
Autopsy: Lessons from Failed Startups - tilt
http://autopsy.io/
======
karmacondon
Startup success is mostly random. I'm reminded of a quote from SMBC [1] that
I've always liked:

"Doubt kills more dreams than failure...but Random Chance is like, Grim Reaper
for dreams."

Success in startups (and life in general) is not the linear function that most
of us want it to be. It isn't related in direct proportion to the amount of
effort, intelligence, work, time, love, energy, etc that's invested. It's more
of a logarithmic function. There is a minimum amount of effort and those other
things that must be put in to have any chance of success. But after that the
returns diminish rapidly. It's comforting to think that if we just try harder
or smarter we can triumph in the end. But the fickle winds of fate have the
ultimate say, and any sense of control is probably an illusion.

Saying that a company failed due to lack of product-market fit is like saying
that a sports team lost due to not scoring enough points. It's always a true
statement, but it doesn't illuminate the cause of the failure in a way that
would be instructive to others. Most startups that were successful enough to
be included on this list probably did 80% of things "right". Some times "it
just didn't work out" is all that you'll be able to say.

Despite all that, I think there is a lot of value in these autopsies. Being
able to learn something, anything, from the experience of others is very
valuable. Knowing more about what causes failure won't guarantee success, but
it sure as hell beats knowing nothing.

[1] [http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3506](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3506)

~~~
jv22222
One thought on this...

If startup success is mostly random then how can someone like Elon Musk create
startup-after-startup shooting for a goal against-all-odds, but always come
out on top?

Does he define the "mostly" in the argument?

~~~
nickbauman
A lot of what Musk is doing now is deeply dependent on government support. And
if you look at all the tech giants you'll see a kernel of government subsidy
from the outset. Oracle. Sun. Google. Many others got their start with a
government "in". It's the open secret of capitalism: states create markets.
Markets require states.

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/tesla-motors-
fre...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/tesla-motors-free-ride-
elon-musk-government-subsidies)

~~~
nunyabuizness
This is almost a non-sensical statement as the state injects itself into every
market and is by definition unavoidable. You could argue that the state
subsidized Uber by handing a monopoly to the taxi industry, who's complacency
created an opportunity for improvement. Doesn't mean government support is by
any means required or necessary.

~~~
nickbauman
States are required in markets (as we understand them) _fundamentally_ for
protection over the transaction. History shows if you remove the state you end
up with inter tribal economies where arbitrary homicide is a "valid" outcome
of exchange (organized crime is a good predictor here). Not sure what you're
advocating exactly though, so you could be right on different terms.

------
achow
The human angle behind these stories transcends way beyond the business one.
Its uncanny how these two founders articulated about the pain in almost the
same way as each other:

99Dresses - Nikki Durkin:

 _Many startup folk say that failure should be celebrated. “Fail fast, fail
early, fail often!” they all chant, trying to put a positive spin on the most
excruciating pain any founder could experience..Let me tell you — failure
fucking sucks..I travelled to my parent’s place in the countryside of
Australia, locked myself away in my room and cried for what seemed like an
entire week._

Critica - Jason Huertas:

 _You’ll hear the phrase “Fail fast” or “It’s good to fail”. Which is true.
You can’t learn without failing. But what they don’t tell you is just how
utterly devastating failure actually is for an entrepreneur. To sacrifice your
personal relationships, finances, and health to the dream, and to still come
up short. How could this happen to me? It was a very frustrating and dark
place to be in._

The case of 99Dresses was an eye opener. I would beg to differ with the
general sentiment in the comment section here about how co-founders lacked
sense of product market fit etc.

Nikki Durkin had oodles of determination, immense grit, was a YCombinator
alumni, had great product-market fit, managed decent seed funding, had good
traction which many startup can only aspire to in the initial days, a team who
were behind her most of the time, still..

All things being equal (actually the case showed even if they are not) fate,
right-time-right-place is a factor which nobody can control, and which has
decisive play in the scheme of things.

