Articles, books, podcasts, and other perspectives on business mortality, professional loss, and what it looks like to end something — a company, a chapter, a career — with intention.
From the Doulas
Ending Well
A zine exploring how to close with intention — the emotional, practical, and philosophical dimensions of a good ending.
Death of a Startup: Advice for All Founders
Personal and practical — what it actually feels like to shut something down, and what you can do to make it hurt less and mean more.
A Still Small Voice
Dir. Luke Lorentzen. A year inside a hospital chaplaincy residency. Sundance Directing Award, 2023.
Going Through a Collapse with Your Self-Respect Intact
Alena Bocharova talks with Adam about why an entrepreneur needs a death doula, and what it means to close a business with dignity. English translation.
On Shutting Down
Shutting Down Your Business Gracefully
A practical and human guide to winding down well — covering employees, customers, finances, and the founder's own psychology.
How to Prepare for Your Startup's Gruesome Demise
Most founders plan for success. Veteran investor David Frankel argues you should also plan — early and seriously — for the end.
How to Wind Down a Venture-Backed Startup
A step-by-step operational guide to shutting down a funded startup — from notifying investors to final payroll to dissolving the entity.
The Startup Shutdown Playbook: How to Succeed in Closing a Company
A candid talk on what closing a company actually involves — legally, financially, and emotionally — and how to do it with integrity.
Shutting Down a Startup: How to Protect Yourself and Your Investors from Liability
The legal and financial guardrails every founder needs to understand before they start the wind-down process.
On Transitions
I Asked 100 Founders, CEOs and VCs About Career Transitions — Here's What I Learned
What actually happens to founders after they step away — and how the most successful ones navigated the identity shift.
CEO Succession: A Very Human Transition
Leadership transitions are rarely just strategic — they're deeply personal. This piece explores the emotional and relational dimensions of passing the torch.
4 Tips for Managing the Succession Challenge
Succession planning in family enterprises — where the stakes are highest and the conversations are hardest — done well.
Transitions
William Bridges taught a generation of organizations that every transition begins with an ending, and that skipping it is why change fails.
Necessary Endings
Henry Cloud on telling the difference between something struggling and something finished.
Almost Reckless
Amy Smilovic's candid account of taking her fashion brand Tibi to the edge of collapse — and choosing to reinvent it instead.
On Grief and Mortality
Being Mortal
Atul Gawande on what medicine learned about talking to people facing the end. None of it has reached business.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow
Francis Weller on grief as communal practice, not private malfunction. For anyone who has to hold a room.
Finite and Infinite Games
James P. Carse on playing to win versus playing to keep playing. Read before deciding what your company was for.
Bittersweet
Susan Cain, author of Quiet, on sorrow and longing as creative fuel.
Notes on Grief
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ninety pages, read in one sitting.