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Y Combinator Failed Startups
- troughway 6y agoWith the eye-raping callout (dark background -> white background switch) half-way through the article on wanting an email address (three callouts within the article in total), I'm shocked you didn't finish the job and put a big fucking modal popup smack dab in the middle as I was scrolling and ask once more.
- stevewodil 6y agoPersonally I find the call to actions rather tasteful on that site
- ganoushoreilly 6y agoYou seem bitter, which startup was yours?
- dang 6y agoWould you please stop posting crap comments to HN?
- quartz 6y agoInteresting that two of these (three if you count Unicorn Rides which is a note within Boosted) are hardware companies and both were a result of the recent tariff war with China. I've always known startups are hard but it seems that hardware startups, even when they appear to be on a rocketship trajectory, are nigh impossible.
- ghaff 6y agoHardware is often a lot more capital intensive, harder to get to an MVP, and, these days, often requires software in addition to hardware.
- lnsru 6y agoAnd that’s the reasons why all the capital sources avoid hardware startups as hard as they can. It’s like betting for a 10x slower horse than the rest.
- nimacainn 6y agoMissing from that list is Grin Scooters / Grow Mobility (e-scooters for LATAM) which is probably one of the biggest failures out of all YC companies in terms of investment money raised. They raised $70M as Grin and then $150M after the merger with Yellow. I think at Demo Day they were trying to raise at a $100M cap with just an idea / pre-launch. After raising an insane amount of money in a matter of moths, they expanded extremely quickly to dozens of cities in several countries in LATAM while having bad unit economics ("land-grab"). There are likely interesting learning lessons there.
- the-dude 6y agoWhich reminds me : only 13 days to when the interview invitations will be sent.
- pvorb 6y agoAnyone else thought that the list of failed startups starts with NerdPilots? That ad is a little misplaced.
- tpurves 6y agoI didn't realize it wasn't first on yhe list until I read your post! I though to myself, of course, why would YC fund a contract development shop, such a wrong model for VC no wonder they must have failed.
- hluska 6y agoHa!! This makes my day - I thought they were on the list of failed startups too, thought the way fact same thing as you and didn’t even realize they weren’t a YC company until I got here. :) Thanks friend - I needed that chuckle today!
- bilbopotter 6y ago"Sponsored by" didn't do it for you
- hluska 6y agoObviously not - otherwise I wouldn’t have posted. The ‘sponsored by’ font isn’t terribly visible.
- atlasunshrugged 6y agoThey did fund Gigster which is what the business model was in essence
- rdw 6y agoYeah, the ads were pretty intrusive in this article. Still got us all to engage, though! Some content marketer is happy today.
- 6y ago
- AndrewKemendo 6y ago"The Trump administration’s trade war with China resulted in a failed funding round led by a Chinese investor, which put the company in dire straits financially. " Trump is a convenient scapegoat here but in no way related to why they failed. Meta was headed to guardianship not long after the Meta2 was released. Overall Meta was just a poor experience with basically zero traction. They changed their hardware approach from the Meta1 to the 2 and it created a completely different experience while on the side the Hololens was blowing everyone out of the water and they weren't in any position to compete. Add to that the complete collapse of Magic Leap and the bubble burst for AR this round. Reinforcing again - Augmented Reality is probably the hardest market/technology to succeed or even just stay alive in.
- rdw 6y agoMany startups are on their deathbed before finally succeeding. A famous example is Fred Smith, FedEx founder, gambling the company's last $5k, in order to come up with $24k for a deadline[1]. Had the cards come up differently, or a political wind had made gambling illegal, FedEx would have failed, and someone would have been able to say that logistics was "a hard market to succeed or even just stay alive in", and even be correct! The casino (or lack thereof) would have been a "convenient scapegoat". But it doesn't change the fact that having the chance to have these kinds of lucky turnarounds seem to play a pivotal role in a lot of success stories. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fedex-saved-from-bankruptcy-with-blackjack-winnings-2014-7?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/fedex-saved-from-bankruptcy-...
