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Comment by pud | Hacker News Reader

Here's a book I wrote that covers 150 failed internet startups from the late 90's.

http://amazon.com/FD-Companies-Spectacular-Dot-com-Flameouts...

I think many of them could be successful if relaunched today.

The 'timing' thing is a huge factor in start-up failure. Plenty of things that went bad in the past could very well succeed today. The problem is to overcome the resistance that says 'it didn't work before, why should it work now' and then to repeat that process externally with every other party you interact with other than the customers.

It would be great to bolster that case with success stories of repeat-entrants into the race.

Pud - bring back FuckedCompany. Based on all of our data, it's about that time.

Please don't. Lots of horrible things were said there behind a wall of anonymity. Think Secret + 4chan for failed startups. For those of us that tried to do the right thing by our employees, it was very hurtful.

The commentors on fuckedcompany were the kind of people that like to rubberneck around accidents and disasters. Some people get off on other people's misery. That doesn't mean that the site itself served a purpose, and a FC sans comments would already be plenty useful.

People ask me all the time to bring it back. Was fun when it was happening and I tried to be funny and good-spirited, but now I have more of an appreciation for entrepreneurs and how hard it is to build a business... so I won't bring it back.

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.

Fuckedcompany served an important role as a reality check on some of the more idiotic aspects of the bubble. As an entrepreneur who was active at that very time I really want to thank you for providing a bit of a backdrop against which my strategy made some sense. I realized early on that 'go big or go home' would probably translate into 'go bust or go home' and I felt that the huge number of businesses that ended up in the 'go bust' bin versus the ones that made it turned the whole art of running a business more into something resembling a lottery.

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.

I want to shake your hand and buy you a drink. Long live FC.

I worked for Efront back in the 90's. You covered them on your site pretty well. I am trying to forget that memory.

Thanks for the link. I just bought your book from Amazon. Paper version.

Flake.com even? Loved fuckedcompany, man.

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