Here's What It's Like To Work At A Failed Startup
We just talked to one of its first employees, Sameer Sundresh, a lead engineer who is surprisingly chill over the situation. Sundresh was hired by Everpix about a year ago, after Everpix landed its seed money.
With a PhD in computer science, he's already juggling a number of job offers, he said. The startup had seven employees, and some, like Sundresh are still working there, winding it down.
The Everpix experience also didn't leave him gun shy about startup life. He's sure he'll do it again.
The good news is that, even though Everpix couldn't get an investor or buyer, it was able to sell some of its technology (to an undisclosed buyer for an undisclosed sum) and fund the costs of a proper shut down.
For instance, employees like Sundresh, who were working for minimum wage for about the last month, will get their back pay. Customers will be able to get their photos back and refunds. Amazon will be paid its roughly $35,000.
Everpix raised $1.8 million in angel and seed rounds, and took on $625,000 in debt, according to its CrunchBase profile, and those investors will be mostly out of luck.
But employees survive, and sometimes even thrive, in the Valley after a failed startup so long as the startup didn't just close shop and vanish, Sundresh says. He has no concerns that Everpix's fate will hurt his career in any way.
"If you're doing the right thing for people. If you're making something that people want, even if for a while things go slower, in the end people respect that in society," he said.
A failed startup, or one that rises from its death bed, is almost a badge of honor in the Valley. Everyone in the startup scene seems to have lived through at least one.
There are "cases where their startup was shut down, cases where you are able to cut back massively and then you get a big customer. But to get a big customer, you have to be enterprise, or be able to license some software," he says.
The harder part, he says, is engineering a product during dubious times. "You have to decide what you are going to work on. Until we were working on the premise that we were going to shut down, we had to release features that will be useful regardless of if we shut down."
For example, in those final months, the engineering team focused on features to let people to remove their photos, useful functions if they survived. Necessary if they didn't.
There's also a culture of cooperation among failed startups, he said. After news broke that Everpix would close its doors, he's gotten calls from all sorts of people, looking for advice and lessons learned.
The biggest lesson he's learned, he says, is that a startup has to balance the risks and rewards of taking on outside investment.
"The particular path we ended up taking as a company wasn't the ideal path for the kind of product we were building," he said. "Personally, I'm not a fan of taking investment. Or if you do take it, you can't rely on it being there for future investment. If you have the money you can build a fuller product. If you don't have the money you have to figure out what kind of product you can build with the money you have."