- moron4hire 6y agoThat's not why Meta failed. Meta failed because their product was garbage.
- TwoBit 6y agoHas any AR product not been garbage?
- cyrux004 6y agobut none of the CEOs say that you have to switch from using monitors at the company to AR glasses
- moron4hire 6y agoThe HoloLens 1 does what it claims to do. It is uncomfortable, the FOV is narrow, but it's usable and there aren't any big, negative surprises. You can use it and say, "yeah, I get it, I can see where this is going". The Magic Leap doesn't do what they claimed it would do. But it does do what the HoloLens 1 does, slightly better in some areas, slightly worse in others. The Meta2 was fundamentally broken. Nothing on it worked correctly. Everything on it was a hack job.
- scollet 6y agoI can say Pokemon Go was a great success. I never played it because I'm not into AR, but I like this vertical of positive social/gaming experiences.
- Dylan16807 6y agoI guess it falls under the very vague term of "AR product", depending on how you define it, but it's not an AR visualization product. Rendering pokemon on top of a surface is a cute little gimmick but if that feature wasn't there it wouldn't really matter.
- cyrux004 6y agoI will have to agree. The tarrif war accelerated their demise; but there product was far from ready. Infact the CEO of Meta said at some point said that employees will be required to shift from monitors to using Meta and they werent able to reach that goal because their tech (or AR in general) wasnt there
- PradeetPatel 6y ago"The Trump administration’s trade war with China resulted in a failed funding round led by a Chinese investor..." Is there another president that's so callous about small medium sized businesses?
- throwaway883484 6y agoTrump is trying to save Chinese children from slave labor, and you're here complaining about it. I can't believe people like you enjoy the enslavement of children. Disgusting.
- knes 6y agoHow can you make a list of failed yc companies and not mention homejoy? $66m raised, bad operations, bas unit economics, lawsuits and an abrupt shutdown. All of that after being the calley darling for so long.
- nicocerdeira 6y agoWill add it!
- Sindrome 6y agoMaybe because the CEO is now a YC exec
- WoahNoun 6y agoAfter stealing HomeJoy's customer DB for another start-up, she is now a YC partner... Move fast and break things?
- swyx 6y agoi dont know Adora and i'm sure she has useful things to teach people. however i really wonder if this clouds every interaction with people going through YC. it's kind of the huge elephant in the room.
- Judgmentality 6y agoI guess people can brand themselves as "successful" after what is by all objective standards a spectacular failure. I have no idea how impressive Adora is and I cannot speak to her qualifications, but HomeJoy should be a textbook example of an SV failure.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cvhashim 6y agoThis comment a little sexist. Is it just me?
- dyeje 6y agoI remember seeing that Buttermilk company arguing with people on their Facebook ads.
- LeCow 6y agoDoes Theranos count? I'd say they achieved even less than most start-ups.
- cbisnett 6y agoThis article says Atrium ran out of money, but I feel like Justin Kan’s blog post said they gave tens of millions back to investors when they shut down.
- ryanSrich 6y agoYeah, I commented that the list is incomplete and at times straight up wrong. This is one example. Atrium absolutely did not run out of money.
- twmahna 6y agoWorth noting that the proximate cause of death is often times largely uninformative as to why the startup actually failed. Most failed startups fit into the following timeline: was burning more money than it was making => failed at raising more money => did a round of layoffs / cost cuts to get economics under control => couldn't right the ship and shut down / did a fire sale or acquihire But, the above timeline doesn't teach you much about why the company really failed. The real answer almost always involves a multitude of contributing factors, and requires intimate knowledge of the startup's business. For the most part, the only reliable source for this type of information is one of the founders, board members, or (sometimes but not always) c-level execs. And, even then, they have to be willing to be vulnerable (which is very rare). If I could give some advice to Failory, it would be to think about how you can incentivize founders to share their stories. As it stands, they have little to gain and potentially a lot to lose (e.g. being labeled one of YC's "biggest failures")
- sjtindell 6y agoAs a relative outsider, I would hope being labeled as one of the biggest failures would be a mark of experience among a set that claims or claimed to uphold the “fail fast” mentality and treats failure like the learning experience it is.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago"fail fast" refers to experiments, not the whole damn company.
