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This is mostly right. DrawQuest would make a fine lifestyle business for a few partners, but is unlikely to become a business that represents a venture-backed opportunity. However because we built it as a venture-backed business, that's the bar we're held to.

Per my post, I'm exploring options for keeping the service alive for the next few months (and hopefully longer), and am cautiously optimistic we'll be able to figure something out.

If it could be run as a lifestyle business by a few partners and be profitable, why not do that?

I suspect the terms of their funding and human nature have something to do with it.

If the business shuts down everyone (founders and investors) loses.

If they now run it as a lifestyle business the founders win but the investors lose.

If I was an investor in that second case I would be deeply suspicious and possibly angry.

Could you elaborate on how the investors would lose if they run it as a lifestyle business? Would they make more money back by liquidating their assets?

I think they "lose" in that they'll be angry to see someone still making a living on the idea while they saw no returns. Or maybe they can't break free, and keeping it running would still mean just giving the profits to the investors for the next 100 years and it's easier to just close it all together?

Even making a 2x or 3x return is a failure for a VC and not seen as worth their time.

I don't think that's the right way to look at it. The VC money you spent is a sunk cost; it's part of the past and the only question is how to make the most of its assets. That VCs are no longer interested in the business makes sense, but it doesn't follow that it needs to be shut down, eliminating its remaining value. They could write it down as a loss, stop thinking about it, and let the founders run it at zero cost to themselves. So I don't the bar you're being held to is a real thing.

What I do think is real is that a bunch of equity is missing, and for the company's cashflow, that might make it non-viable. You may have also built in a way that makes its operating costs too high to turn it into a lifestyle business. Or perhaps you just don't want a lifestyle business. All of those (and others I haven't even thought of, I'm sure) are great reasons to call it quits. I'm just objecting to the "bar" part of it.

As I said, we're considering our options going forward, but for all intents and purposes, the venture-backed startup that was Canvas Networks has failed.

Seems like you have to be really careful with VC as it can reframe a success into a huge failure.

But if you are making less than pennies on the dollar, was it ever a success anyway? Having users and traction is not success. Plenty of companies get both users and traction, all they have to do is tolerate negative profits...

shrug It seems to work for Amazon. All you need is patient investors.

Amazon is somewhat of a different story; Amazon is enduring small profits by choice in a bid for the future, and investors feel like they see that future, that tremendous potential.

The way they are playing it, IMO Amazon is still neither a success nor a failure. Their story is still being written, as they position themselves for whatever move they have been preparing for the last decade.

Discussing Amazon's business model is always an interesting topic. The first time I heard about that Amazon made no profit was from the news telling that they had to increase the free shipping criteria to be $35 instead of $25. Basically, they cannot afford to keep the $25 promise, which may lose some customers foreseeably.

Of course, Amazon does a lot of good and successful things, such as running such a huge ecommerce website to fulfill and meet so many customers needs, helping online business to sell, keeping their executives rich and making their employees job secure, including the stock holders happy, etc. And they are also investing into the technology side of the business and expanding into the cloud technology in early years. But how successful is it for AWS?

All of these cannot avoid an issue that their business model was going a wrong direction for many years to reach today's stage and further. So the article below shows that they are going to change their direction and stopping the effort to replace or shorten the supply chain by offering all kinds of services which exhaust their resources and lose focusing:

Amazon’s Future Is Not in Selling Stuff — And That’s a Good Thing

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/amazons-future-not-sel...

I'm not sure it's that useful to compare a <10 person startup to the world's largest online retailer, with revenue increasing by leaps and bounds every quarter, a quarter-billion active customers, and approaching $100 billion a year in net annual sales.

Bezos is choosing to reinvest $$$ in business rather than report it as profits. So far it's been a very wise choice.

Back on the topic at hand, I should add that it's sad to see this happen to DrawQuest, and it's very decent of Chris to post this for us to read.

I'm guessing the OP is talking about the PAST of Amazon, not the present. They ran for many years at a huge loss in order to capture the online retailing market, and didn't provide any returns for many, many years. Arguably, it worked.

Yeah, its a bummer because my 9 y/o daughter really loves DrawQuest.

It would be nice if some other mobile/gaming company bought the assets and kept it alive.