I can only wish good luck to Nikki Durkin, and I’m 100% sure that she would
come out with something amazing in future.

~~~
alaskamiller
Two things:

1) Learn to live with failure. Most of these folks sound pretty privileged, as
if they never got smacked in the face with reality or had to deal with
failure. Sometimes that's what happens when one is a young superstar, the odds
were in their favor until it wasn't. The rest of us just learned to deal with
disappointment and overcoming.

2) The real secret about success is that it's random. It's not even about luck
or hard work, success is simply random. Luck is just a lottery scratcher and
hard work lets you get more tickets to scratch but hard work, product fit,
traction blah blah don't guarantee success. Because again, success is random.
Thinking otherwise will drive you crazy trying to analyze why bad things
happen to good people and good things happens to bad people. Determination is
the only trait that finds success, because you just keep trying until you die.
Which then calls back to my first point: learn to live with failure. It's good
for you. Each subsequent time you need to cry less.

~~~
kenjackson
_Learn to live with failure. Most of these folks sound pretty privileged, as
if they never got smacked in the face with reality or had to deal with
failure. Sometimes that 's what happens when one is a young superstar, the
odds were in their favor until it wasn't._

I disagree. Never learn to live with failure. Failure should be painful, and
should be proportional to what you put into trying to succeed. Doing a startup
should be toward the top of the list of things you should feel really bad
about failing at (after failing as a parent, spouse, child). You should pour
everything you have into the startup. If you do anything less then you
probably deserve to fail (although you may still succeed).

If you can do a startup, fail, and then say, "no biggie, on to the next", then
you're probably not someone that I would bet on.

That said, after a week of crying (and probably months prior to that of
anxiety), you should be able to bounce back. Incorporate all that you learned
into your next try.

~~~
alaskamiller
Using pain as a motivation is what a monk does behind closed doors whipping
himself to get to god. I offer satisfaction as the better non-masochistic
alternative.

And in your scenario only a child plays that game. Because they don't know any
better and at that stage it's entirely based only randomness. Today's Disney
super star is tomorrow's old news.

There's also some kind of weird perversion of only wanting to place bets on
those so intense that they tilt to suicide from the anxiety and shame.

Adults know better and as it turns out after adulting for awhile and living in
reality only then does entrepreneurship really take shape.

~~~
kenjackson
It's not based on randomness. You can't field a random group of 12 men and win
the NBA Championship or 53 for the Super Bowl. As composed as Russell Wilson
was, he didn't immediately forget about the game.

That's the difference between those that make it and those that don't.

I'd be curious if there are virtually any successful founders (Steve Jobs,
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jerry Yang, etc) who would
have been completely indifferent if they failed. I suspect that is not highly
correlated with those that succeed.

And I think Floyd Mayweather would offer that failure is bad for you. You can
learn as many lessons from winning/succeeding as losing/failing. Or as an ex-
coach used to say, "losing teaches a lot of lessons -- most importantly, that
you need to figure out how to win"

~~~
majormajor
Business success is nothing like winning a sporting championship. Sports are
specifically constructed to let talent and skill shine through and impress the
audience. Business is practically the opposite of that.

You don't know all the skills you need in advance.

You don't have thousands of hours of live and taped competition directly
between the best in the world to study.

Progress towards those skills and a championship/success isn't directly
measurable.

The ground may shift out from under you overnight (few pro sports rule changes
have caused players or teams to go bust or lose all hope of winning... compare
that to any widely-felt economic event).

The environment facing an entrepreneur is far, far more chaotic, which is why
a first-time founder without deep personal reserves is going to be far more at
the mercy of luck than Lebron James or Russell Wilson.

(And even then, there are fierce debates over the role of luck when it comes
to individual's career accomplishments. Drop Lebron onto MJ's Bulls, and how
many titles does he win? Drop MJ onto the mid-2000's Cavs, and how many does
he win?)

(Edit for fixing inconsistency between which directions I was making the
comparison in.)

~~~
JackFr
While I understand your point that business is fraught with unknowns, and
sports is a regimented as it may be I wouldn't say the Duke of Wellington was
all wrong about the playing fields of Eton. We watch professional sports as
entertainment. We embrace and participate in competitive sports at all levels
because they act as a microcosm of the real world, an artificial conflict in
which we practice our virtues.

