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Hmm, re: > how startups tend to go bankrupt and their tech dies with them I have this mental model, which may not be entirely accurate, that the original Irid
by mherdeg 5y ago
Hmm, re:
> how startups tend to go bankrupt and their tech dies with them
I have this mental model, which may not be entirely accurate, that the original Iridium corporation successfully launched satellites into orbit, erased the multi-billion dollar costs of the launch using bankruptcy, and then handed over control to a successor corporation who inherited control of the constellation but none of the startup costs.
Do I have the story right? Is there any other example like this where a failed company manages to leave us with something useful while its immense costs were just … evaporated?
- CommieBobDole 5y agoThat's roughly true, but it's sort of a special case; as I recall it, the US Department of Defense had come to depend on Iridium and didn't want to lose service, so they facilitated the orderly bankruptcy and re-emergence of the company, in part by offering an enormous multi-year contract to the successor company.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kingcharles 5y agoDo things like Tumblr and Skype count? Where a legacy Internet behemoth mistakenly clicks "Buy It Now" on a startup for eleventy billion dollars during some drug-and-drink fueled bender and then wakes up the next day and offloads it to some rando on Twitter for whatever they have lying around in their PayPal balance.
- neilparikh 5y agoIt's funny, I think Yahoo has done this twice now: once with Tumblr and once with Delicious (although the chain of ownership for Delicious is much longer).
- kingcharles 5y agoYes, I forgot about Delicious. Yahoo destroyed both of those companies. Unbelievably all the Delicious data is still available. Delicious was one of the only accounts I could log into after eight years in jail. It was amazing to see that 99% of my bookmarks were dead links.
- beervirus 5y ago
- jasode 5y ago>Is there any other example like this where a failed company manages to leave us with something useful while its immense costs were just … evaporated? Blender's original investors' capital not totally evaporated but the $100k buyout to release it as open source was a small fraction of their $4.5 million: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/about/history.html#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9CFree%20Blender%E2%80%9D%20campaign%20sought%20to%20raise https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab...
- jcun4128 5y agoI liked the book Eccentric Orbits about Iridium
- coliveira 5y agoThey didn't give me anything, they gave to the companies that bought the satellites for next to nothing.
- gowld 5y agoThe company didn't "fail" -- it ripped off creditors.
- Kon-Peki 5y agoMotorola developed and launched Iridium. They may have lost their $X investment, but they also went out and sold mobile network infrastructure equipment in the developing world for $(X * Y).