My startup didn't fail. But my initial projects failed. Project 1. I started a commercial version of Wikipedia back in 1990. Just the computer hardware and software section. I hated starting there. But that's what I knew. And that's the reason I started the project in the first place. It was harder to get info about computers back then. You had magazines (and user groups I guess). I wasn't sure of my computer programming skills. So I used an off the shelf database management system. Long story short. The DBMS didn't scale. It had a GUI front end. And as the project went along. Any change became exponentially longer. Small insignificant changes started taking an hour, then two, and finally 2 whole days to make a small change. (I was so mad I wrote my own DBMS. And since it didn't have all the bells and whistles, it was lightning quick. And changes were mere compiles that took 4-11 minutes.) I should have stress tested the commercial DBMS I bought, at the start. I just assumed I was paying a lot of money for it. It would work. There's much more that I don't have time for. I should have sought funding, I shouldn't have worked on my end of the project alone (I thought it would be in business's self-interest to provide content and update the info. At the start about 15% did. Which in retrospect was decent.), ... I should have started the startup earlier in life. My aging parents became my primary concern.