The Startup Graveyard

by skogstokig • 6 months ago

66 48 6 months ago

mushufasa• 6 months ago

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.

forkLding• 6 months ago

Club Penguin was sold to Disney for 350 million, it didn't die in the sense that money ran out

giancarlostoro• 6 months ago

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.

Oras2• 6 months ago

There are a few startups that were acquired, not sure if the acquisition had covered the investment, as it's not clear.

- Pebble

- Udemy

- Viper

frankdenbow• 6 months ago

reminds of the old site fuckedcompany by pud which wrote about startup closures in the dot com era

Wistar• 6 months ago

My thought exactly.

baggachipz• 6 months ago

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.

tracker12• 6 months ago

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.

gordonhart2• 6 months ago

How'd you source the information? Curious to see Cloudera listed as dead and wasn't able to find anything corroborating this online.

rawgabbit• 6 months ago

Genuity was also bought out. Domo seems alive and well.

vaughands• 6 months ago

The author posted this on a vibe coding subreddit, so I'd be willing to wager some AI deep research with manual clean up.

gordonhart2• 6 months ago

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)

joloooo• 6 months ago

Circling the drain, but not dead

joering2• 6 months ago

Evernote is dead?

TZubiri• 6 months ago

I don't get the "Uber Rush" entry.

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.

alansaber• 6 months ago

RIP Theranos

bilater• 6 months ago

one of the startups listed that "failed" is music.ly. the app bytedance acquired to launch tiktok

siliconc0w• 6 months ago

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)

foobiekr• 6 months ago

A lot of acquisitions are tech and talent and the details matter. A startup that gets acquired for $30M after burning $70M is definitely burned.

raincole• 6 months ago

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.

njudah• 6 months ago

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.)

defaultcompany• 6 months ago

Poshmark also is not dead.

cploonker• 6 months ago

Similar site: https://www.failory.com/cemetery

henning• 6 months ago

The entry for Theranos does not mention the massive fraud that occurred. All of this bullshit is AI-generated, isn't it?

adityashankar• 6 months ago

The filters don't actually work, unless I'm misunderstanding them >.<, can you fix them please?

gkoberger• 6 months ago

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.

jabedude• 6 months ago

I don't think this website is implying there was a 'problem' per se. In fact it seems to be geared towards helping resurrect the original premises

Kkoala• 6 months ago

"Where $32.5B+ in venture capital was burned to ashes." isn't exactly a positive spin.

At least the copy seems AI-generated though, so I guess can't read too much into it.

aeve890• 6 months ago

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.

gravel7623• 6 months ago

I hate that every single Execution Plan says has "AI-first" in it. Is this an ad?

nkohari• 6 months ago

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

asdev• 6 months ago

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

Oras2• 6 months ago

E La Carte was such a nice idea. I remember it quite well as I tried to do something similar in the UK back in 2011. iPad menu in restaurants.

fluorinerocket• 6 months ago

I miss fuckedcompany.com

CrzyLngPwd• 6 months ago

Reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

latchkey• 6 months ago

Back when PoD t-shirts were more of a thing..

https://www.wired.com/2015/05/techs-failures-live-t-shirts/

SoleilAbsolu• 6 months ago

Once they're done, shouldn't they be called "stopdowns"?

tptacek• 6 months ago

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.

dadrian• 6 months ago

Some of them also aren't really dead.

AstroBen• 6 months ago

The idea for the site is interesting but there seems to be an incredible amount of misinformation on here

klik99• 6 months ago

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.

tracker12• 6 months ago

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.

tibbar• 6 months ago

Is Cloudera actually dead? The website seems alive and well...

mbesto• 6 months ago

Some of these still exist, I don't get it? What dictates when a company is "dead"? Insolvency? Bankruptcy?

For example - Domo is still publicly traded and does $300M in revenue:

https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DOMO

TheGRS• 6 months ago

I think MySpace being an example is bizarre. It had its time and I'm sure it made a lot of advertising revenue. It walked so Facebook could run. I guess there's potential for another social media start-up, but its a crowded space for sure.

parliament32• 6 months ago

AI slop, a good portion of these are either still in business or acquired and still running.

loot-dropdude• 6 months ago

True - I shipped way too early but have done a lot of clean-up

phendrenad2• 6 months ago

Why is this flagged? It's a funny idea, perhaps even an intentional tongue-in-cheek joke.

Is it because many of these were HN startups? Are we free to speak our minds here or do we get penalized for criticizing startups in any way?

The Startup Graveyard

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