- majormajor 6y agoA new company is almost by definition an experiment.
- derekmh 6y agoEspecially when peoples’ lives depend on it.
- mathattack 6y ago
- pbiggar 6y agoMissing Airware - $112M raised. (https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/14/airware-shuts-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/14/airware-shuts-down/)
- amichal 6y agoA really good idea. Not at all the same social/economic climate as it was at the time but I couldn't help remembering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company which really lent some perspective to industry when it was so hard to understand where the hell all these dotcoms came from and why not all of us were getting the millions.
- pmiller2 6y agoThis is my first time hearing about uBiome. Oh well, at least I have one of their t-shirts from some startup trade show thingie I went to. It's pretty cool looking.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoTo all those who failed (apart from the weird sounding fraud with the FBI), well done for actually climbing into the arena and fighting. Better luck next time. To the rest of us. Schadenfreude is its own reward.
- gkoberger 6y agoI don't get the last section, where you just name 4-5 small "failed" startups. For most of them, you don't even have any real insights! Why pick on them, for no reason? They didn't do anything unethical, and most didn't seem to even raise a Series A. You have no clue why they failed; you just speculate... and you don't just name the companies, you call out random founders by name. These people put themselves out there and worked hard, and now they're going to get a Google Alert saying they're in a blog post called "Biggest Y Combinator Failed Startups." Most YC companies don't work out. In my batch (5 years ago), about 80% are out of business now. That's okay! That's just how it works. I'm all for talking about failures, but it's weird you just pick on a few small random YC startups.
- whymauri 6y agoI think Failory is meant to be an educational tool for founders. I suppose there's lessons to be learned at any scale.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoI had the same reaction, but then I was delighted they included these smaller examples. It was especially interesting to hear about the desktop search startup from the summer founder’s program. There’s an inclination to view this sort of thing as adversarial / picking on the founders, especially because there are a lot of haters for successful people in general. But this piece seemed clinical, not critical.
- nicocerdeira 6y agoWe aimed to cover different sizes of business, industries, raising funds, etc. as our audience is quite broad.
- gkoberger 6y agoWhy call it "Biggest Y Combinator Failed Startups," and just randomly pick on some very small companies that weren't even contacted for their side of the story? Like, what could anyone learn about from what you wrote about, for example, the vegan milk startup? You just picked on a random small company, and then said generic stuff about "economies of scale". I love hearing about failures (and am happy to talk about my own!), but there's a difference between exploring what went wrong, and "punching down". Now when you Google their names, "Biggest Y Combinator Failed Startups" will be the result. Unfair.
- deft 6y agoI like how stealing is called growth-hacking now!
- ozten 6y agoIt looks like TheMelt is down to 7 grilled cheese stores. https://www.themelt.com/locations https://www.themelt.com/locations
- johncoogan 6y agoTheMelt wasn't in Y Combinator, but it is an interesting story.
- ryanSrich 6y agoWhat's the story?
- marcins 6y agoI found this article: https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-trendiest-grilled-cheese-venture-got-burnt/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-trendiest-grilled-cheese...
- ozten 6y agoI'm sorry for linking the two. I have had this wrong idea stuck in my head since 2011. I should have validated that fact.
- traek 6y agoDid they go through YC? I can't find anything online about that, but I had no clue they raised $10M from Sequoia. Surprising.
- phendrenad2 6y agoAh yes The Melt Index. You can track silicon valley startup activity by how many tech workers are grabbing a quick grilled cheese sandwich while their code compiles.
