Failed Startup Post-Mortems
3things.gitbooks.io
3things.gitbooks.io
http://amazon.com/FD-Companies-Spectacular-Dot-com-Flameouts...
I think many of them could be successful if relaunched today.
It would be great to bolster that case with success stories of repeat-entrants into the race.
Also won't bring it back because of onwards and upwards.. and so on.
Thanks for asking though :) Still makes me happy when people tell me they like my work.
So I agree fully with not bringing it back but if we ever get into another out-of-control over-hyped dumb money situation then I really hope that you or someone like you will do a re-run of fuckedcompany.com.
https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/
Perhaps more useful, we also sifted through and analyzed each post-mortem to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. The biggest reasons founders have cited has not been running out of money or the economy but building a solution looking for a problem.
"But you must provide an email to get access to that."
6 alpha chars @ gmail.com, on Firefox and Chrome on OS X 10.9.5. Really should work; doesn't. Console shows that you're passing an empty string to getElementById at some point.
Note: I didn't downvote you.
Also, the "I'm not profiting, looking to profit from these collected works" disclaimer is almost as bad as "no copyright infringement intended" on YouTube videos. Regardless of your profit, it is still copyright infringement to copy people's content without their consent.
It's especially egregious that the original source is only listed at the end of articles, where there's no reason to bother clicking through (since you've already read it). Plus, in many cases the original sources had relevant and interesting images which are omitted here.
And if so, did you leave out stories that may be of interest? Then I'd suggest you link those on a separate list.
And if you did not obtain permission then you probably should!
It would be even better if authors who are going to say yes to a request like that would make it clear, by using a Creative Commons license in the first place.
Interviews are a totally different situation and 'on the record' quotes out of context are the very reason I avoid interviews like the plague. I've yet to have one where that didn't happen, journalists are also called 'reporters' but from my experience 'reporting' to them does not mean reporting what was told to them but retelling in a way that suits their own agenda.
I've seen arguments that there are too many facts to be told, so it is the very job of a journalist to take those facts and tell a story by selectively highlighting ones that matter in that story.
I disagree with the premise. I think we (the audience) could handle all the facts if they were given to us straight. The narrative journalists are creating is not helpful, is actively harmful - because it's always someone's agenda and because they twist the facts too much (i.e. they lie through their teeth) to tell that story.
INB4 I get accused of generalizing, I'm invoking Sturgeon's law twice - once on journalists and once on critical thinking of general population, all that while giving a friendly reminder that this "general population" is the majority of the electorate. Sometimes all that crap tends to reinforce instead of cancelling out.
One distinction - we didn't republish your post. We linked out to the original post you'd written and quoted a few lines from it which we thought were particularly telling about the reasons behind & process of shutting down.
That was the format we took throughout the post. Original link and a few line excerpt.
Hope that makes sense.
http://3things.gitbooks.io/77-failed-startup-post-mortems/wi...
And compare that with the linked article:
http://blog.wishberg.com/post/92014031388/the-final-note-tha...
It looks as if the whole post was copied without any commentary at all.
The diffle one is exactly like that, not quite a 'few sentences'.
We're not affiliated with the book.
http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/2008/06/postmortem.html
I wrote the aftermath because I felt that there were a few other things that should be said with the benefit of hindsight, and I'm actually thinking of writing a second aftermath, 6 years later, but want to see how events unfold first. Most of the actual lessons are in the postmortem.
(I'm not miffed - I think one of the great strengths of the web is the ease of linking to and republishing content. But I do think it's worth pointing out that one of the pitfalls of aggregators is that you lose the original context of the post - in my case, there was a whole blog that tracked the startup journey, day by day, and not just a single post.)
Thanks for posting them here. This is great HN content.
"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn't know the first thing about starting a business. When I asked a successful classmate how to invoice a customer, he suggested I go to one of the large business-supply warehouses. "They sell 'Business in a Box,' " he told me. "It's got everything you need." I didn't realize he was joking until I asked a clerk for one at Office Depot."
Does anyone have link to cached version ?
Author copied everybody's content verbatim without obtaining permission first, what you are saying is simply not true.
I think this is a very worthwhile project but that doesn't mean the author should trample over other people's rights.
So no, your 'logic' does not hold up for google because they LINK to the content rather than that they copy it and display it in their own environment (incidentally, google images does do that and I think they ought to be slapped for that).
(converted from the epub)
It's a hard thing to talk about the failure of your baby.
(including Kindle & PDF)