A lot of this “startups commit suicide, not homicide” framing feels like it pathologizes what is often a rational choice. Most founders don’t “give up” in some moral sense, they just run out of personal runway before the company produces enough evidence that the sacrifice is still worth it. Cash runway is visible on a spreadsheet; emotional runway, health, relationships, and opportunity cost aren’t, but they’re just as real a constraint.

What I’ve seen kill companies is the mismatch between those two curves: the time it takes to get real signal from the market vs the time a small group of humans can tolerate living in permanent crisis mode. In a ZIRP world you could paper over that with cheap capital; in 2025 you can’t. Calling that “suicide” makes it sound like a failure of grit, when it’s often just updating on new information about your life and the macro environment and deciding this particular lottery ticket isn’t worth any more years.

Calling it suicide is assuming that most startups shouldn’t fail of “natural causes”. There’s nothing bad or unnatural about a startup not being viable. It’s not like every company can be viable just by sacrificing a bit more for a bit longer