Most Startups Die Before Launching, Some Die After

http://www.valleyofdeath.biz

by yankoff • 14 years ago

47 18 14 years ago

Should also calculate the size of the home page against the date of the first funding (rather than just the dns / http response).

If a startup was funded with eg $3 million in 2007, and their supposed homepage is something like sub 3kb (10kb?) in size but responding, they're either dead (with a living domain) or they moved.

TheGlobe.com for example has a responding site, but they're dead as a door nail.

andygcook• 14 years ago

Are these numbers from the inception of CrunchBase? What year was it started?

khakimov2• 14 years ago

right, from CrunchBase (later going to try add http://angel.co/ too), http://www.crunchbase.com/api

lowglow• 14 years ago

Why do most start-ups die before they're ever launched?

khakimov2• 14 years ago

http://davidcancel.com/3-startup-lessons-i-learned-the-hard-...

kintamanimatt• 14 years ago

Flaky founders.

Running out of cash.

Wantrepreneurs at the helm instead of entrepreneurs.

Pressure from "friends", family, etc to chase after the cubicle with fluorescent lighting rather than the apparently riskier start-up.

Fear.

Realizing the idea isn't as good as was originally thought and moving on to greener pastures.

Lack of technical expertise to get the product ready.

Regulatory restrictions that prevent the idea from moving forward.

Crappy credit that prevents the founders from being able to accept card payments, or worse yet, being in a jurisdiction where payment solutions are stuck in the stone age.

Most grim: death of a founder.

However ... a lot of these start ups appear to have just changed their name, been acquired, or otherwise pivoted into something new, which makes it look like hundreds of millions have been poured into companies that have just disappeared. They may not have updated their Crunchbase profile either, so I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in the stats, but I do think it's true that a lot of start-ups fizzle out before they even begin.

BadassFractal• 14 years ago

I'm confident that the bulk will have to do with a poorly executed customer discovery phase. 9/10 times, after some investigation / interviewing / research and your original concept turning into a basic MVP, you will realize that your original idea isn't going anywhere.

At that point you either pivot, or often you start from scratch, on something completely different, something that the founders didn't sign up for. For many it's highly demotivational and perceived as a failure, at which point things just break apart.

I know that everybody tells you that you should be sticking to your original vision, but often a vision that's not backed by thorough investigation doesn't go very far. Often you discover the vision has already been realized by someone else very adequately and you just hadn't done enough preparation. I think at the end of the day, as you embark on your startup journey, you have to all agree that it's ok if your original idea of providing accessible education to 3rd world children might suddenly one day turn into a dating site for foot fetishists. Perhaps that's a much bigger idea (the whole Derek Sivers's multipliers) and you can execute on it much better. Yeah, it's a real bummer that you moved away from that initial plan, but now you might be orders of magnitude more effective.

vishaldpatel• 14 years ago

We died after :(

jimboyoungblood• 14 years ago

This is pointless and misleading.

For example: #3 on the "top" list is Danger. According to crunchbase (where this site gets its data from) it was acquired for $500MM. And the founder went on to start Android. Why does it matter that danger.com is now dormant?

_delirium• 14 years ago

I agree, though I think it's more likely to be wrong in the other direction. There are definitely examples like Danger, but also many examples of effectively dead (or at least, zombie) companies where you can still reach a webserver.

danielpal• 14 years ago

Not to mention #1 OakPacific.com is actually mop.com which is alive and very valuable.

From wikipedia:

Oak Pacific Interactive is the second-largest operator of social networking websites in China,[1] after taking ownership of one of the most viewed Web sites in China MOP.com.

pmboyd• 14 years ago

The data is also skewed with false positive whereby the company appears alive but is not. My previous, now defunct startup's domain responds with a redirect to another domain.

richardw• 14 years ago

So somebody bought Danger for $500MM, but it's now worthless? (I don't know the backstory, but reading between the lines.) The good fortune of the ex-founder isn't the focus of the page. The person doesn't seem to be saying "don't work in a startup", they're just measuring how much funding startups get that ends up with a dead server [1]. Pointless and misleading for HN startuppy-readers, but I can imagine there are people who might find it perfectly on-topic.

Edit: I'm not saying the data is correct, just that the page might have value for some participants. Hopefully the creators will include HN and other feedback on final outcomes.

[1] From the page: "3. Calculation

Calculate how much money was spent on startups which dns/http servers don't work at that time."

RedwoodCity• 14 years ago

If $153 billion was invested and some $3 billion in investments will never be recaptured, as the figures suggest, that there is roughly a 2% chance that the money will be lost.

It is still good to be a VC.

carsongross• 14 years ago

There but for the grace of God (and Heroku) go I.

unreal37• 14 years ago

On the top list is "Official Virtual DJ" which claimed $170MM in funding. Never heard of it. I doubt this is real. Is it possible the founders lied about funding? Why wouldn't I create my own Crunchbase profile and claim $1 billion in funding?

einhverfr• 14 years ago

Almost every startup dies. Those that succeed are those that refuse to stay dead. Failure is but a stage on the road to success.

jvoorhis• 14 years ago

I knew I wasn't the only one thinking of CrunchBase analytics. It's a good resource that's worth digging through and making sense of, but,

"""1. Startup's list Throught crunchbase (api). Put everything in db."""

Throught [sic]? They also need some better metrics than cash in/out before this helps.

Most Startups Die Before Launching, Some Die After

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