From Zirtual’s Overnight Collapse to Adios: How Maren Kate Rebuilt and Bet on Reuse

At 27, Maren Kate Donovan was running a 400-person remote company doing roughly $1M/month. Then, in a single day, Zirtual shut down. Instead of disappearing, she did the unglamorous work: a post-mortem, learning the finance she’d outsourced, a tour at Calm to study operating excellence, and a new thesis for her next decade: build less, waste less, and scale with discipline.

Today Maren is building Adios, a reuse startup in Austin. She started with a logistics pilot (“Goodbye Bags”) that validated consumer demand but not the margins. So she pivoted. Now she’s building a personal inventory app powered by vision AI so people can see what they own, know what it’s worth, and buy better.

This episode is about second chances (and the secondhand movement) told by a founder who earned both.

What we cover:

• The Zirtual post-mortem: services + venture, unit economics you must feel, and the two line items she’d never outsource again
• Calm’s influence: why narrow focus beats “Amazon-of-X” dreams for most of us
• Delegation that actually works in remote teams (train well, define 30/60/90, write the why)
• What the “Goodbye Bag” pilot proved, and why Adios moved from trucks to software
• The personal inventory bet: pricing data, eBay solds, and when parts are worth more than the whole
• Why hyper-local reuse sells better than “impact,” and how logistics ROI shortens sales cycles
• The resale boom: Savers’ IPO, brand partnerships, Gen Z’s secondhand shift — and what founders can build on top of it

If you’re rebuilding after a hit, or you’re excited about the business of reuse and the behavior change behind it, you’ll get a playbook you can use tomorrow.

🎧 Listen to Founders & Empanadas with Maren Kate Donovan on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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