I think the reason why these venture-backed companies are shutting down is because they can't live up to their investor's (as well as their own) expectations, E

I think the reason why these venture-backed companies are shutting down is because they can't live up to their investor's (as well as their own) expectations, EVEN IF they're doing pretty well. It's kinda crazy thinking about it. Nowadays if you don't get hundreds of millions of users AND if it's not growing exponentially, people call you a loser. Look at companies like Dropbox and Twitter. It's not like they've failed but people compare them with the newest hot startups like Snapchat and Slack and call them "the next Unicorn that will probably die". But I don't think that's true. You should keep working on what you believe in, and whenever you see something like this, congratulate yourself for staying in the game and keep going. You never know what will happen in the future, markets change and things change, and as a result your product can become very attractive to certain groups of people, and when that happens, if you're the only one standing in the arena, you win.