------
feedjoelpie
Can we vote on which ones accurately assess their failings and which ones
still harbor serious delusions about them?

~~~
feedjoelpie
I am 100% serious, by the way. People have the most ridiculous ideas about why
things failed and how it will totally work next time. If they just follow
these ego-comforting steps that don't even begin to address the problem.

My top at-a-glance eye-roller says _" technical co-founder quit & pulled the
code out from under me"_.

So completely neglectful of basic business structuring that the tech co-
founder could just walk away with the code, to which you don't have copyright
claim? If a non-technical co-founder can't even bring responsible management
to the table, why are they at the table?

Article goes on to suggest that if the non-technical co-founder had learned to
code so as to not feel so helpless, things would have gone better. Just wow.

~~~
nostrademons
At a startup (before traction, employees, etc.), you are pretty much doomed if
your technical cofounder quits even if you've structured the company with
vesting, ownership of IP, etc. All the domain knowledge, architectural
knowledge, etc. goes out the window when the person who wrote all the code
leaves. It's very hard to drop someone else into an unfamiliar codebase and
have them pick up where the original person left off, and you probably
would've made many different decisions (about product, platform, languages,
architecture) with a different team.

The real fail there is poor relationship management. _Why_ did the cofounder
quit? What was running through their head? Did they not really want to commit
to a startup in the first place, in which case the business founder should've
vetted them more thoroughly before starting the company? Or did they lose
trust in the business founder's leadership, market knowledge, and integrity?
Were their incentives never aligned to begin with?

~~~
hinkley
Maybe the tech cofounder quit because you're a clueless asshole? Blaming your
failure on the guy you drove away, I think that's what he's complaining about
as delusional.

------
jdimov9
Looking through the list, it seems to me like a good 90% of these (if not
more) can be summarised as "lack of product-market fit", meaning that they
blew their money on building something that nobody wants.

Anyone notice anything else standing out?

~~~
imaginenore
I see a few "we weren't in love with the idea or market", which I feel is
bullshit.

You can hate lemonade, but can still make money selling it.

~~~
paulhauggis
I've seen this all too often with co-founders I've had in the past (which
didn't work out). They first love the idea and work on it with lots of
passion.

As soon as they need to do the boring work (IE: 90% of the hard work involved
in any business), interest is lost and they want to quit.

I call these people employees because they aren't willing to do what it takes
to build and maintain a business.

~~~
misterbee
they are researchers, not employees. Employees are the people you need to do
drudge work in a professional manner.

------
brandonb
It's interesting that so many startups listed lack of product-market fit as
the reason for failure, even though another startup with an adjacent idea has
been able to get traction.

For example, the first was a "same day ingredient delivery service" that
"simply didn't have legs", but both Blue Apron and Instacart could be
considered same-day ingredient delivery and both are growing fast.

I wonder if we can "unpack" product-market fit into a checklist of smaller
goals?

~~~
nostrademons
"Fit" is a checklist of subtle details and features that together make up the
product. I like to think of it as "When the sum total of nice touches and
problems solved that make you love the product is greater than the sum total
of annoyances, missing features, and usability snafus that make you fear and
loathe the product." Most of these are invisible to someone reading a
1-sentence summary, but you very much notice them as a user.

That's why MP3 players and smart phones failed to get widespread consumer
adoption before Apple, why Instagram succeeded where Picwing failed, why
Facebook has taken over the world while Xanga is relegated to the dustbin of
history, and why Google makes billions while Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista, etc.
failed. Same product category, but the product itself was much better.

~~~
misterbee
That's product quality, not market fit. Market fit is reaching the people who
would buy your product, and meeting their needs, before you are famous enough
for them to find you.

------
codeshaman
Two days ago I've met this friend of mine, who's been working on a project for
the last 1.5 years. He's been living off savings and he's got a couple of
months of money left. The project is not ready yet and even if it were there's
the huge question of how it can ever make money, being open source and all.
He's been working day and night and he's so obsessed with it and the myriad of
complicated technical issues that plague the project. He will not take a
weekend off. He doesn't want to rest because he has a lot of work to do.

From the looks of it, he'll not make it, but how can I possibly tell him that
? How can I possibly take his dreams and hopes and break them into pieces and
hope to still be a friend after that.

