Startup Failure Post-Mortems

Yeah, but I appreciate the things they say instead of some kind of stock "It was my fault, plain and simple". It's an interesting perspective. And I think that some fault lays at their feet is kinda built into it being a postmortem discussion about their failed business.

I agree. Some of these post mortems are insightful but some are lame like prism. "Welp we built a cool product, learned content distribution is tough, and failed to achieve growth. The end" But why is it tough? What it sounds like was that prism didn't provide a useful enough experience for enough people to change their old habits of consumption.

Also there was a hotel top 10 one that was odd. They couldn't grow because they were priced out by large competitors. But any ranking / aggregator site should crush end providers in seo. I work for a financial services companies and lead aggregators dominate seo because it's inherently more beneficial for a consumer to see a bunch of choices than one provider. I imagine its a similar story for hotels.

Music startups have a pretty valid point when it comes to fighting an uphill battle.

As much as I agree with you, successful CEOs tend to be very good at never accepting responsibility for any failure and accepting credit for everything good that happens.

Jeffrey Pfeffer's "Leadership Bullshit" expands on this sobering reality in more detail. As much as I like to believe that righteousness, honesty, and integrity matter for leaders, the realities of modern business do not reward the most honest people as reliably as those that know how to work systems and crowds.

Speaking from personal experience, I think a lot of them end up in the boat of having just enough paying customers that the idea looks viable but not getting enough long term traction to go from niche product surviving on raised capital to self-sustaining. Riding the initial public interest wave a bunch of people signup and the revenue projections look really good which lets the company go raise more capital to keep going, but over time, the company taps out their customer base and their revenue growth flatlines and ultimately they can't jump from niche product running on capital to self sustaining.

A lot of these postmortems, I think end up with CEOs looking at metrics, especially the early growth metrics, -- and they want to be successful, most of the time it's their baby -- and seeing enough interest to make them think they're close. Ergo, the "only if we had more time/money" postmortems.

I bought "unicorngrill.com" out of a half-assed idea to do something similar. Haven't had time yet, but every time I see something like this, I'm tempted.