How can I keep pursuing this company with commitment without burning myself and my team out?

I worked on a project for several years. At the beginning, I was full of enthusiasm, but I felt the company culture slowly wore me down. The colleagues who had been with me from the start were laid off one by one. For about three or four months, we worked overtime every day without producing results. The project lead had no ideas of his own and mainly passed along the boss’s demands. Because he did not fully understand them, the project kept going off course. The communication was ineffective, and so was the overtime. In the end, we failed the first project acceptance, and management let a group of people go. I stayed. I could still see some hope, and I liked the new person in charge. They promoted working efficiently, and proved that this was more than a slogan. I also still believed in the hardware market. I was somewhat shaken at first, but the project eventually passed acceptance fairly successfully, and I felt a huge sense of relief. Then the operational problems became difficult. Because of the budget, the hardware product could not be updated or iterated. For a hardware company, that was fatal. After giving so much of myself to the project, I reached a simple conclusion: it was over.

I once worked with a colleague who had spent about ten years as an engineer and project manager at a large technology company. He believed he had found a kind of electronic glass with features that would become very popular, so he left his job and started a company with several colleagues. He put a great deal of his own money into making a special product. For two years, they solved one problem only to meet another. Eventually he had spent all his money. He had even sold his home, so he no longer had a place to live. In the end, the project failed, the team separated, and everyone had to look for work again. He came to our company and became my colleague. When he talks about that time now, I think he would choose differently if he could go back. He might have stayed at his old company instead of trying to build one of his own. His experience changed how I think about risk. The challenge may be exciting, but sometimes we need to think even more seriously about the difficulties waiting inside it.

I stayed at my company for about five years and spent all my time on one project. It was a machine—not exactly a robot—that could help people connect across the world. Someone could stay at home, control the machine through an app, and see video from another place. You could be in a Chinese home and watch a show in the United States. I thought it was very interesting, so I gave it my time. There were many difficult technical details. We overcame them. The video could travel through the network, and the machine could be controlled by the app. We finally showed the device on the web. Then one year passed, and two years, and three years. No one wanted to buy it. The painful part is that we designed the feature before we really analyzed the market. We did not collect users’ thoughts. We did not even know whether the machine was useful. My friends and family probably did not want to hurt me, so they told me it was useful. But they were not real users or customers. I had no one giving me the truth that it was not useful. Finally, we will close the company. Now, when someone wants to design something new or start a company, I want to tell them: analyze the market first. Listen to what users want. Know whether your features really help people, and what the main value is. We solved the technical problems. We just did not first solve the question of whether anyone needed what we had made.

There was a period when my work was extremely busy, and I felt completely worn down. I had headaches every day. I faced challenge after challenge, often figuring things out while doing them, and it was very painful when something was beyond my abilities. I gritted my teeth and kept going, but I became slower. My body and mind were under enormous pressure. I am in a similar situation now. I still have not found a real solution, but I cannot simply leave because the pressures of life do not allow it. What I fear is not having enough money to support the rest of my life. “Enough” feels like something I may never reach. Whether it will come depends on having sufficient funds—but isn’t that a cycle? I am confused now. I can see it a little, but I do not know how to get out.