This week, a founder explains why she shut it down.

The decision was not made on a Tuesday, but I remember it that way. The light in the kitchen was thin, the kind of light that feels borrowed. I had been holding a mug of cold tea for an hour and had not noticed it was cold. After six years and forty-one employees, Maren Olsen turned the key for the last time. She wants to be clear: it wasn't a failure. It was an ending.

For six years I had been the person who explained, on stage and at dinners and in investor meetings, what we were going to do next. The shape of the next quarter, the next hire, the next round. The shape of the next year. I had been very good at this shape-making. It is a kind of confidence that, once practised, you cannot easily put down.

And then one morning I could not pick it up.

I wrote the letter to the team in one sitting, which is unlike me. I usually edit for days. This time I wrote it the way one writes to a person one has loved for a long time and now must be honest with. There was a paragraph about money and a paragraph about severance and a paragraph that was just one sentence, the sentence I had been avoiding for nine months.

The sentence was: I do not believe in this anymore, and I owe you the honesty of saying so before I owe you anything else.

I sent the letter at 7.04am. By 7.06 my phone was vibrating in a way I had never seen a phone vibrate. I put it face-down on the kitchen counter and went for a walk in the park behind the house, where I cried, briefly and quietly, on a bench beside a man who pretended very politely not to notice.

The first week was loud. Calls and questions and the choreography of telling investors, telling customers, telling the press in that order and not the other way around. The second week was quieter. By the third week the office was empty and I was the only one left with a key, and I went in on a Saturday to pack the last things, and I sat in the chair I had sat in for six years and I did not feel relief and I did not feel grief. I felt the absence of the shape.

That, I think, is what nobody tells you. You spend years being the shape of the company, and when the company is no longer there, you are not yet a different shape. You are unshaped. It takes longer than you expect to feel like a person again.

I have not started another company. I might. I might not. I am being deliberately careful not to know yet. I am reading more, walking more, taking my mother to lunch on Wednesdays. I am learning to say I do not know without feeling that I have failed an exam.

Someone asked me last month if I would call the whole thing a failure. I thought about it for a long time, which I think was the right answer in itself. It was not a failure. It was an ending. The two are different and we have allowed them to become the same word, which is doing a small violence to anyone who has ever had to end a thing on purpose.

If you are about to do the same, I will not tell you it gets easier. I will tell you that it gets quieter, and that the quiet, eventually, is its own kind of room.