About a week ago, the CEO of a startup I had joined in February called me into a conference room, and fired me. There was absolutely no warning, no discussion of my performance before that, no nothing. Basically, because the company was heading for trouble, he was changing his strategy, and I was gone. I am now scrambling to replace that income, deal with a bunch of other problems this has created, and basically, quickly rebuild my career. I'm also taking a long, hard look at what happened, in order to prevent anything like this from happening again, an exercise I highly recommend.

Lesson One: I should have seen this coming.

Lesson Two: I didn't because I came into my relationship with this company from a position of weakness. See where I'm going here?

Lesson Three: Men have to look at dealing with women the same way.

There were all kinds of red flags in this situation that I ignored. The founders were not American, which is a huge drawback when selling to American companies. They had no financing from venture investors, only individuals, which is also problematic. There was a huge lack of transparency. They'd never done a startup before. There was no real CFO. They didn't understand their customers, and weren't especially interested in learning. On and on an on.

What I should have done was look at all of this from the perspective of someone who was potentially investing. In this case, I was investing my time, my effort, my reputation and so on, but I was definitely investing. Weigh the upside, weigh the downside, ask a lot of specific questions and negotiate, with my current business as a healthy, viable alternative. Instead, I just bought into it, and paid for it. If you come into any situation from a position of vulnerability, weakness, need or emotional attachment, there is a real chance you're going to get screwed.

When dealing with women, in anything but the most transactional, temporary way, you have to think the same way. What I am I getting out of this? What are my alternatives? What am I sacrificing or risking? What are the odds of the different scenarios? And so on.

This isn't easy, because much of our culture is specifically aimed at preventing men from thinking this way. White-knighting, romance, all that shit is specifically designed to keep you from thinking rationally and calmly, based on facts, about what you're doing. Marriage in particular is Ground Zero for this. You're risking everything you have on a coin toss, basically. Who in their right mind would sign up for that if they were thinking rationally? Add to this lust and the drive for pussy, and you're programmed to sign your own death warrant.

Don't. Think like you're investing. Because you are.

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