Show HN: Dead Yet? – Keep an eye on dying startups
deadyet.lol
deadyet.lol
https://web.archive.org/web/20010203210800/http://www.fucked...
Of course, if startups do start to IPO and the public markets catch the over-valuation bug, then we could see a repeat of 2000. Barring that, I think a correction would not infect the markets at large and may drive more capital into the public companies that are not over valued.
:)
;-)
Personally I'd like to see a post mortem for companies that collapsed. Sometimes they are the only historical record we have of these businesses.
So frequently founders and investors rush to burn the evidence of their failures before the lessons they learned are ever taught, and the business completely vanishes into the ether as if it never existed.
There's a lot of value in documenting and aggregating data in companies that failed for whatever reason. Not only to apply the lessons of failing but it does a great job of logging the industry zeitgeist, seeing what trends in ideas we thought were worth investing in that turned out to be duds, what flamed out and then sprung back years later. Too much of that data has been lost over time, it's a real shame.
It was based on actual financial statements "based on their reported liquid assets and loss rate. When the cash runs out, something bad for stockholders has to happen."
The weird thing is, at the time that statement was controversial. "We'll make it up in volume!"
For instance, L'Usine à Design is dead since 2013. They were a French company that made furniture, I bought a couch from them. Their office was on the same floor as Moodstocks, where I was working at the time, and after it closed a few angry customers came banging at our door to complain.
(The reason why the website thinks they are not dead is that the URL they used for the check is the URL of a news article announcing that they were dying!)
If you want to check a company's status, just go to the website. This seems like a cynical tool.
In any case, great domain name, haha.
Silicon Valley (YC included) has a large number of these. I remember one that is not "dead" by any public measure (live site accepting new customers), but upon digging I found that the two co-founders now work at Facebook!
It would've been similar to this (like some kind of "Startup Graveyard") but slightly more extensive: interviews with the founders and the lessons they learned from it, what "type" of failure they suffered from (misinterpreting the market, lack of skills, etc).
I ultimately gave up on the idea because none of the founders I contacted wanted to truly spill the beans on what went wrong (the best I tended to get was some vague PR mumbling).
Legal, reputation among other reasons force people to don't share why something failed. I'm convinced it would be a great resource for learning on all kind of areas.
Meh. I'll stick to reading what the winners have to say - or those still actively competing with them.
So far it seems to me that it's more of a "Haha, you didn't make it" page creator when it could actually become a force for good.
It's normal that companies die. What advice would you give them?
I don't personally have generic advice off-the-bat for company-wide failure avoidance I'm afraid.
Also, I'm curious about what the refresh rate is to check HTTP status. I'm sure some sites on that list may have been down for more than a day or two.
The sentiment of http://issnapchat.deadyet.lol/ is amusing, but I agree it shouldn't be with the dead-product-walking list. Will add something that can filter or move these.