I lived through that era compared to then things might be tight but people are actually making money back then nobody was making money and web applications required teams of c/c++ people the burn rates were staggering.
Web apps did not require c/c++. Plenty of ASP, and Perl/CGI sites in those days. The burn rates were insane but it didn't have a lot to do with the developer resources required. For one thing there was no AWS so many web companies built their own data center an exhorbitant capital and operational expense.
I think the difference is public vs private money. If we are in a bubble (which I'm not sure of but let's assume yes for the sake of argument) the investors that stand to loose their capital are all "qualified investors." There are few public companies that are "frothy" this time. Personally, I think the fact that the public markets appear to still be functioning well is _why_ few startups are going for IPOs.
Of course, if startups do start to IPO and the public markets catch the over-valuation bug, then we could see a repeat of 2000. Barring that, I think a correction would not infect the markets at large and may drive more capital into the public companies that are not over valued.
Personally I'd like to see a post mortem for companies that collapsed. Sometimes they are the only historical record we have of these businesses.
So frequently founders and investors rush to burn the evidence of their failures before the lessons they learned are ever taught, and the business completely vanishes into the ether as if it never existed.
There's a lot of value in documenting and aggregating data in companies that failed for whatever reason. Not only to apply the lessons of failing but it does a great job of logging the industry zeitgeist, seeing what trends in ideas we thought were worth investing in that turned out to be duds, what flamed out and then sprung back years later. Too much of that data has been lost over time, it's a real shame.
This Twitter bot (Deathwatch) kind of has the right idea, nice way to pseudo-automate the process at least. The downside though is that it can throw a lot of false positives, just because a startup stops tweeting from a particular account doesn't mean they've perished:
I predict that within 10-20 years we will have AI bots that automatically come up with ideas for bots (trivial versions of this surely are already possible) - and that also have an add-on that lets them monitor forums and post "thanks!" notes to any comments mentioning them. I'm curious what people like you, or your descendants, will be doing by then :-)
Anyone remember deathwatch[0] from the first dot com bubble?
It was based on actual financial statements "based on their reported liquid assets and loss rate. When the cash runs out, something bad for stockholders has to happen."
The weird thing is, at the time that statement was controversial. "We'll make it up in volume!"
pretty negative, reminds me of fuckedcompany.com back in about 2000 - that made it into a game, you could bet on which dotcom bubble companies were going to fail.
Some living startups are listed dead (Pinboard, bad URL), but some dead startups are listed alive as well.
For instance, L'Usine à Design is dead since 2013. They were a French company that made furniture, I bought a couch from them. Their office was on the same floor as Moodstocks, where I was working at the time, and after it closed a few angry customers came banging at our door to complain.
(The reason why the website thinks they are not dead is that the URL they used for the check is the URL of a news article announcing that they were dying!)
Wasn't there one of these that turned into a service that then failed itself some time ago? I don't keep track but I seem to remember it from the past two years.
I was doing an analysis a while back to figure out YC's IRR, and the problem wasn't outright dead startups, but the walking dead.
Silicon Valley (YC included) has a large number of these. I remember one that is not "dead" by any public measure (live site accepting new customers), but upon digging I found that the two co-founders now work at Facebook!
I worked at one of these startups whose product kept running for months, even after firing all of its developers. That's the main reason for this and the "dead yet" name -- the "walking dead" state definitely seems like a common occurrence.
This reminds me of an idea I had in mind a while ago.
It would've been similar to this (like some kind of "Startup Graveyard") but slightly more extensive: interviews with the founders and the lessons they learned from it, what "type" of failure they suffered from (misinterpreting the market, lack of skills, etc).
I ultimately gave up on the idea because none of the founders I contacted wanted to truly spill the beans on what went wrong (the best I tended to get was some vague PR mumbling).
I did set up something similar on postmortem.co (dead) that was being populated by subreddit r/shutdown plus other contributions, main problem was to get proper explanation on why they failed and not just the public statement.
Legal, reputation among other reasons force people to don't share why something failed. I'm convinced it would be a great resource for learning on all kind of areas.
Interesting idea. However, I'm not a fan of the overwhelmingly negative vibe this gives off. By this I mean there seems to be no effort made about any kind of constructive criticism or help, e.g. a way to offer feedback on the listed startups so that they could actually use it as a platform to learn from.
So far it seems to me that it's more of a "Haha, you didn't make it" page creator when it could actually become a force for good.
I don't like the negative vibes I get from http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ instead giving tip how to stay up it's purposed to say if website is down.
It's normal that companies die. What advice would you give them?
'is it down for everybody or just me?' is a neutrally-framed status reporter. The 'vibes' I speak of are the way in which 'Dead Yet?' is, fundamentally by its name, presumptuous (in my opinion). Therefore I don't think you have a great analogy there but I do see your point that my 'feedback' point was perhaps a bit too general — it would just be nice to be able to review a startup (a small disqus comment thread on the page, for example) rather than just pointing the finger at its deadness.
I don't personally have generic advice off-the-bat for company-wide failure avoidance I'm afraid.
It doesn't come from a place of negativity. As I mentioned elsewhere, it can show how resilient a product is as well. A community for startup support is probably outside the scope of this site (and done much better elsewhere), but what would you like to see added?
It checks the site immediately when it's added, then once a day afterwards.
The sentiment of http://issnapchat.deadyet.lol/ is amusing, but I agree it shouldn't be with the dead-product-walking list. Will add something that can filter or move these.
No way to discuss the starts in question? I'd love a comment board under each name. I tried one or two; their websites were awful. Virtually unusable. Feedback might help them.
Did CoTap really die? This site says yes, but their site is up, their app is available in the App Store and their Twitter account is still active..walking dead or not dead yet?
It appears The Iron Isles is finally dead. Undoubtedly it was a great product with so much promise. Alas, even dreams as lofty as The Iron Isles must one day die. LOL
Thanks https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud