Shutting down my startup - by Lachlan Green - This Is Fine

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Shutting down my startup<br>Lessons learned from starting and shutting down a venture-backed startup.

Lachlan Green<br>Dec 31, 2025

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Eleven months ago, I set out to found and scale a startup. I’d spent the previous two and a half years working as a senior product manager on Spotify’s new products team and I was keen to leave Big Tech and do my own thing. I raised $350,000 USD, moved to London, and got going: startup glory awaited.

Getting bundled for the lovely London winter.<br>This post covers what I built, why I shut it down, and what I learned.<br>What I built

Over the past year, I researched and built prototypes for audiences in two problem spaces: compliance and mental health.<br>By “compliance”, I mean the legal, regulatory, and privacy practices a startup must have in place to sell their software to big companies. It’s very unsexy but very important: if your startup isn’t compliant, you’re not closing big deals. I liked that Getting Compliant was a critical and annoying problem many startups faced and I thought AI startups might have novel compliance needs unmet by current offerings.<br>Unfortunately, I found compliance crushingly boring1.<br>Unfortunately, I found compliance crushingly boring.

Keen to work on something I cared more about, I started learning about mental health tech. I know how debilitating and painful depression and anxiety can be, having experienced both and supported loved ones going through these and other mental health challenges.<br>I began by learning about what mental health providers needed ie therapists, psychiatrists. However, after talking to a lot of therapists, psychiatrists, and founders serving these segments I “pivoted” to consumers.2<br>I was interested in consumer mental health for two main reasons: I had first-hand experience with the problem I was trying to solve, and I’d worked as a consumer product manager for the previous eight years.<br>I’d spend the next few months zeroing in on a specific segment of users, digging into their needs, developing hypotheses to address those needs, and creating and testing prototyping to validate my hypotheses.<br>I wanted to create a kind of AI-enhanced human-to-human therapy that thoughtfully integrated voice-to-text, text analysis, and yes, generative AI, into conventional therapy. My goal was to make therapy vastly more effective and scalable while retaining the human element that I felt was critical for high-quality care.3<br>Soon I was making good progress. I had learned a lot from interviewing prospective users, talking with current and former founders in the space, and researching the market. I hacked together prototypes to test a few hypotheses, and after several iterations, was beginning to get positive feedback. I was excited. Things were moving.<br>Then, with six figures in the bank, I told my investors I was done, and began closing up shop.<br>Why I shut down my startup

When someone asks me why I shut down my startup, I usually tell them that I wanted to work on a team again. This is true, but incomplete.<br>The truth, which I normally don’t get into, is that I was miserable.<br>I’d begun so excited. No meetings! No slacks! No emails! I loved the freedom. I loved the founder community: getting to know, bond with, and learn from other founders. I loved the intellectual challenge: what do you do when you can do anything?<br>I’d begun so excited. No meetings! No slacks! No emails! I loved the freedom. I loved the intellectual challenge: what do you do when you can do anything?

However over time, it became a slog . I found the work isolating, disorienting, and draining. I felt pressure to “perform” the role of a startup founder. I felt like I had to be confident, happy, enthusiastic, and positive all the time. And, critically, I didn’t have the burning motivation and social infrastructure in place to keep going.<br>At the time, wrapping up felt like a colossal failure. I felt a deep responsibility to my friends, mentors, and investors to not quit, no matter what. As I considered closing up shop, I experienced a mini-identity crisis: if I wasn’t a founder, who was I?<br>Thankfully, with love and reassurance from friends, family, mentors, and yes, investors, I did stop. It turns out people that love you love you whether or not you’re a successful startup founder. Who knew.<br>Some stuff I learned

Well for one thing, I learned that sometimes the haters are right . The “haters”, in this case my beloved friends and family, questioned my decision to start a company and move to a new country, simultaneously, by myself, without a visa. I’m not saying I plan to listen to the haters in the future, per se. But going forward, if basically everyone who loves me is warning me about the same thing, I do plan to take that warning more seriously.<br>That being said, another key learning here is that failure is painful but survivable . I felt really bad telling my investors I was...