Sometimes failure is unavoidable, no matter how much people will warn you
about it. Failure is something so personal and private that the only way to
understand it is to live through it.

~~~
akbar501
> From the looks of it, he'll not make it, but how can I possibly tell him
> that ?

Don't tell him. Ask questions that get him to think.

~~~
mandeepj
> Don't tell him. Ask questions that get him to think.

That is also not easy. Poster's friend might get annoyed\offended when he will
not have answers

------
njp89
Hey HN!

@NiralSJP here—one half of the team that put this together.

Glad you're finding it useful and we appreciate the comments and suggestions

~~~
pbiggar
Thanks for doing this!! (I'm one of the folks mentioned).

Something I've noticed when discussing failure is there's a class of people
who are real assholes about other people's failures (focusing on blame, using
very negative phrases, trying to second guess founders for who knows what
reason, etc). I notice some comments in this thread are along those lines.

I'd love it if you kept that in mind as you build this, esp since some of the
comments/suggestions in this thread are quite, em, unpleasant.

~~~
ValG
This will always be the case, even here on HN, the vast majority of
users/commenters haven't been through a start-up, especially not as a founder.
Gotta just ignore it and move on. Having been through it 3 times now (2x as a
founder, 1x as first employee) I can read some of these critiques and see how
maddeningly simplistic they are.

That's not to say a founder has too much more insight into the specifics of
what you faced. Without being in the thick of it, it's almost impossible to
really see what happened.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth - Mike Tyson

~~~
pbiggar
Oh I agree. I endured and ignored a ton of assholes' simplistic reductions
about my business, motivation, work ethic, etc, when we shut down. I agree.

But, as a community, we should try to builds things that don't encourage this
sort of shit. If you want to promote learning from failure, it's in your best
interest to make sure that you don't accidentally dissuade people from writing
about it.

------
mellavora
What a great database! I keep a "worry" list, things I check often, and this
will certainly go on it.

Reminds me of one of the best books I ever read on SCUBA theory: a case by
case description of some 30 odd fatal incidents.

Knowing what goes wrong is helpful

~~~
tjradcliffe
There is a somewhat dated but still useful book by Stephen Flowers called
"Software Failure: Management Failure" that does a nice job of post-mortems
for failed large-scale development projects you might find interesting.

------
vincele
I whish there was a column "successful startup with similar idea". Then we
could have a better understanding of the quality of realization.

------
pdevr
Partially related: Third party analyses of failures. [1] and [2] analyze
Webvan's failure 14 years back.

It is fascinating to read it now and see how much of it they got right (and
see how much was wrong, with the benefit of hindsight).

[1] Why E-commerce Didn’t Die With the Fall of Webvan
[http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/2496.html](http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/2496.html)

[2] What Webvan Could Have Learned from Tesco
[http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-webvan-
could...](http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-webvan-could-have-
learned-from-tesco/)

------
AndrewKemendo
Absolutely invaluable. So how do we get more unsuccessful founders to add to
this?

~~~
feedjoelpie
Easy. Just build more unsuccessful businesses.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Wouldn't they be successful in their failure if the goal was to give this list
more data?

------
tjradcliffe
This one contains some solid insights, mostly about doing a better job of
proving demand: [https://medium.com/@michalbohanes/seven-lessons-i-learned-
fr...](https://medium.com/@michalbohanes/seven-lessons-i-learned-from-the-
failure-of-my-first-startup-dinnr-c166d1cfb8b8)

But...

There is no business idea I cannot kill using a sufficiently cold and
objective evaluation. I can show the demand is not there, that it doesn't
solve a customer pain-point, that the price is too high, that the model won't
work in this market, that the technology won't scale...

At the end of WWII Vannevar Bush, the head of the American military rocketry
program, said that human beings would never go to the Moon because you'd have
to take a rocket the size of a battleship, stand it up on end, and launch it
into space, and this was obviously impossible.

Prediction is hard, especially about the future. Entreprenuership is
fundamentally about courage, because you've got to jump off that ledge knowing
the odds are you'll fail. If you dig too deeply or look too closely at the
problem you may never start, because the risk is always going to be
unacceptably high to any sane person.

So it's important for entrepreneurs to balance their optimism against reality,
rather than just giving in to realism and sticking with the day job.

