I worked at this company that raised $400 million and it completely imploded.

I worked at this company that raised $400 million and it completely imploded. Let's talk about it. Was that this company called Brandless? They were essentially a CPG brand selling generic white-labled everyday items with no brand. It was one of those VC darlings that had raised a ton from Softbank. I was a product manager there working on their digital experiences, which is basically their website. Honestly, my first red flag was the tech. Unless you're doing like hundreds of million dollars of revenue, there's no reason to have a homegrown e-commerce. website. Like Shopify is good enough, but they were maintaining this custom setup and my job was actually to migrate the site to Shopify. One day, I am three months in at this point, they call the entire company over for an all hands the next day. Now, if you were at a startup, I feel like these last minute all hands aren't that surprising. Things just move so much faster. At this all hands, the CEO basically gets up and he says, we're shutting the company down. We are going to return all the money back to investors. There's going to be a small team to wind down operations, but for most of you guys, today's going to be your last day. Imagine my face. And I'm lucky that I've never been laid off before, but I was not ready to be back on the job market after three months. In hindsight, the warning signs were pretty obvious. The first red flag was the fact that we were losing money on every order. The margins and the order economics were just really bad. If we increased the marketing spent and got more orders, that only made the problem worse because that meant that we were actually losing more money. And at this time I was already working on my sunscreen brand on the side and I built it with my savings. And I kid you not, my little bootstrapped sunscreen brand was more profitable than this company that had raised $400 million. Let that sink in. And then the second red flag was that they brought in a professional CEO to replace the founder and he had a CFO background. which basically meant that he was there to cut costs. That's usually not a good sign that the company is doing well. So my main takeaway is that if you are bootstrapped And you have a competitor that's raised a lot of money. I know it's easy to feel intimidated, but you really shouldn't. Because money only works if you know how to deploy it. If you're throwing money at something that fundamentally doesn't work, you're only making the problem bigger and accelerating the burn. Obviously being well-founded has so many perks. The main thing is that you can actually take more swings and make more mistakes. As a company that's bootstrapped, you don't get endless swings and you have to make smart choices. But if this story tells you anything, company that raised over $400 billion is gone and my little sunscreen brand is still here today after five years. So be patient and don't be discouraged by a competitor that's raised a lot of money.