
25 Most Valuable Startups That Failed This Year - taytus
https://www.inc.com/business-insider/25-most-valuable-startups-that-failed-this-year.html
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joshstrange
Wow, what a lazy article, buzzfeed called, they want their listicles back...
For real though, we couldn't get a paragraph per company on what they do and
why they failed? I'm not asking for deep deep insights or breaking down every
mistake they made but with ZERO research let me do one for Theranos:

    
    
        Medical company that claimed they could run a number of tests with just 1 drop of blood. Turned out they lied about their abilities and really didn't create any new tech but used existing tech and due to the low sample size they had a number of false positive/negatives.
    

I think my fasts are about 90% correct but still if I can do that in a minute
with no research I think that I "journalist" can manage to do that for 25
startups.

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Fission
I think that it's particularly difficult to write about why a company failed.
Theranos is an extreme example, because the root cause of the company's
failure is pretty clear and because there's a lot of mindshare and commentary
about their issues. For many other companies, failure is a culmination of many
different issues, many of which are likely to be private. As a result, unless
someone with good internal insight into the failure of the company makes a
public post, a la Shyp founder Kevin [1], there likely isn't one comprehensive
single cause of failure, and any speculation would likely be doing a
disservice to the company.

[1] [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-
we-d...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-we-do-next-
kevin-gibbon/)

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inoiox
How did "rethink robotics" go out of business? I remember seen their robot in
documentaries about the future of robotics in manufacturing and seen their
robots in different tech conferences.

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ferongr
Probably because their product was toy-grade, slow and with inaccurate
movements, not meeting the demands for the industry. It did look photogenic
though.

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jamestimmins
1\. A large number of these companies were hardware or healthcare related
(some were both); presumably these would be harder to validate without
significant upfront costs, increasing risk relative to price.

2\. You can remove the autoplay video by selecting the element in dev tools
and deleting the div.

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SethTro
A couple of these had smaller max valuations than amount raised this seems
independent of year founded.

What's the explanation? Several funding rounds with high burn rate? ...

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Fission
Startup equity rounds are typically disclosed publicly, but the valuations
might not be (for a variety of reasons, one of which is that valuations can be
used as a proxy for the health of the company, which the company may want to
keep private). Pitchbook likely only uses publicly known/verified valuations,
which may not reflect the actual valuation at the latest round of fundraising.

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candiodari
Rethink robotics ... _snif_

You will be missed.

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ohiovr
Should read worthless startups.