~~~
intrasight
Vannevar Bush foresaw many things correctly. But the rocket thing... It was
only a few years later that we were lobbing those vertical battleships into
space.

------
praveenster
It might be valuable to add the ability to have discussions for each of the
entries on autopsy.io, allowing people to analyze it further and include the
founders in the discussion. From this it might be possible to combine the
analysis of a couple of the autopsies and launch a new idea.

------
jasim
Betting so much of one's soul into a consumer play is a risky decision. The
pay-outs are huge, but the odds are enormous, as bad as a lottery. Consumers
decide to use a product based on intangibles; brand recognition, emotions,
entertainment. These are fleeting, like fashion, and for an entrepreneur, hard
to pin down what works and doesn't. There is no repeatable model for us to
experiment and learn from.

Businesses on the other hand are considerably more rational. B2B decisions are
made based on value. Even when a deal doesn't go through, you get tangible
data to see why. But make yet another photo-sharing app and no one uses it?
That's a lot more harder.

------
c17r
Awesome list to look through! I remember a few of these postmortems when they
first posted, like the Wesabe one.

It'd be great if the table had start/close dates, or "months alive", or
something.

~~~
usmeteora
yes some more data based analytics on metrics you could calibrate on such as
months alive, rounds of funding, profit margins, basically any type of
portfolio you would present to an investor for value assessment.

------
sxates
The thing I noticed many of these startups had in common: Awful names.

~~~
misterbee
Google's original name was "BackRub". Facebook was "TheFaceBook". They changed
the name when it mattered.

------
shawnee_
It may be interesting and important to note that some of the "failures" on
this list may have simply been before their time. I see a few going back to
~2006 that might actually have a decent chance today if given another go.

Sometimes the fine line between failure:success hinges on nothing more than
timing itself. The optimal time to enter a market is a variable that should be
weighted almost as heavily as cash to burn.

------
kzhahou
There's selection bias at play here, but anyone else notice that 99% of these
are consumer plays? There's mostly photos/food/social/video/community/jobs
ideas. In consumer plays, there's a lot of luck involved, since the company is
essentially guessing whether the problem itself is significant, let alone
their particular solution.

~~~
tjradcliffe
There's a lot of luck in everything. I've been involved in startups in remote
sensing, computer-assisted surgery, medical imaging, and other areas, and
while there were various reasons for the failures luck loomed large in all of
them.

The medical imaging play got scooped by a patent issued to another research
team a month before our patent application was ready to go (this was before
applications were published.) That was pure bad luck. We were a small team who
weren't publishing our work while it was in development, they were a small
team who weren't publishing their work while it was in development. They
started a few months before us, or long after us but had more resources, or
long before us but worked more slowly, or didn't go down the same blind alley
we did part way through. I defy anyone _using the information available at the
time_ to pick out a better set of choices than we made without flipping a
coin.

The key to understanding the role of luck is to realize how scarce information
is when you are building something new. You don't know how big the market is.
You don't know what customers are willing to pay. You don't know what the
"killer application" will be. One company I worked with thought they were
aiming for selling a service to the bottled water sector. They ended up
selling it to the sewage treatment sector.

I also know people who were one decision away from success: if they had taken
deal X or added feature Y they almost certainly (in hindsight) gotten rich.
Given the information at the time, they made the best choice they could. That
it happened to be the wrong choice was luck, and nothing else. These are
people who had built successful companies during the dot-com era, mostly. If
they had exited at the right time they'd be hailed as geniuses today.

------
drallison
Most of these "startups" are boring; they are not STARTUPS, they are small
businesses doing what others are doing (or have done).

They seem to lack the OMG spark of insight into how technology can be used to
do something exciting. IMHO, a web site or an App (is there really much
difference) is not a STARTUP--but it can be a business that generates income.

------
tathagatadg
This is a really great effort. It feels like a nice addendum to Sam Altman's
class
([http://startupclass.samaltman.com/](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/)) -
take that knowledge and use it to come up with what would you have done
differently.

------
heyalexej
This is a great idea. I wonder if you thought about implementing some sort of
comment/discussion section, maybe with a voting system. That way people could
express their opinions and maybe even give valuable advice as to how they'd
deal with certain aspects of these failures.

------
bau5
It would be neat to see some lessons from companies that still exist, but have
major plans that failed, like 42floors.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9140768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9140768)

------
Goladus
Thought this one was a neat idea: Critica:
[https://medium.com/@jasonhuertas/my-startup-
failed-6c54bd68c...](https://medium.com/@jasonhuertas/my-startup-
failed-6c54bd68c654)

------
rdlecler1
RE: Elon Musk -- I see a lot on luck in the comments, and agree with most.
Another aspect of luck is timing. If Musk graduated in 2002 would he have been
able to start a successful company, or would capital not have been there?

------
davidu
Would be great to also add a column for "date of death" as timing is often a
major component related to failure.

While on the subject of timing, I'd add a column for years in business, but
that might be getting too cluttered.

