
Startup Graveyard – History Shouldn't Have to Repeat Itself - tilt
http://startupgraveyard.io/
======
jstandard
An interesting idea. The trouble here is that analysis like this tends to
document the symptoms of failure as if they were the causes. The actual causes
are more likely to be very complex, based on circumstances unique to the
startup/people running it, require deep insider knowledge of the company, and
in some cases be things people aren't willing to admit or recognize.

It's the flipside of a similar problem in analyzing why companies are
successful. [1]

The little disclaimer at the bottom really says it all.

The attempt is a noble one, marred by data and insight quality issues. I think
it could be useful if the site can source insightful analysis from
founders/insiders and make it easy to search by market/product category.
Perhaps even adding a badge to information which came from a founder.

[1] [http://www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com/2011/12/09/good-to-
great-...](http://www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com/2011/12/09/good-to-great-to-
gone-2/)

~~~
nostrademons
Something I've noticed with both my own past startup failures and other
startups I've known: by far the most common failure reason is "There was no
reason for them to be a company in the first place."

By that I mean that either there was no customer demand for what they were
building, or there were already lots of other companies that solved the
problem just as well and they had no unique angle on the problem, or a key
technical assumption they were relying on turned out to be false, or the
market was better served by lots of little firms rather than one high-growth
startup. In other words, they never found product/market fit, because there
was either no market for the product or they couldn't build the product to
serve the market.

The problem is that usually you can only determine this in hindsight. If
everybody assumed that the only businesses that can work are those that
already have a working product and customers, we'd never get any innovation.
I've learned to think of "Finding a reason for the company to exist" as the
primary job description for a founder, and failure means that you are doing
your job but haven't completed it yet.

~~~
jmspring
What's interesting thinking about history, would Webvan and Pets.com fall
under "no demand", "too soon", or just tried to do too much given the timing?
Now we have services that are similar, for instance chewy.com is the modern
version of of Pets.com.

~~~
nostrademons
"Too soon" is usually another way of saying "A critical piece of
infrastructure that my business plan requires doesn't exist yet."

Instacart's founder is fond of saying that Instacart couldn't have existed
before 2012. I suspect what he means is that there were a collection of
technical & social changes that happened in the early 2010s that let him
recast the problem Webvan was solving in an economical way. These were: 1)
smartphones allow real-time coordination across thousands of workers, without
hiring lots of managers 2) cloud-computing lets you run big-data algorithms to
feed those instructions to thousands of workers, without building data centers
3) because of the Great Recession, thousands of workers were unemployed and
desperate for some way to earn money 4) increasing urbanization has clustered
people together in a city and made them disinclined to drive, which increases
the demand for a grocery-shopping service and decreases the cost of servicing
them and 5) everybody had Internet access and cellphones.

By contrast, WebVan spent a billion dollars building warehouses, at a time
when the total number of Internet users was < 150 million. They bought their
own fleet of delivery vans and hired their own drivers, at a time when
employment was full and labor costs were high. They had to invest much more
capital for a much smaller market, and then had much higher variable costs.

Being a "startup" doesn't repeal the laws of business - you still have to pay
for labor, generate returns on capital, generate more value than you charge,
and charge more than you spend. But because computers operate millions of
times faster than humans and don't require wages, if you setup the business
model right you can realize huge efficiencies of scale. "Setup the business
model right" is the tricky part - WebVan thought that "Internet ordering" was
a crucial part of the business model for online grocery delivery, but it
turned out that "use existing supermarket infrastructure" and "coordinate lots
of shoppers so they can work very efficiently" were the real keys, and the
technology to do that hadn't been invented yet.

~~~
nathantotten
Interesting podcast with Instacart's founder where he talks about an investor
who turned him down because the same investor lost money on webvan.
[https://www.npr.org/player/embed/523003162/523047374](https://www.npr.org/player/embed/523003162/523047374)

------
vivekd
Lots of startups fail for timing reasons. There seem to be alot of startups
that maybe just started at the wrong time. One example is QBotix that provided
robotics for the solar industry, probably not much of a market a few years
ago, but in the coming few years that should explode.

~~~
gumby
Actually for QBotix it was the other way around: the robot was designed to
reduce the cost of solar trackers (instead of a motor on each tracker you had
one robot that moved around to adjust each tracker). The problem was that the
cost of PV fell so far that it was cheaper just to deploy more, use a fixed
frame, and not worry that your panels were never really pointed directly at
the sun.

I had hoped to read the QBotix page to see what they said but like others I
got a 503.

