Matt Barrie's Freelancer may be a listed company worth more than $560 million now, but his previous startup left him so broken he was unable to do any work for almost a year.

Prior to Freelancer, Barrie ran a semiconductor circuitry business called Sensory Networks, which was sold to Intel for $21 million in 2013, about seven years after Barrie burned out and quit with an incendiary comment that would make venture capital raising in the future almost impossible.