~~~
njp89
Cheers, we're going to add "Date of Autopsy".

------
bbody
I tried something similar with My Startup Fail
([http://www.mystartup.fail/](http://www.mystartup.fail/)), but definitely
like Autopsy's approach better.

~~~
alxndr
How meta! Is there anything you wish you'd done with My Startup Fail?

------
usmeteora
I agree with feedjoelpie. One criticism I have here is that there is a lack of
comprehensive data analytics from their actual portfolios before they cut the
chord, and that it relies on self reported data from the founders, which is
bound to be bias to some degree. Some of these failed that are exact clones of
companies that were the exact same idea but implemented more quickly and ended
up and still are very successful, and in those particular ideas, the autopsy
of the failed companies never seems to want to admit their idea was just not
that original, or not implemented as well.

Examples that stand out to me just from knowing really successful competitors
of the same idea:

Bombfell Manilla Dnnr bloom.fm solorix

Overall, I value their feedback (and I am glad to see it compiled as opposed
to every failed company posting on here as if they have some diamond in the
ruff wisdom on why they failed) but I would prefer some more data based
trends.

Overall interesting idea to start pulling more calibrated analytics from. I
was also thinking someone should do the same thing for lessons learned from
how VCs and Angel Investors screw over companies.

It's actually going to take some time for me to find something on this list
that doesn't reek of knocking off popularized trending app ideas.

I happened to see 99 Dresses on this list, whom I saw on Shark Tank somehow
(the one time I watched the show). I'm a girl and for me personally I don't
really give about the idea of weddings and think its nonsense, and think it's
a waste of money, but I thought it was a pretty cool idea that basically you
could rent a wedding dress, and that sounded unique to me and a good niche of
rent the runway, though I doubt I'll ever invest in a wedding dress myself in
any capacity. Point is weddings are a billion dollar a yr industry and wedding
dresses are sometimes the most expensive part aside from venue and catering.
As culture becomes less traditional, it's less likely women will view their
dresses as a long term investment their posterity will wear.

Additionally, I think I know of plenty of girls who would rather rent a
designer wedding dress they could never afford outright (especially if their
posterity is not going to wear it as culture is these days) than settle for
something they like alot less because that is all they could afford to buy,
that will sit in a closet. Additionally, now that we have facebook and social
media, girls do not need to buy the dress (despite posterity) so it can
collect dust in their closet for the sake of nostalgia. Now we have social
media to document not only the dress but how the woman looked in the dress.
Therefore, providing the capability to rent one of the most expensive clothing
items the average woman will ever invest in, seemed like a pretty solid idea,
and at least there was something a little unique about it. However, I have no
idea how well she implemented the idea nor did I follow the company after the
pitch.

Other than that one company, I didn't see anything I have not heard of
realistically, atleast 5 times before.

------
kisna72
Findory's link links to Findery. They are two different companies that do the
same thing. I find it interesting that the names are so much alike. I wonder
if there is a connection.

------
ericjang
There's often considerable link rot associated with these sites, so it'd be a
good idea to save autopsies as well, not just link to them.

------
xtat
I wonder how many of these are actually related to interpersonal issues,
mismanagement, or co-founder turmoil. Nobody talks about it.

------
codeshaman
This is a good* resource. We should have more of these. I wouldn't mind having
an app with a stream of these which pop-up notification on my desktop:
notification of failed dreams.

Because they are many - a lot more than in that list. And there will be a lot
more of them in the future.

For every startup success story, there are about 9 silent tales of shattered
hopes, financial ruin, depression and even suicides.

Success stories are so shiny an bright, that all the smart 20-somethings are
blinded by them - and why not - who doesn't want to be a billionaire ?

The theme is always the same.

A really cool idea - which will totally transform, disrupt, reinvent and
reimagine the world and will forever change it for the better.

Your heart beats faster, you're full of enthusiasm, you're obsessed, you talk
to everybody and you infect others with your enthusiasm. They come on board,
