There's a time to get tough and keep building our startups. And there's a time to be honest about simply folding the tents.

The problem is that our own egos can rarely distinguish between the two.

We hear these (revisionist) stories of great entrepreneurs overcoming insurmountable odds to build the great companies of today, and we assume that in order to earn our own tale, we'll need to bring ourselves to the brink of destruction to do the same.

But the truth is, more often than not, the idea of running ourselves into the ground is just that: we're just killing ourselves with little upside or glory on the other side of the journey. As Founders, we need to have an honest dialog about when it's really time to put a bullet in this thing for th...