Aereo Laying Off Staff in NYC and Boston

I honestly believe that much of the depression we see in tech is caused by unrealistic expectations of success, mostly due to the breathless survivor-biased media cacophony of all these rags-to-riches, out-of-nowhere, dropped-out-of-college success stories.

Therefore, although I don't want to dance on anyone's grave, I think it's important to recognize and mourn catastrophic failures like Aereo and understand that, no, success is not as easy to come by as they'd like us to believe. If it were, you'd see repeat entrepreneurs (not named Jobs or Musk, I guess) doing it flawlessly over and over.

To that end, here is Aereo's fundraising history, to the tune of $100M.

http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/aereo

It's interesting. I'm actually not sure there is a lesson to be learned here. Aereo innovated against legal boundaries, not really technological ones, and the gavel falling on the wrong side was always a distinct possibility. Should they have not tested that boundary?