The Startup Graveyard

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Evernote is dead?

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

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

RIP Theranos

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

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

I miss fuckedcompany.com