When am I "allowed" to quit and not be labeled a quitter?

Whenever you want to. Let's flip that around: how much of your finite life are you obligated to commit to something you don't want to be doing anymore? On your deathbed, is it a good outcome for you to say "I hated every moment of it, but at least I didn't quit!" Not in my book.

The title is not perfect, the article talks about startup co-founder quitting, not an employee. For an employee, &quot;anytime&quot; is acceptable. For a co-founder the answer, IMO, should be different.<p>A founder quitting usually means the end of the startup and that means that founder quitting also affects other founders and early startup employees (for some it may create visa headaches). So, rather than a blanket &quot;anytime&quot; a co-founder should be clear to at least the other founders. And, if other founders feel the same way, to the first employees, too: a generic &quot;we need to get to N users&#x2F;ARR X&#x2F;profitability&#x2F;whatever within M months for the startup to survive&quot; is sufficient.<p>Also, it depends on whether a quitting founder wants to try again. A startup failure on a resume is not a big deal for a founder, at least in the US. But being the founder who bailed on a startup that other cofounders thought could have made it is likely a big hit on the ability to raise money as a future founder. My 2c.

I recently decided to quit a startup I founded after raising about nine million dollars. Quitting meant admitting to professional investors, friends and angels that I had lost their money.<p>It meant admitting to myself and our team that we had fucked up and miss-executed.<p>It meant giving up on a dream and market opportunity that I thought--and think--is still fruitful.<p>So deciding to quit was very difficult. And in general I&#x27;m a pretty tenacious guy, I hate giving up.<p>I didn&#x27;t <i>have</i> to quit. I could have kept going in some diminished form. But the reason I decided to quit is that I had started to do damage.<p>I was doing damage to my health. I was doing damage to personal and professional relationships. Damage understood not as &quot;pain&quot; but as &quot;an irreparable worsening.&quot;<p>So my advice: quit before you start to do damage.<p>I&#x27;d say that advice applies to most endeavors. Push through the pain, but quit before the tendon pops.

This title made me laugh. Life is very short and very precious. Being a &quot;quitter&quot; is not a bad thing. Take ownership of your precious time when you are on a path that is not working for you.

Saying it’s okay to quit when you have less than $1M ARR also means that you’re leaving your customers hanging out to dry. $1M means 100 customers paying $10k&#x2F;yr which is a significant amount of money. If your plan is to dump them like that they should at least be warned when they sign up that could happen otherwise I think that’s unethical.

The specific milestones here are certainly up for debate, but the general approach to thinking this way is a good one in my opinion.<p>I read <i>Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away</i> by Annie Duke last year and found it quite illuminating, both in introducing this concept of having “kill criteria” like this to help clarify <i>why</i> we are doing things and when it’s “okay” to quit, and also in exploring the scope of social&#x2F;cultural bias we have towards sticking with losing propositions at the expense of trying new things. Social pressure to not be viewed as a “quitter” is quite a powerful force, and it distorts our thinking about what we really want to achieve.

Why should you care how someone labels you?<p>Often people do that to coerce others into behaviour that is not in the victim best interest.<p>If something doesn&#x27;t feel right to you, just quit or call it an exit.

The world &quot;founders&quot; live in is so foreign to me, I barely understand the words. It&#x27;s useful to read this stuff once in a while, though, as a reminder that when a mega tech company with billions in profits lays off tens of thousands of people, the ones at the top are not even on the same planet, in terms of their values and they way they think about the world, as me and everyone I know.

The core answer in this post is correct: decide for yourself. But here are a couple of other nuances.<p>What commitments have you made to others? The less than 1MM ARR one is a good example: if you think you won’t be anble to make it succeed, stop. But try to shut it down in a way that doesn’t leave your customers in the lurch.<p>It can be appropriate for <i>you</i> to quit while others don’t: I’ve left companies I’ve founded when they got too big for me; others continued. Again, nobody left in the lurch.<p>And on hiring, I am unenthusiastic about candidates with some college but no degree. College is hard and a degree shows that you can finish something hard.<p>BUT, “unenthusiastic” isn’t a blanket “no” — if there are other reasons to talk to them then I still will. Perhaps they simply couldn’t afford it and do want to go back and finish. Also no college at all says nothing either way about whether the candidate can finish things or not.<p>And of course after the candidate has a couple of jobs under their belt I don’t really even look at their education at all.

Quitters never win.<p>And winners never quit.<p>But those who never quit and never win are idiots.<p>-Despair poster

&gt; <i>Two years and no seed</i><p>&gt; <i>4 years to 1 million ARR</i><p>This article would have made sense 4-5 years ago.<p>Almost no one is going to reach those goals now that VC money and dried and ZIRs are gone.<p>And IMO if you&#x27;re a solo bootstrapper making $300k per year on a high profit software project I&#x27;d consider that a massive success.

Once you gave it your best, learned what you could learn and found out that it’s not working, or that you don’t care about it anymore, just quit and move on to something you’re more interested in! The world needs people who love what they are doing.

