Starting a new business venture comes with a lot of challenges, from finding employees to marketing your products and everything in between. But there’s one aspect that never changes, no matter how many times I’ve done it: The rush you get when things go right.

When the stars align, and all the hard work you and your team have done turns a startup into a rocket going all the way to the moon, you feel like you’re strapped onto that thing’s fuselage, riding it like a space cowboy. That’s an amazing feeling.

In fact, it’s such an amazing feeling that it’s hard to imagine that things could ever go poorly again. But as someone who has been on both sides of this coin, I can tell you firsthand: Just like elevators, your startup can go up or down.

Be prepared for both.

Sucked In

Back in the mid-1990s, I started a venture with little more than a few employees and an idea. The idea stemmed from this problem: doctors constantly need new information. They have to keep up with the latest technologies and techniques; otherwise, they won’t know how to properly treat their patients. Going back to school wasn’t a great option, but there were courses and TV programs that could help keep them up to date.

My venture spun off from my time in cable television, and without getting into it too deep, we had an entire catalog of educational shows for doctors at our disposal. The internet was out there, but not as widely adopted as it is today. We could, however, deliver these shows to doctors who had computers capable of receiving the signals. So that became our plan. We would give doctors a computer, a monitor, and everything else they needed to connect to the internet, all for free. We would then deliver these continuing medical education programs to them at no cost. Easy.

On its surface, this seems like a good way to send your new venture into debt collection, as we were giving everything away. But that wasn’t our product. What we actually were selling was advertising. We could pitch potential pharmaceutical advertisers who could buy commercial time for those shows. We could give them highly targeted marketing, which, at the time, was rare. Just imagine being a pharmaceutical firm that sold specialized drugs to OBGYNs. We could deliver a market of only those doctors to that company. It was a great value proposition, and we secured some big-name clients in the process. It was great.

While we did get investors and advertisers on board, by the end of the first ninety days, we had undergone a name change, were running out of funding, and needed an infusion of capital soon, or we would shut down. The levels of stress that I went through in those days must have shaved a few years off my life, and while it taught me a lot, it was difficult to get through. The good news; we sold the company for $10 million before we went bankrupt!

After that, I kept trying new things, which led me to the most stressful venture yet.

24/7 Media

When we began 24/7 Media in 1997, the plan was to sell internet advertising. We were at the cusp of this new technology, and my prior experience showed me all of the untapped potential that we could use. Our company had a real shot at becoming a huge player in the internet advertising world, and lots of investors who wanted in. There was no way this was going to fail.

The rocket ship climbed for a few years, that’s for sure. We were neck-and-neck with some of our competition for a while and had made a name for ourselves as one of the companies that understood the industry well and were a reliable partner. But when the dot-com bubble burst on March 11, 2000, we didn’t immediately feel its effects. In the next few months and years, we definitely would.

Soon, we found ourselves in multiple precarious situations. Our stock would plummet to just $0.09, and we were temporarily delisted from the NASDAQ. Then 9/11 came, and the economy tanked, leaving us in a place where it was even harder to recover. We had to sell everything that wasn’t bolted down just to keep the doors open, and to top it all off, one of our main investors and a key person in getting the company off the ground was murdered.

And that was all just in 2001.

Lessons Learned

We did end up pulling 24/7 back from the brink of death on multiple occasions, and we sold the business to WPP for close to $700 million just before the Great Recession. There were quite a few nail-biting moments in those years, and it was tough to manage on a professional and personal level.

Still, if you were to ask me if I would do it all over again, I definitely would. It was one of, if not the, biggest challenge of my career, and I came out better for having gone through it.

But I would do so knowing what could happen. Just like an elevator, ventures can go up, and they can go down. You just have to be prepared for both.