

Ask HN: How do well funded startups fail? - my_new_account

Any examples of startups that raised hundreds of millions of dollars but folded eventually?
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_delirium
It depends to some extent on what you mean by "folded eventually"--- if they
managed an exit, but it soon became obvious that the exit was way too high and
the company crashed shortly thereafter, does it count? Or are you looking
purely for companies that raised a ton of VC and then died, leaving the VCs
holding the whole bag?

For the 2nd category, the largest I know of was kozmo.com, which burned
through about $250 million in VC dollars, in about 3 years, before going
under. Boo.com also managed to torch an impressive $150m in 2 years. Flooz and
Broadband Sports deserve honorable mention in the ~$50-60m category.

The biggest immediately-post-IPO bankruptcy that I can think of was WebVan,
which went bankrupt within six months of a $375m IPO, after having burned
through about $800m in total funding.

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instakill
Well, depending on how you look at it, Bebo was bought by AOL for $850m when
it was still in it's startup stages (fairly late stages, mind you). Recently
it was sold to Criterion Capital Partners LLC for a tiny $10m.

Sure it didn't fold, but this project was massively funded and ended up
flopping. Definite fail.

------
fragmede
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-
com_bubble#List_of_companie...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-
com_bubble#List_of_companies_significant_to_the_bubble)

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empire29
hrm - i wasn't able to find any doing a quick search on Crunchbase
(<http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/companies>)

keyword: deadpool, Funded Min Size: 100,000,000