Winners know when to quit.<p>Usually sucessful people are quite talented at more than one thing, but the best in the world at only one or two.<p>In order to get to that level they have to &#x27;quit&#x27; the goal of becoming the best in the world at all of the other things where they have talent.<p>Probably a smart decision given where they are. But, yes, they&#x27;re therefore all quitters in a very real sense. Just nobody cares or talks about those other things.<p>Maybe the thing you are doing now is one of those &#x27;other&#x27; things. Quit so you can win at something else.

Startup founders need to lead their investors to understand that the company is not going to deliver what everyone hoped it would. Whether the points in the article will work to convince them is obviously very dependent on the investors, but if the founder wants to go back to those same investors with a new company idea in the future it&#x27;s essential that they get everyone on the same page.<p>More generally, <i>anyone</i> who promises delivery in the future has to manage the expectations of those who they are delivering to. If you tell your boss &quot;I&#x27;ll have it on your desk first thing in the morning&quot; and then you don&#x27;t deliver, your boss certainly will think twice the next time you say it.<p>Edit: I see a lot of comments here are about whether it&#x27;s &quot;worth it&quot; to an individual to keep going with some <i>individual</i> effort that doesn&#x27;t seem to be paying off, as if <i>everything</i> that a person does is in isolation and has no ramifications on others, which is absolutely not the case when you found a startup. If you&#x27;re a startup founder you have responsibility not only to yourself but to customers, investors and employees and you should do your best to &quot;do right by&quot; everyone as best as the circumstances allow. Reasonable people will see that you&#x27;ve done the best you can given the circumstances.

&gt; If you’re looking to build a unicorn, and not a lifestyle business, 4 years is enough time to get a feeling for whether you’ll succeed or not.<p>I hate this false dichotomy and to me it represents some kind of counter-reality thinking that would be poisonous in 99% of the businesses on earth.<p>If I start a business, generate revenues of $50K in the first year, $250K in the second, and by year 8 I&#x27;m at $10M annually but the growth has flattened out, is that a &quot;lifestyle&quot; business? No it&#x27;s a shit ton of work, a huge achievement and as the founder it has probably made me quite rich, but also that doesn&#x27;t look like a unicorn trajectory that some VC is looking for so that he can line his own pockets.<p>As a founder, unless you&#x27;re very deep into a very successful career, <i>you lean into that business for the big win it is.</i> In this guy&#x27;s view of the world it apparently doesn&#x27;t even exist and yet it describes a huge chunk of &quot;main street&quot; businesses and in a lot of cases these businesses can be more profitable for you as the founder than whatever scheme a VC is cooking up.

When to allow yourself to quit, or when you can quit without being labeled a quitter by people who matter to you? Either way, I don’t think the answer lies with me or my peers on the internet.<p>My opinion you’re in the right track in thinking about objective criteria level of effort, results) and timelines. I also agree that being honest with yourself about the effort bit is super important - building a unicorn can’t be done in half measures.<p>Edit: Typo.

Socially if you quit during a team game because of non-injury issue like you get pissed off or scared you’d be called a quitter because of people’s standards.<p>Someone can always call you a quitter because of their standards, so you can’t really “win” trying to play that game

A subset of Quitting is starting again, shown many times by many people to be a valuable life strategy. For an example, check out what Steve Jobs said about leaving Apple to start Next.

I think the premise is flawed simply because the writer says when am I allowed to quit and not be labelled a quitter? Frankly never because if you quit you are a quitter. However, the scenario you postulate could be quitting but it could simply be recognizing that the startup will not achieve it&#x27;s goals and that it should wind down and return any remaining funds to it&#x27;s investors (or try to sell itself) that&#x27;s not quitting it&#x27;s just being realistic.

We wouldn’t fit either of your criteria.<p>And yet - we now have a bank license (!) and should clear 15-20M in revenue this year.<p>Sometimes hard things don’t make for overnight successes.

People will always label you about anything they feel like. I labeled routinely candidates as quitters in my career and didn&#x27;t invite them. Would i give my younger self therefore the advice to not quit early? Hell, no. Do it. Quit. Do whatever you like (as long as you have signed up for another job or source of income).

With the amount of outsourcing and immigration these days, judgements on employment tenure are only getting more harsh

At school the mantra is to always try your hardest and give it your best. You should go above and beyond the calling. Blah de blah. But that is pure bogus tripe. You should do only what you want to do as in the end there is only you.

No one is going to answer this question for you. Your circumstances are you unique, involve your business particulars, your personality and life situations and serendipity. Good luck!

Sometimes I wonder if I ever get to be happy. From social experiences it feels like I only pretend to be alive because of social obligations.<p>I imagine work to be similar.

When you stop caring so much about what others think!

Quit early quit often. In start ups one they have a down round it’s basically over for you making a good exit unless you are the ceo

OP says not to put companies that you “co-founded” that lived for less than a year on your resume<p>OP has a todo app in his list of projects

Rabbi Tarfon used to say: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.

That is not how it works

you can quit six times<p>long as you get up seven<p>you&#x27;re not a quitter

ridiculous