The 20 Worst Venture Capital Investments of All Time | Hacker News Reader

The 20 Worst Venture Capital Investments of All Time

insidecrm.com

14 pointschengmi8 comments

All of these are just from the late '90s and after. What about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_sea_bubble

Notice how many of these were in the last bubble. Notice how much VC money these people burned through. These companies even got private people--Whoopi Goldberg--and corporations like Coca Cola to invest millions in these startups.

I'd bet you could add up all of the VC money given to web 2.0 startups for the last 4-5 years, and it wouldn't add up to the money given to cue-cat + Kozmo + Webvan. ($1.23 billion)

You've got to be kidding me! We could start 1000 startups for that kind of money and have plenty left over to buy a small carribean island to move to and run our startups from while drinking fruity drinks and getting massages.

I just don't get the hoopla of bubble 2.0. Nothing to see folks, just keep moving along and keep working on your startups.

Um, did you miss the whole Microsoft giving piles of cash to Facebook?

Facebook has 50 million active users, is the 7th largest website online according to Alexa, and is growing rapidly.

Many of these startups failed to even launch, and the ones that did never got traction or had completely unsustainable business models.

And besides, the Facebook deal was "only" 200 million dollars. If Facebook tanks tomorrow, that is a small loss for a large business event. As others have pointed out, the numbers today are small by 1999-standards.

I recently read some parts of the FuckedCompany book, which has most of these, as well as many many more amazing bubble flameouts. It's not very well written but a quick and fun read.

How depressing that webvan.com is owned by a vanilla domain parker.

It's actually not that bad of an idea--selling groceries to UMC city people. They just executed badly.

Pets.com:

Once backed with $50 million by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Bowman Capital, and Amazon.com Inc.

Can I get $50k from one of those?

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