- bsder 6y agoTo be fair, Covid is a nuclear bomb dropped on the entire restaurant sector. However: 1) Putting a grilled cheese sandwich restaurant in ferociously expensive real estate known for upscale, health-conscious consumers can't be smart (Irvine Spectrum Center?--LOL) 2) The food just wasn't that good. Sorry. They deserve to go out of business.
- ryanSrich 6y agoThis list feels wrong and incomplete. The startups at the end are completely random. If you included the full list of failed YC startups regardless of funding it would be hundreds deep. I don't understand what I just read.
- Alupis 6y agoHow's Y Combinator doing these days? Many smaller base hits, a few home runs, or striking out? I don't follow the VC world much.
- mauriziocalo 6y agoJust this week: - Momentus: $1.2B IPO (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/momentus-the-latest-space-stock-mnts-through-spac-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/momentus-the-latest-space-st...) - Segment: acquired for $3.2B (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735414) - MessageBird: reached a $3B valuation (https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/08/messagebird-series-c/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/08/messagebird-series-c/) More generally: - 15-20 YC companies are now worth $1B or more. - 100ish YC companies are now worth $100M - $1B. A good number of those (and others currently worth less than that) are growing very rapidly and will likely reach unicorn status in the next year. So it seems like one can reliably expect 2-3 unicorns to come out of each YC batch. Those 2-3 unicorns likely more than make up for the costs associated with running each batch (including all of the ~$150K investments). Seems quite good to me. Admittedly, there hasn't yet been a Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft-scale company that has come out of YC yet. I think it's only a matter of time until that happens -- anecdotally it seems like at least a handful out of the recent batches could become massive home runs, as well as other more established companies like Stripe that seem to be growing quite well.
- xenihn 6y agoI'd definitely consider Stripe in the running.
- Mascobot 6y agoThis list seems to be a biased list. I thought the list was first in descending order (funding), but it's not. Some super early stage startups were picked for some reason in the bottom section? To clarify: by numbers, the vast majority of startups fail, and that's part of trying new things until one of them works great. I know multiple founder friends that had 1-3 *big failures before they built a great company after that.
- tikwon34 6y agoI have this question on my mind and if someone could explain this sincerely I would be very grateful. Time after time, YC startups seem to engage in practices which are unethical or dark or downright scammy. Be it Homejoy, uBiome, AirBnB (updating consent without asking). They seem to employ aggresive marketing tactics. They work under assumption that "law does not apply to us". Although this is true for ultra rich people, why regular seed funded do it? Is growth focus this much necessary to the to do outright fraud or in engage in shady tactics? They are willing to kill other people's business and livelihood for their growth. I would call this "preying tactics" Paul is very successful person and I read about him a lot. Why companies going through YC do this? Or is this just Business-as-usual (BAU) in Americas? Kill or be killed? Thanks for responding!
- 7twelve 6y agoI have this question on my mind and if someone could explain this sincerely I would be very grateful. Time after time, YC startups seem to engage in practices which are unethical or dark or downright scammy. Be it Homejoy, uBiome, or many others. They seem to employ aggresive marketing tactics. They work under assumption that "law does not apply to us". Although this is true for ultra rich people, why regular seed funded do it? Is growth focus this much necessary to the to do outright fraud or in engage in shady tactics? They are willing to kill other people's business and livelihood for their growth. I would call this "preying tactics" Paul is very successful person and I read about him a lot. Why companies going through YC do this? Or is this just Business-as-usual (BAU) in Americas? Kill or be killed? Thanks for responding!
- dustingetz 6y agostart here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/229FkbLrhat9JLhwQ/does-big-business-hate-your-family https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/229FkbLrhat9JLhwQ/does-big-b...
- ericlevine 6y agoQuick note: you got the pronoun wrong for the founder of The Buttermilk Company when referencing her Medium post.
- goatcode 6y agoI wonder who the founders were for Plurchase. It's kind of weird that they're the only one without this info listed.