you find money, then the coding starts.

It's so fun and cool - you're on _that_ path - you're an actual startup - the
coolest thing you can do with your life - sacrifice a bit of yourself for a
huge payout sometime in the nearest future.

And so you put in days and nights, you replace food with caffeine, sleep with
debugging sessions. You _ignore_ the wisdom of others, because they're not you
- you can do it better, you will prove it in the end.

And then, suddenly, after so much work, your main coder drops the bomb that
he's accepted a job at XYZ.

You now have little money, no users and a repository full of spaghetti which
only your coder understands. You need to launch fast. You use duct tape and
saliva to keep everything from falling apart.

And...... You launch! Version 0.1 beta. Then 0.2 beta. Then 0.3 beta. You have
231 users after two weeks. 0.4 beta. 0.5 beta. Two months in and you've still
less than 500 users. According to your business plan, you're short about 49500
users by now.

More Red Bulls, it's 3 o'clock in the morning again, when did I sleep last
time ? The fucking thing still crashes. Where's everyone ?

Your mother calls. "I'm fine, mom. Everyting's fine.". She knows you aren't,
it breaks her heart, she tears up.

You can still do it. Look at XYZ - they've been through worse and they made
it. Never give up. Never give up. Rent is due next week. Jack doesn't show up
to work and doesn't answer his phone. He's burned out and he's had it, he's
leaving.

I can still do it alone, I just need to re-write the whole thing and it will
be much better. How long could it take ?

You're in denial, but reality knocks on your door. It's time to move out.

You've failed. You're not good enough. You disappointed everyone and yourself.
You're not built for this. You will never make it. You lock yourself in your
room for weeks. You put on weight. Days are nights are days are nights are...

Your girlfriend wants to really talk about something. She can't take it
anymore. Fine, we split up. Maybe it was because of her anyway...

Depression kicks in. The dark place. The 'there's no escape' place. The 'i'm
worthless' place. The 'I'm a failure place'. The shame, the guilt. The
disappointment.

The place were all failed people go. By now, you should have been having an
IPO, rubbing shoulders with the big guys. Instead, you're in that place - the
silent place, the place nobody wants to talk about.

You will be there for a couple of months, maybe years, before you recover. Or
you'll swallow your guilt and get a job. Any job. Maybe in another city, maybe
in another country.

And then things fade, life gets better, you meet another girl, you fall in
love, you recover. You're good again. You have energy. You have power. Your
mind is energized.

And then ... the coooolest idea in the world pops up in your head. If you
don't do it, who will ? This time you know better. You've learned from all the
mistakes of the past. This time will be different.

This time you'll make it... You've got a 10% chance.

~~~
logicallee
edit this down (I didn't read it.) looks OK though.

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bpg_92
Does anyone know what happened to Goldee? It was a good product with a killing
web page, I don't know what exactly happened.

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mx10
Would be good to know how long were the founders they committed to the
startup? Extra column OP? Thanks!

~~~
njp89
Thanks for the suggestions. We're looking into this. Something like "Months
Alive"

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go37pi
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
-Tolstoy

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travis-bickle
Make it more complete crowd sourcing (with voting) Then only the list will be
more useful

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jakejake
An interesting column to add to this would be the amount of funding raised, if
known.

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adas1
I would love it if there were a similar list for successful (or ongoing)
startups..

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magic_beans
A little off-topic, but does anyone know how Plated succeeded where Dinner
failed?

~~~
mkagenius
It could be the culture difference as the founder pointed out in his article.
United States vs London.

And various other unknown factors.

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crasshopper
Thanks for doing this! I hope more people add their stories.

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MichaelCrawford
The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

[http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/stock/venture/capital/...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/stock/venture/capital/misery.html)

