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Oh wow, another startup has to lay people off. Why should we care every time a volatile organization realizes that they're not making money and can't afford to pay people? Isn't that the nature of working at startups?

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These guys wasted a lot of money that could have been used to fund 100s of other companies. This should make the headlines as a case study, what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. When a high profile well-funded startup goes south, there is a lesson to be learned for many people.

It would probably take over $100m to fund "100s of other companies".

The company is not going south. It brought in top-tier talent (Barry McCarthy ex-Netflix, namely) who reasonably concluded the company wasn't structured properly from a personnel standpoint. This doesn't appear to be another Color considering the company has plenty of cash, some quality executives and a functional product in a huge, well-known category (payments).

Perhaps he was talking about examples like YC funding "100s of companies" (500? 600?) with less than half of what Clinkle has raised.

Then that's a total mis-understanding of what YC is and how it compares to venture capital. And no one has really come very close to replicating YC despite quite a few attempts.

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