- jyu 6y agoNo list of YC failures is complete without mentioning Loopt.
- agumonkey 6y agoI wonder how many could succeed if they started at a different time.
- fallingmeat 6y agoairware?
- nassycheezy 6y agoHow is Docker a success from YC? Pretty much the opposite no?
- duxup 6y agoHas it officialy failed yet?
- jonathankoren 6y agoKind of surprised not to see Homejoy on this list. After failing to understand three sided marketplaces, posting a widely mocked Christmas blog post, Homejoy flamed out, and founder Adora Cheung landed as a partner at YC... for some reason. Kudos on failing up.
- underwater 6y agoCan't help feeling like this article is doing their sponsor a disservice. > Here are some of their biggest failures, sorted by funding. [...] NerdPilots My first thought was "I've never heard of NerdPilots, but they must have been awful" before realising that it was an ad.
- SpecieCo 6y agoI am an outsider to this site. Found it trying to find something like reddit was around Mt Gox timeline. Posted my Startup to this forum. Never got much traction. 6 months later though Acre.com started much better funded than I. Is Acre a YC startup? Now i just follow on and read. aka old scool reddit lurking
- CGamesPlay 6y ago> suspicions uBiome was billing its client’s medical insurance providers multiple times without the prior knowledge or consent of their clients > Growth-hacking on the wild-west which is the internet is one thing, but when you try to use similar tactics in traditional, heavily regulated industries in developed, heavily regulated markets - that’s a recipe for disaster. Was this growth-hacking or outright fraud? Are those the same thing?
- a_bonobo 6y agoOutright insurance fraud. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/06/ubiome-suspends-clinical-operations-after-fbi-raid.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/06/ubiome-suspends-clinical-ope... >In the months before the FBI search, the company would often bill insurance multiple times for its tests without patient consent, insiders told CNBC. In an interview, one customer, Marc Harris, told CNBC that he sent in two samples, but the $2,970 test was billed to his insurance five times.
- ooaudreyoo 6y agoIt happened to me. Billed my insurance double and sometimes triple for each test.
- gravypod 6y agoIt's very unfortunate The Buttermilk Company closed down. I was looking for them recently and found the founder's posts about how stressful it was to run. Does anyone know any similar products out there?
- break_the_bank 6y agoJust buy MTR or Haldirams ready to eat if you want instant Indian food. More authentic and tastes nice. I haven't tried them as I'm not from the states. I'm Indian though and found the buttermilk company products to be highly priced and didn't find anything novel when compared to Haldirams or MTR. At their price you could probably get food from a takeaway.
- gravypod 6y agoThe main thing I was looking for was something that tasted pretty good and was shelf stable and easy to transport. Haldirams and MTR look great! Thanks for the pointers.
- alex_young 6y agoCurrent title is misleading: Y Combinator Failed Startups. Why did it change? This is a discussion of the biggest failures out of thousands of startups, not that YC is horrible or something.
- raverbashing 6y agoIt's not misleading, though I can see why It's not YC "failed" startups, it's (a list of) YC "failed startups".
- alex_young 6y agoSomething like “Failed YC startups” or “YC startup failures” would be a less ambiguous title.
- Angostura 6y agoI really don’t think Nerdpilots wants that sponsorship spot. Thought they were the first example of a failure
- ykevinator 6y agoI've often wondered if yc is duplicitous, old people tricking young people and playing the averages
- pedro1976 6y agoImagine every failed startup would open-source their stuff so others could stand on their shoulders if they want to give that idea another shot.
- TudorBirlea 6y agoShameless plug: I research exactly this, but from a different perspective - namely the personality traits behind productive/unproductive decisions that ultimately lead to failure or success. If anyone interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w31inj3xf4aiu66/Successful%20Startup%20Founders%20v3-compressed.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/w31inj3xf4aiu66/Successful%20Start...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]