I guess I don't see the problem? Nothing lasts forever, and everyone involved knew the risks.
That money wasn't purely wasted, it went into salaries and other products. At least half ended in exits and became a part of another company.
The ability to fail and fail big is what makes the SF tech scene special... people aren't afraid to try something audacious. And sure, the world could take-or-leave most of these products, but I don't really see the point in this negative framing.
Are these LLM-generated causes of death? There are a couple startups here where I'm somewhat familiar with the "real" causes of death and the stated cause here is just fluff.
I think it's a great idea to highlight that companies that fail in the VC context aren't necessarily bad ideas for companies - there is just a specific business model that thrives with VC funding (extremely high scalability, reliable unit costs) and companies that don't fit that or fail to develop in that direction may still be great businesses but get driven into the ground by VCs trying to find the one unicorn out of 15 in the profile.
Agreed, there's nothing at all wrong with a company that has a comfortable market fit than makes a pretty consistent $X/yr with Y employees/staff. Not everything needs to be the next big VC Unicorn. A lot of these ideas could very well be multi-million dollar businesses with a little effort.
I was going to say, I don't see Club Penguin as a total failure. Heck, there's a dozen or more Club Penguin private servers. Don't let your children on them though, I hear they've got the same pedophilia problem as Roblox.
Some of these are acquires so it's hard to argue the money was 'burned'. That said I do agree acquired companies can be viable as the product usually gets put on life-support or ruined/shutdown (like Club Penguin)
Even the products got eventually shut down I still don't think the money was necessarily 'burned.' Most buildings eventually fell or got destructed so were all the resources spent on construction burned? But whether a product actually helped the users is a question too nuance to ask.
As they say, I'm not dead yet -- many of the companies listed as dead are acquired or very much still alive. (Domo is still publicly traded, for example.)
this type of resource is actually super useful to idea-stage founders, as it can often be hard to research failed attempts at a domain (typically the websites and assets disappear over time). Even just an index is helpful.
In glancing through this list, some of these make me go "hmm." For example, MySpace is an entry. While it did eventually die, I'm not sure I personally would count myspace as a startup failure -- it got to huge scale, got acquired, and still had niche activity for many years of gradual decline post-acquisition. Certainly, the startup founders and investors had a successful exit.
feature request: tag startups with YCombinator and be able to visualize failure in terms of capital invested over time. my hunch is it's going up but would be cool to see the data
Seems like it. That would explain the various suspicious entries and lack of rigor (missing thousands of smaller startups that have failed in the last decade)
Ha, almost every "New Business Idea & Product Name" is heavily focused on AI. It tracks. Everytime I present a problem to an LLM the solution is the same "use AI". Can't blame them though.
Some of these are still in existence. For example, Wealthfront Cash is their HYSA offering, which is still very much a thing: https://www.wealthfront.com/cash
Same... some of the horror stories still stick to me... move to SF/SV on a big job offer, show up on your first day to locked doors and guys with armed escorts repossessing the servers.
At one point, there were multiple new entries throughout each day. It was entertaining/terrifying to reload the page. Wonder when we'll see something like fuckedaicompany.com pop up.
That money wasn't purely wasted, it went into salaries and other products. At least half ended in exits and became a part of another company.
The ability to fail and fail big is what makes the SF tech scene special... people aren't afraid to try something audacious. And sure, the world could take-or-leave most of these products, but I don't really see the point in this negative framing.
- Pebble
- Udemy
- Viper
For example - Domo is still publicly traded and does $300M in revenue:
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DOMO
In glancing through this list, some of these make me go "hmm." For example, MySpace is an entry. While it did eventually die, I'm not sure I personally would count myspace as a startup failure -- it got to huge scale, got acquired, and still had niche activity for many years of gradual decline post-acquisition. Certainly, the startup founders and investors had a successful exit.
https://www.wired.com/2015/05/techs-failures-live-t-shirts/
First of all, it's not a startup it's a feature.
Second, in my country this service exists, you can make deliveries with uber and it's used for package delivery as well as signing contracts.