Allison MaslanCEO & Business Scaling Expert | WSJ Bestselling Author

This is the piece most founders never say out loud...

16 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:08

In this candid dialogue, a founder (Speaker A) recounts a six‑month period marked by a cascade of crises that nearly destroyed the company and his personal life. He describes discovering that several executives were dishonest, leading to massive cash burn, misreported taxes and sales, and a frivolous wrongful‑termination lawsuit. Simultaneously, his mother required a kidney donation, his father had just died, and his seven‑year‑old daughter was under emotional strain. The founder spent months waking up with dread, contemplating shutting down the business, but ultimately corrected the financial and leadership issues. The experience forced him to confront his mental‑health limits, develop grit, and emerge with a resilient mindset that now lets him view future setbacks with detachment and perseverance. The conversation underscores the hidden emotional toll of startup failures and the importance of mental‑health awareness for founders.

Chapters

Had a few executives that were not honest with me, let's put it that way. And we were— where I thought we were hyper-profitable, we were actually burning tons of cash, and figured out quickly, thank God, but took a few months to really uncover it. And in that time, just burned through our cash holdings, had to clean up my entire leadership team, so trust was broken, et cetera. The same time, my mom came to me and said she needed me to give her a kidney. Our team had misreported our taxes, had misreported our sales numbers. We got a frivolous lawsuit from a former employee claiming wrongful termination. She had quit. My father had just passed away, and my daughter, who's 7—
So when When it rains, it pours.
Yeah, I'm saying this isn't in the same week. I spent about 6 months waking up every morning with dread and going, I just want to shut this thing down. That realization was it. It was like, well, this is probably the worst it gets, but we've corrected a lot. I corrected a lot of it right away. It was the emotional side that was hard. And so I was like, just grit through it and learned a lot about, like, frankly, mental health. Spent about 6 months literally every morning waking up just waiting for the next shoe to drop. After 6 months, it never really came. And then you start to feel better about it. Going through it and coming out the other side gives you a lot more grit. 'Cause now when bad things happen, like when you've gone through something that catastrophic, it's like you kind of roll your eyes at everything else. You're like, whatever, keep going.