Ask HN: My company has been acquired and I'm kicked out. What should I do now?

Flagging this. Someone asking for help should not be handed a loaded gun.

- Take a break

- Experiment with new technologies

You're burned out right now so you're not seeing the big picture. Or rather, you think you're seeing the big picture, which is that you're fucked. But you're really not. You're in a great place and I'm sure your next company will be a success.

Take some time off to reorient yourself, then when you come back to the computer, don't work on anything specific. Just chill and play with new technologies. One day you'll have an epiphany, see an obvious market void, and then your motivation to build a product will come roaring back.

Whatever you do, don't get a job... cmon man that sounds entirely out of line with everything you told us about yourself. That would be a huge waste. Keep plugging away. You'll have success soon.

Hey there throwaway,

First of all, this is really not all that bad: you got paid, and you have a years worth of $ in the bank.

Good. Now, the first thing to do is to make sure that you get into a mode where you extend your runway, turn that 12 months into 13 months and so on. Doing nothing for 3 months is enough to recharge your batteries a little bit.

Figure out what your monthly expenses are and then try to find something - anything, really - that pays you just a bit more than that so that you can remain floating while you work out what to do next.

Please do not consider yourself a failure in any way, I've run the same company for almost two decades before getting back a little over what I put in initially. I don't consider that a failure either (maybe I should ;) ), and you managed to do this in a substantially shorter time.

Sooner or later a new real opportunity will come by: use all the lessons you learned and your new perspective on life to make the call on what is worth your time and if and when that happens you can roll the dice once more. But don't get seduced by risking that head-start that you now have over most other people on something with a low chance of success.

Then you might end up losing all the time you put in.

If you're like me - and I really hope you are not - and you're continuously tempted to spend your money in unwise ways then I suggest you buy some real estate in a place where the market is reasonably fluid or, if you already own a house, to simply dump it (or at least a sizable fraction of it) in your mortgage. That way it will last long, will have an immediate ROI (if it is your own house) and you avoid the temptation to spend it piecemeal until there is nothing left.

Best of luck!

You're taking a highly dramatic read on your situation, I'd say overly so. Even though you may have been "kicked out," you still got paid, and you apparently had enough skills to get to that point.

Start applying for a bunch of jobs and see what positions feel most comfortable. Also consider psychotherapy to deal with what looks like ruminations and generally poor self-esteem.

^This. Working at a big company is about 10% as hard as working at a startup as a founder (maybe less). HR people love applicants with an "entrepreneurial spirit", and founders are often great product managers at big companies. Give yourself 18 months to do a great job in that role, and spend 25% of your personal time looking for problems within that type of company that could be solved with technology. Build a prototype of a solution nights and weekends, raise a seed round, and then start a new company. (That's what I did).