In April, I left my job at a hedge fund. This was, admittedly, not the best time to leave a job in New York, but I needed out because the lack of purpose in my work was starting to affect my health.
Even though we didn't "technically" know ourselves to be in a recession, I knew something bizarre was going on that summer. I had some really surprising rejections. I never find rejection to be shocking, because even if you're really good, you might not be a fit... but I got turned down for in-person interviews at companies that would have been slam-dunks (for in-person interview) in mid-2007.
Anyway, I found my way to a really cool startup and began working there, the only downside being that pay would be deferred until we had funding. I was told that we'd probably have funding by November. I figured January - March was more likely, since PG's essays have educated me on the fact that funding matters are always a lot worse than expected, but I had enough savings from the hedge fund days to hold out that far.
It's January. I enjoy the work a lot more than I have at prior companies. The problem is that I have no control over the funding situation, and it's started to scare the shit out of me the minute we crossed into 2009. I only have 5-7 months of living expenses now (fuck New York's ridiculous housing costs). I honestly have no idea what I'll do if this doesn't pan out. I don't want to go back to Wall Street and might not be able to (there may not be a Wall Street). With an imploded economy, even a traditional job search is going to be risky and time-consuming. I don't have any contacts that could lead into consulting projects, and taking a typical software job (Java to implement some business guy's lame vision) is about as palatable as selling out and getting an MBA. I want to stay in technology, but working on cool projects and using decent languages (e.g. Lisp, ML, Haskell... or Python/Ruby at the very least).
If the startup gets funding, and it probably will, I'm fine. However, I'm worried about that 1-in-20 (?) chance that we don't manage to line up funding in time, in which I need to do a crash job search in an imploded economy and on shaky ground (and I don't want to do any job search, because I really like the startup and the projects I am working on). It's getting to the point where I hate spending money and I'm delaying necessary expenditures.
So, I'm staring down a 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 risk of utter disaster and now that it's 2009 I'm starting to get scared. Has anyone here been through disaster before? How did it pan out?
You should be worried -- and if I were you I'd re-evaluate your odds. My guess is that a startup which would print money would still have more than a 1-in-20 chance of failing to get funding at the moment.
Assuming you definitely want to continue with this startup (and think about that carefully -- sometimes there's a reason why startups don't get funded), I recommend doing everything you can to lower your costs. Yes, including moving out of NYC: While gravitycop makes a good point about location being important for getting funding, it sounds like you're not the person who is going after the funding right now (based on the comment about having 'no control')... and while VCs care where a company is based, they aren't going to care much if a few employees live in the suburbs.