~~~
gumby
SO I read the QBotix page and the "comparison companies" are absurd.

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inputcoffee
Potentially a great idea. I have wanted to see data on the reasons startups
failed.

One of the problems with this sort of thing is that it is not clear what the
category of the failure should be. In a sense, the vast majority of failures
is: no sales.

But is this because of "product-market fit" (they just didn't want it), or
"customer acquisition costs" (couldn't get the word out), or "lack of runway"
(can't get the word out fast enough).

That's why you almost need some hybrid of story telling and data so you can
compare what Balaji Srinivasan calls "the idea maze."

I wish I could compare the series of decisions in some manner, and not just
read it as a story.

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blakesterz
Anyone else reminded of Fucked Company? The website or the book :-)

~~~
fourstar
Of course. Those of us who are actually old enough to remember it, do.

~~~
icedchai
I remember it from the early 2000s. It was hilarious!

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AndrewKemendo
Every year the idea of a startup post mortem site or study comes up and as
always goes nowhere because they can't actually draw a causal relationship and
tell the story of why the company in question rolled up.

Besides the fact that there is no incentive, in fact there is negative
incentive, for key players to contribute to the study of failure, it also
requires insane amount of depth in the very specific field which the company
was operating in.

It's the same problem as failed replicated studies not getting documented,
it's easier and higher incentive to just try again than to study the issue.

Really just needs to be a non profit that would run the studies and maybe turn
it into a consultancy or something.

~~~
neilk
When outages happen, there are companies that do blameless postmortems, and
they do get good data.

I think it's a matter of creating the right incentives. Possibly an
organization like YC or a VC that's existed for a long time does. Although
they tend to regard such knowledge as proprietary, so, no luck for us.

> Really just needs to be a non profit that would run the studies and maybe
> turn it into a consultancy or something.

Now you're on the right track.

Many non-profits like this already exist: universities, and sometimes,
governments. There are lots of papers out there about why businesses fail, and
governments are strongly incentivized to fund this kind of research.

I don't know for sure though, but there is probably a paucity of data about
why wacky tech startups fail.

\- At least until recently, it hasn't mattered very much. Actually, I would
argue it still doesn't matter.

\- Startups are bespoke and weird by definition, so analysis is hard. But
possibly an academic could maybe test theories of exactly how much risk you
should take on (I'm thinking of mcfunley's insights on "innovation tokens";
maybe that can be formalized somehow. [http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-
technology](http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology))

------
z3ugma
Looks like we hugged it to death: "Error 508. Resource Limit Is Reached"

~~~
pavel_lishin
Not a bad thing to put on a gravestone.

~~~
robotnoises
That or 410 "Gone"
[https://httpstatuses.com/410](https://httpstatuses.com/410)

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simplydt
In case this helps, you might want to A/B test your homepage with and without
coffins, watch the bounce rate. I bounced, the feelings created by my amygdala
were too strong and overruled my curiosity or any desire to learn!

------
Animats
I used to do something like this on Downside.com, but only for public
companies where you could get the financials from the SEC. Then you have some
hard data. Startup Graveyard seems to be listing companies that failed before
they even launched. There needs to be some minimum qualification, such as
"actually had at least one paying customer".

~~~
restalis
I'm actually interested in all commercial ideas that got funded. That means
there was enough things in place to generate confidence from someone else
other than the (possibly deluded) founder(s). Once customer cashflow appears,
the business recipe gets a partial validation and the entire context changes.
In my view the part before that bears a higher risk and that makes it more
important.

------
sillysaurus3
It'd be nice if there were a summary of each company without clicking through.

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abetusk
It's sad that all the content, source code and other intellectual property is
just lost. Does anyone know of a resource that has or lets companies open
source their code instead of locking it away forever? Like a farm sanctuary
but for failed startups?

~~~
inetknght
Github?

~~~
chrshawkes
I've not heard of this GitHub you speak of.

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ChuckMcM
It would be interesting to include (but really hard to do) startups that
'exited' through acquisition that failed to clear the liquidation preferences.
This sort of exit could also signal a 'mistake not worth repeating'.

------
sh87
Can someone build an AI out of this to predict success / failure factors ?

For the record : I'm being sarcastic :/

------
azr79
This website should in the list too.

