn't conviction. It was stubbornness.
For a while, I had proof. We signed an LOI with an enterprise company. It felt like validation, like the market was finally telling us we were right.
Then the champion left. The one person on the inside who believed in us was gone, and the pilot fell through with him. Overnight, the thing that made everything feel real just disappeared.
That's when I stopped being able to avoid the truth I'd been dancing around for months. The market wasn't there. At least not for us, not the way we were building it. I could keep telling myself a better story, or I could look at what was actually in front of me.
I chose to look.
Me and my co-founder sat down and talked. There was no blowup. No dramatic split. We looked at the same reality and came to the same conclusion. It was time.
I think people expect the end of a startup to be this explosive, painful thing. Ours wasn't. It was quiet. Two people who had given it everything, agreeing that giving it more wouldn't change the answer. In a strange way, deciding to stop was the most aligned we'd ever been.
Here's the honest part. The part I don't really know how to say without it sounding bad.
The moment we decided, the weight lifted. All that stress I'd been carrying, the pressure of not being able to make it, the guilt of not having the answers, it just left my body. And I felt good. I felt free.
What kind of person feels good about their startup dying? I've asked myself that a lot. I poured months into this. I told people this was my life. And when it ended, the loudest thing I felt was relief. I still don't fully know what to do with that.
Maybe it means I was more tired than I let myself admit. Maybe it means it was never as right as I forced it to be. Maybe both. I'm writing this a few days after we made the call and I still don't have it figured out. I'm not going to pretend I do.
What I do know is I'm not stopping. I already can't sit still. My head is already somewhere new, some new problem, and part of me wonders if that's a strength or if I just don't know how to grieve things properly. I haven't decided.
Ryft taught me my why. Shutting it down taught me something I wasn't ready to learn. Knowing when to let go of the thing you built is its own kind of conviction. Maybe the harder kind. Because walking away when you still care doesn't feel brave in the moment. It just feels like losing.
You can pour your whole self into something and still be wrong about it. I was. And I'd do it again tomorrow.