Knowing When to Quit
Quitting isn't weakness. It's the discipline that lets the next thing breathe.
A Bangladeshi founder came to me two years ago. He had a startup, a dream, and a conviction strong enough to light up a city block. Investors had believed him too, for a while. Then the traction dried up. Customers stopped responding. The money ran out.
He sold his wife’s jewelry to keep the company alive.
When he told me this, something tightened in my chest. The startup shut down six months later anyway.pleappl
I knew another founder who had spent seven years on a real estate platform. Seven years. Monthly revenue had never crossed five thousand dollars. “Real estate is a big market,” he told me, eyes steady, completely sincere. He was right about the market. The market had been answering him for seven years, and he had his hands over his ears.
Both men called this resilience. I call it the refusal to quit on time.
Hustle culture says you grind until it works. But there is another truth sitting right next to that one: knowing when a thing is finished and cutting it cleanly is the actual skill. Founders who learn it survive. Founders who don’t take everything down with the ship.
If I hadn’t quit, over and over, Pathao would never have existed.
Jaben: Uber for Dumbphones
One of my first serious attempts was Jaben, Uber for CNGs, but on dumbphones. Drivers made missed calls to log their location, and passengers could find them online. Scrappy, clever, a hack.
But it stalled. Onboarding drivers was slow. The CNG world was messy, controlled by owners and syndicates who didn’t want transparency. After a month we had ten drivers. We needed fifty. We time-boxed it. When momentum didn’t come, we quit.
CallSpring: The IVR Gamble
Next came CallSpring—an IVR tool that let companies call employees for automated surveys. On paper, smart. In reality, too expensive. Call rates were 4 taka per minute, unit economics upside down. So we killed it.
Dhaka Rides: The Vanishing Van
Then Dhaka Rides. We rented a van for a carpooling test route. Three months later, it was obvious: too much capex, too little demand. We shut it down.
By then I had a graveyard of projects. But each one taught me the same thing: quitting isn’t weakness. It’s discipline. You give an idea a fair shot. If it doesn’t take root, you cut it and move on.
Slack: The Failed Game
That’s how it works in Silicon Valley, too. Slack wasn’t born as Slack. Stewart Butterfield and his team spent years building a game called Glitch. It failed. But inside it was a chat tool they’d built for themselves. They killed the game and pivoted to Slack—a $27 billion company.
Instagram: The Subtraction
Instagram started as Burbn, an overloaded app with check-ins, badges, and photos. Nobody used it. So the founders cut everything but photo sharing. That act of quitting created Instagram.
The Path to Pathao
Pathao came from the same graveyard. Our first idea was on-demand courier by cycle—instant delivery for forgotten chargers. Nobody cared. Orders came once a month. Then a Facebook merchant asked us to deliver clothes. That was the crack in the wall. We pivoted. Suddenly, it worked.
If I had been afraid to quit, Pathao would never have existed.
The Real Lesson
Startup culture worships persistence. History is full of founders who held on through impossible odds and came out the other side. It just leaves out the version where holding on was the cause of death. The practical discipline looks like this. Set a window before you start. Define the metric and the date while you are still optimistic, because objectivity degrades fast once you are inside the work. Jaben got one month to reach fifty drivers. It reached ten. We cut it. CallSpring got a quarter to find unit economics that held. They never held. We cut it. Set the criteria before you start, or you will find reasons not to enforce them later. Keep the cost of each experiment low enough that quitting is survivable. Jaben cost some biryani and a few weeks. CallSpring cost a few months of engineering time. Neither put the company at risk. The man who sold his wife’s jewelry had let the cost of his experiment climb past the point where quitting was a real option. By the time the evidence was clear, walking away meant losing something irreplaceable. The experiment had taken hostages. Watch what customers do, ahead of what they say. The factory manager said he liked CallSpring. His actions told a different story before his words did. The merchant selling sarees through Pathao said nothing strategic. She just kept placing orders and negotiated us to a price that revealed what the market would actually pay. Conviction is the fuel of the early stages. Every founder needs enough belief to keep building when the evidence is thin. But conviction without an exit criterion becomes the thing that kills you. The real estate founder had conviction. He also had seven years and five thousand dollars a month as his answer. Pathao was experiment number six. The first five had to die on schedule to give the sixth one room to breathe. I am still not sure I would have survived a seventh.