
Ask HN: Which YC companies failed badly? - symbolepro
There are lot of stories about success but I wanted to know about any failure stories.
======
jakozaur
I would define badly as biggest amount of capital raised and than went to zero
or acquisition less than 1/5 of capital raised. Though this may be hard to
verify as those acquisitions usually has undisclosed price.

Failing fast and cheaply (e.g. below $5 mln) is good and essential for
innovation. You can still learn a lot, test some concept and next time be more
successful.

E.g. Cost of 1000 dead YC style startups is likely still very positive, while
BetterPlace from $850mln to zero is just a drag for the economy. Most likely
those $850mln could be deployed more efficiently.

~~~
petra
IDK . There are some big things that can only be learned when you invest a lot
of money.

For example, Better place. Sure they we're wasteful.

But if they took the same idea, focused in the taxi market in a certain
city(for charger density, battery use density, and mayor support) , and maybe
worked creatively , instead of needing a new car, maybe using a pickup truck
and putting the removable batteries in the back, and deciding on a more sane
charging cost - maybe this could have worked.

But $5mln sounds low for that.

------
gordon_freeman
A few months ago when Craig posted on YC to gather some ideas about who to
invite on YC podcast and how it should be structured and I proposed to invite
founders whose companies failed along with the ones whose succeeded. Looks
like I yet have to see an episode with YC failure company on that podcast.

~~~
gt_
I’m not surprised. The tech/startup world’s relationship with processing
failure is not the passion-fueled thirst for knowledge some may think. It’s
just a type of of PR and marketing that works well with a certain crowd. It’s
implemented with all the same passive inconsistency as anything else out of
these departments.

~~~
mazeway
Or that people are just embarrassed of their failures

~~~
owens99
Not very likely. Many people are happy to share lessons learned from failure.

------
pedalpete
I don't know about the stories of failures, but you can view the list of yc
companies at [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/) it shows the status of
some companies as Dead.

~~~
Jaruzel
I don't really know much about how YC funding works, but some of the startups
listed on there are for simple things like browser extensions, which surprises
me.

~~~
ayushgp
Browser extensions can start out as very simple but quickly turn into very
complex pieces of software. Have a look at
postman([https://www.getpostman.com/](https://www.getpostman.com/)) for
example.

~~~
jonny_eh
Or [https://www.grammarly.com](https://www.grammarly.com)

------
S4M
I don't know what you mean by "badly", but Homejoy failed after raising more
than $40M.

This was largely discussed on HN:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=homejoy&sort=byPopularity&pref...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=homejoy&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

~~~
muzani
Homejoy is probably the highest profile failure they've had.

------
niko001
Not exclusive to YC companies, but check out
[https://www.failory.com](https://www.failory.com) (lessons learned interviews
with founders)

------
argonaut
What do you mean by _badly_?

I'd guess that pretty much _every_ batch has startups that implode very
quickly due to disagreements within the team. The company is dissolved and the
founders end up disliking each other. This is pretty bad but nobody has heard
of these companies and it's clear the team was just bad. A decent team is able
to persevere for some time.

The more interesting examples are companies that had traction, were growing,
raised lots of money, but some aspect of the business didn't work out or they
got beaten by competitors, and ended up shutting down. Homejoy is one example.
The problem is many other companies like this end up getting acquired for some
small amount of money instead of shutting down, making it plausible to deny
they failed badly.

------
philwelch
WakeMate:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WakeMate](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WakeMate)

------
ggg9990
Probably >50% of YC companies vanish unceremoniously.

------
ENGNR
In the spirit of celebrating failure, I'd very much like to read the stories
of what they tried that just didn't work, as hard as it might be to write for
some

------
lettergram
When I saw this question, only one _jumped_ to mind: flightcar

On the surface I understand why the idea was thought to be a good one. But
getting sued by SFO because they didn't have the proper licensing agreements
pretty much killed that company. There may have been more, but I remember that
particularly.

There was also the personal lingering questions about insurance, questionable
whether the customers would be good (one damage incident spoils the well),
etc.

~~~
raarts
I was a huge fan of flightcar. They suddenly disappeared on me. The remains (I
found it later) were bought by Mercedes. Anybody know more?

~~~
tedmiston
The idea was always pretty cool. It's not super well known but they went
through another accelerator before YC (The Brandery). The founders were really
really young, just out of high school if I recall, so some mistakes were
probably related to that. Nonetheless, what they were able to accomplish at
the time was impressive.

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/06/03/flightcar-san-
francis...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/06/03/flightcar-san-francisco-
sues-unruly-sfo-car-rental-startup-from-santa-clara/)

[https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/employees-deplane-from-
fli...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/employees-deplane-from-flightcar-as-
it-undergoes-major-restructuring/)

These days it seems like Uber and Lyft have really captured the airport
pickup/dropoff market. It looks like Turo (formerly RelayRides) is still
active in the P2P space though, and they've raised $172M.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/turo](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/turo)

~~~
raarts
Thanks for these. For posterity I'd like to add that the Series B round for
$20 million happened in sep 2015, investors were very optimistic at that time,
and in June 2016 I received notice that they were shutting down. The former
CEO/Co-founder now works for AirBnB.

------
dd36
Cinder.

