

Ask HN: What are some examples of startups that failed mainly because of timing? - msukan

After watching this, https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed I tried finding some startups that had novel ideas that failed because of timing. One example is &quot;MyMobileMenu&quot; by Reddit founders in their initial YC application, which was scraped because mobile adoption wasn&#x27;t there. Do you remember any?
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nostrademons
Kozmo, Webvan, and all the online delivery startups from the first dot-com
boom.

Arguably Loopt (Sam Altman's startup), which was doing a locality-based social
network in 2005, before the iPhone. Subsequent attempts (Google Latitude,
etc.) have also failed, but I suspect that's because the market _still_ isn't
ready.

General Magic. This Apple spin-off was doing a handheld computer in 1990, way
before the technology or population was ready for it. Interestingly, basically
all of the modern smartphone industry comes from General Magic alumni - Tony
Fadell (father of the iPhone) and Andy Rubin (father of Android) both worked
there.

First generation of search engines. It's not just a matter of being smarter,
PageRank _wouldn 't have worked_ early on in the web because the link graph
wasn't dense enough to get useful signal out of it.

LiveJournal, Xanga, EZBoard, and the first generation of social networks. They
had some traction with early adopters, but the problem was that their userbase
was weird enough that it drove off mainstream adopters, rather than bringing
them in like Facebook did 5 years later.

~~~
yankoff
hey, you'll be surprised, but LiveJournal is still popular and widely used in
Russia and other ex. soviet countries ;)

~~~
solomatov
It's used there as a media site not as social network.

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dangrossman
Most of the companies in this book:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3438149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3438149)

You can pick up a used copy for a penny plus shipping. A couple examples: Pet
food delivery (pets.com), same-day grocery delivery (webvan.com), local event
listing/registration (eRegister.com). All thing we now have, but which failed
despite massive VC funding in the '90s.

~~~
akg_67
Wow, I never knew who was behind F'd Company site. Brings back memories. That
site saved me lot of anguish and money from dot.bomb explosion in stock
market. I wonder if the data from F'd Company is still accessible somewhere.
That dataset might be valuable for text analysis to determine negative
sentiment about a company and business.

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notacoward
SiCortex

It might not be the kind of startup that you were thinking of, since it was
hardware-focused, but I was actually there so I think I can tell the story in
some detail. What we made was large computers, though we tried not to call
them supercomputers. Up to 972 nodes, each a six-core MIPS CPU with direct
access (no second support chip) to a very fast RDMA-capable communication
fabric. Looking at the boards, you'd see little other than those chips and a
lot of memory. I got there in 2006, but the company had already existed a few
years before that.

The "bad timing" aspect was two-fold. First, the market just wasn't ready for
that kind of low-power/high-density play. It's a lot closer, but still took
too long even for Calxeda and SeaMicro which came later. Then there was the
funding. Our first generation had done well enough to start a second - likely
to be on the order of six times as fast. Since we were building everything
from chips on up, we needed a fair bit more than the first gen was bringing
in, but we needed it in 2008. Not a good time to be seeking funds. Even
pursuing unconventional avenues, we just couldn't scrape together enough funds
structured the right way to make a round, and literally ran out of money. All
that _amazing_ knowledge now molders in escrow somewhere, except for that
which former employees are now applying in subsequent jobs.

If that same talent and effort could be collected in one place now, or even
better around two years ago, I still think it could lead to a new computing
paradigm. Instead of a few "fat" nodes with more CPU power than the rest of
the system can keep up with, we'd have _seas_ of smaller nodes better balanced
between compute, memory and communications, and software designed to take
advantage of it. In the end, far more useful work done per kilowatt, per BTU,
per cubic foot, or per dollar (that was almost exactly one of SiCortex's
slogans).

But it was not to be, because the principals saw too far ahead. It's a sad
commentary on how deluded (or misled) the rest of the computing industry can
be.

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bosky101
Go Corp. with their tablet in the 80's.

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup)

