Startup Mortality: What End-of-Life Care Teaches Us About Startup Failure

I’m shutting down Esper, an enterprise machine learning (ML) startup that I founded 4 years ago. We raised roughly $4M of venture capital and were used by clients at Dropbox, Salesforce, Stanford…

Sure, a good founder knows to divert resources away from something that isn’t working, but what happens when that something is the startup itself?

I recently read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, in which he discusses medicine’s role in end-of-life care. I found some striking parallels between end-of-life startup decisions and end-of-life medical decisions...