Hey there, I’m Nick Freund and I post regular musings here about the failure of startups. I am a Bay Area to NYC transplant, and live in the city with my amazing wife and 3 kids.
I began writing here in the aftermath of shutting down my company Workstream.io. We spent 4 years, and put a lot of money, tears and sweat into the company. I find myself deeply unsatisfied with the result, but feel the journey made me a a better businessperson, husband, father and friend. Failing Forward is intended to be at its core two things:
A place to share the wisdom I gained starting and shutting down Workstream.io, and to collate the wisdom of other failed founders like me.
A way to publicly digest and understand what happened so I can be better next time.
In these ways, I hope to pay my failure forward to others who have started or are considering starting something. And I also hope to continue learning from the experience as I, among other things, move forward from failure to whatever is next.
A little more about me
I spent 12+ years working in tech before starting my own thing.
I started my career in Tesla in 2008. This was back in the day when there were only 200 people at the company, we had not delivered a single car and no one outside of Silicon Valley had heard of Elon Musk. I spent about four years running finance for the Roadster and Model S programs, and worked on the company’s financings across VC, our IPO and strategic such as our $500M loan facility from the US Department of Energy.
After I got my MBA, I moved to NYC and got into SaaS. I became an executive at the enterprise software company BetterCloud, which was one of the first real enterprise companies started here. I served as a classic “guy behind the buy” to our Founder and CEO, and touched nearly every part of the business from our first sales, to product and business operations, to customer support and implementation.
Why subscribe?
I intend everything that I post here to be real and not contrived. It is supposed to be helpful to founders or anyone interested in the hard sh!t that comes when you start a company.
The newsletter and publication archives are all free.
Other musing of mine:
Here are some other places I have been featured over the years as a founder and tech person.
Data Knowledge Pioneers, a show by Workstream.io
Key Moments Podcast by Chopcast
The Joe Reiss Show: Closing a Startup
Towards Data Science: Data Teams, Kill Your Service Desk
Get in touch
If you ever want to get in touch, feel free to reach out to me via my Linkedin or my email: nicholas.freund@gmail.com.