Reasons of failure:

\- Couldn't scale its web servers

------
jorgeer
Seems like front page HN is too much for this website. Only getting 500s and
error pages.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Individual pages still seem to load:
[http://startupgraveyard.io/company/selltag/](http://startupgraveyard.io/company/selltag/)

~~~
Animats
Even that's now returning a 508 error.

------
RangerScience
I think a very useful feature for this site is a "I worked here and want to
talk about it" listing.

That way, one thing I could do is research my idea / etc for similar startups
that failed, call up the people, and ask what went wrong.

The goal here, it seems, is to help you not fail at something similar. The
best information will come from those that worked there. So, why not index
just enough information to find those people, and then help connect you to
them?

------
vtange
Great idea. Site is hugged to death at the moment I think

A quick issue that arose in my head is what happens if people turn away from
ideas because they see it in the graveyard? Some ideas may have seen the light
of day too soon...timing for startups is important, as shown in this TED talk
-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY)

With this resource at hand, people might mistaken bad timing for bad idea.

------
wand3r
This is cool and it's always smart to check past implementations like this. As
long as you learn _why_ the failed not that the idea is impossible. VR is a
good example; I didn't see any companies on that list but many gave up on VR
because it was too early to be possible until a few years ago. Another good
example is digital currency.

Also; you can learn from a comp like Clinkle which should def be added to the
list

------
lightedman
This will have been the millionth incarnation of this idea I've seen in 20
years, from books to videos to websites.

I'm guessing nobody's actually paying attention to history, otherwise the
first book/video/website would've been all that was needed.

------
traviswingo
I like this idea; however, this is very subjective. Laying out 6 solid reasons
for _why_ a startup failed is a bold statement. In reality, there usually
isn't a concrete reason why, but I guess it's a good exercise to at least
think about it collectively.

------
bikamonki
By plain logic: if there isn't a formula for success, there isn't one for
failure either.

~~~
guntars
That's just silly. There are guaranteed ways for company to fail and not vice
versa.

------
proaralyst
Wayback:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170511100358/startupgraveyard....](https://web.archive.org/web/20170511100358/startupgraveyard.io)

Not much got archived though.

------
nkkollaw
> History Shouldn't Have to Repeat Itself

I used to follow another startup shutdown site that got shut down, though. :-)

Cool idea, I love reading those. I have no clue if reading about failures can
make you successful, though.

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jparise
Seeing this prompted me to revisit [http://thecan.org/](http://thecan.org/),
"a pet cemetery for dead games."

------
beat
Kind of sad to see a product you liked on this list. RIP Grooveshark.

~~~
ythn
I knew it was too good to be true when I first started using it. Same with
VidAngel (basically streaming version of Redbox). Any product that bypasses
the bureaucracy/legal requirements of the MPAA/RIAA to give consumers exactly
what they want is doomed to failure.

------
flor1s
Reminds me of a website focused on failed Kickstarter projects:
[http://kickended.com](http://kickended.com)

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chiefalchemist
Startups, by definition, fail. The reasons are endless. Attempting to sum
those up in what looks to be too few words is helpful how?

Entertaining. But is it useful?

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magic_beans
This looks like a waaaay prettier version of
[http://autopsy.io](http://autopsy.io)

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adamzerner
I know this is very tangential, but I hate the design decision to have the
hamburger menu mixed in to the graveyard stuff at the top of the site. It
reminds me of those hidden object puzzles. It very much prioritizes aesthetics
over usability. With more thought, the aesthetics could be included without
having to sacrifice usability.

------
draw_down
Sometimes ideas don't work but then they do. Or vice-versa, sadly.

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JansjoFromIkea
Nearly every image on the site being a ~600x450px jpeg seems wasteful when
almost all of these have easily accessible (or at least easy to recreate)
SVGs.

Unless wordpress doesn't support SVGs?

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chrshawkes
This wordpress website is slow as balls.

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robotnoises
Wow, rdio.com redirects to pandora...

~~~
funnyfacts365
Wow? Why wouldn't it? Pandora bought them after all.

~~~
robotnoises
Ah, didn't realize that.

------
bigbossman
perhaps the domain startupgraveyard.ai would better reflect these times

------
kevinmannix
How does one submit?

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pokemongoaway
Startup Graveyard: A website for cataloging failed startups

Reason for failing: "Error 508. Resource Limit Is Reached"

~~~
uptownhr
I own STARTUPDEADPOOL.COM and would love to contribute the domain and my
engineering time. How do I get in touch?

