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The Startup Graveyard
- tibbar 10mo agoIs Cloudera actually dead? The website seems alive and well...
- mushufasa 10mo agothis type of resource is actually super useful to idea-stage founders, as it can often be hard to research failed attempts at a domain (typically the websites and assets disappear over time). Even just an index is helpful. In glancing through this list, some of these make me go "hmm." For example, MySpace is an entry. While it did eventually die, I'm not sure I personally would count myspace as a startup failure -- it got to huge scale, got acquired, and still had niche activity for many years of gradual decline post-acquisition. Certainly, the startup founders and investors had a successful exit.
- forkLding 10mo agoClub Penguin was sold to Disney for 350 million, it didn't die in the sense that money ran out
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI was going to say, I don't see Club Penguin as a total failure. Heck, there's a dozen or more Club Penguin private servers. Don't let your children on them though, I hear they've got the same pedophilia problem as Roblox.
- Oras 10mo agoThere are a few startups that were acquired, not sure if the acquisition had covered the investment, as it's not clear. - Pebble - Udemy - Viper
- frankdenbow 10mo agoreminds of the old site fuckedcompany by pud which wrote about startup closures in the dot com era
- Wistar 10mo agoMy thought exactly.
- baggachipz 10mo agoAt one point, there were multiple new entries throughout each day. It was entertaining/terrifying to reload the page. Wonder when we'll see something like fuckedaicompany.com pop up.
- tracker1 10mo agoSame... some of the horror stories still stick to me... move to SF/SV on a big job offer, show up on your first day to locked doors and guys with armed escorts repossessing the servers.
- gordonhart 10mo agoHow'd you source the information? Curious to see Cloudera listed as dead and wasn't able to find anything corroborating this online.
- rawgabbit 10mo agoGenuity was also bought out. Domo seems alive and well.
- vaughands 10mo agoThe author posted this on a vibe coding subreddit, so I'd be willing to wager some AI deep research with manual clean up.
- gordonhart 10mo agoSeems like it. That would explain the various suspicious entries and lack of rigor (missing thousands of smaller startups that have failed in the last decade)
- joloooo 10mo agoCircling the drain, but not dead
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- joering2 10mo agoEvernote is dead?
- TZubiri 10mo agoI don't get the "Uber Rush" entry. First of all, it's not a startup it's a feature. Second, in my country this service exists, you can make deliveries with uber and it's used for package delivery as well as signing contracts.
- alansaber 10mo agoRIP Theranos
- bilater 10mo agoone of the startups listed that "failed" is music.ly. the app bytedance acquired to launch tiktok
- siliconc0w 10mo agoSome of these are acquires so it's hard to argue the money was 'burned'. That said I do agree acquired companies can be viable as the product usually gets put on life-support or ruined/shutdown (like Club Penguin)
- foobiekr 10mo agoA lot of acquisitions are tech and talent and the details matter. A startup that gets acquired for $30M after burning $70M is definitely burned.
- raincole 10mo agoEven the products got eventually shut down I still don't think the money was necessarily 'burned.' Most buildings eventually fell or got destructed so were all the resources spent on construction burned? But whether a product actually helped the users is a question too nuance to ask.
- njudah 10mo agoAs they say, I'm not dead yet -- many of the companies listed as dead are acquired or very much still alive. (Domo is still publicly traded, for example.)
- defaultcompany 10mo agoPoshmark also is not dead.
- cploonker 10mo agoSimilar site: https://www.failory.com/cemetery https://www.failory.com/cemetery
- henning 10mo agoThe entry for Theranos does not mention the massive fraud that occurred. All of this bullshit is AI-generated, isn't it?
- adityashankar 10mo agoThe filters don't actually work, unless I'm misunderstanding them >.<, can you fix them please?
- gkoberger 10mo agoI guess I don't see the problem? Nothing lasts forever, and everyone involved knew the risks. That money wasn't purely wasted, it went into salaries and other products. At least half ended in exits and became a part of another company. The ability to fail and fail big is what makes the SF tech scene special... people aren't afraid to try something audacious. And sure, the world could take-or-leave most of these products, but I don't really see the point in this negative framing.
- jabedude 10mo agoI don't think this website is implying there was a 'problem' per se. In fact it seems to be geared towards helping resurrect the original premises
- Kkoala 10mo ago"Where $32.5B+ in venture capital was burned to ashes." isn't exactly a positive spin. At least the copy seems AI-generated though, so I guess can't read too much into it.
- aeve890 10mo agoHa, almost every "New Business Idea & Product Name" is heavily focused on AI. It tracks. Everytime I present a problem to an LLM the solution is the same "use AI". Can't blame them though.
- gravel7623 10mo agoI hate that every single Execution Plan says has "AI-first" in it. Is this an ad?
- nkohari 10mo agoSome of these are still in existence. For example, Wealthfront Cash is their HYSA offering, which is still very much a thing: https://www.wealthfront.com/cash https://www.wealthfront.com/cash
- asdev 10mo agofeature request: tag startups with YCombinator and be able to visualize failure in terms of capital invested over time. my hunch is it's going up but would be cool to see the data
- Oras 10mo agoE La Carte was such a nice idea. I remember it quite well as I tried to do something similar in the UK back in 2011. iPad menu in restaurants.
- fluorinerocket 10mo agoI miss fuckedcompany.com
- CrzyLngPwd 10mo agoReminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
- latchkey 10mo agoBack when PoD t-shirts were more of a thing.. https://www.wired.com/2015/05/techs-failures-live-t-shirts/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/techs-failures-live-t-shirts/
- SoleilAbsolu 10mo agoOnce they're done, shouldn't they be called "stopdowns"?
- tptacek 10mo agoAre these LLM-generated causes of death? There are a couple startups here where I'm somewhat familiar with the "real" causes of death and the stated cause here is just fluff.
- dadrian 10mo agoSome of them also aren't really dead.
- AstroBen 10mo agoThe idea for the site is interesting but there seems to be an incredible amount of misinformation on here
- klik99 10mo agoI think it's a great idea to highlight that companies that fail in the VC context aren't necessarily bad ideas for companies - there is just a specific business model that thrives with VC funding (extremely high scalability, reliable unit costs) and companies that don't fit that or fail to develop in that direction may still be great businesses but get driven into the ground by VCs trying to find the one unicorn out of 15 in the profile.
- tracker1 10mo agoAgreed, there's nothing at all wrong with a company that has a comfortable market fit than makes a pretty consistent $X/yr with Y employees/staff. Not everything needs to be the next big VC Unicorn. A lot of these ideas could very well be multi-million dollar businesses with a little effort.
- mbesto 10mo agoSome of these still exist, I don't get it? What dictates when a company is "dead"? Insolvency? Bankruptcy? For example - Domo is still publicly traded and does $300M in revenue: https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DOMO https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DOMO
- TheGRS 10mo agoI think MySpace being an example is bizarre. It had its time and I'm sure it made a lot of advertising revenue. It walked so Facebook could run. I guess there's potential for another social media start-up, but its a crowded space for sure.
- parliament32 10mo agoAI slop, a good portion of these are either still in business or acquired and still running.
- loot-dropdude 10mo agoTrue - I shipped way too early but have done a lot of clean-up
- phendrenad2 10mo agoWhy is this flagged? It's a funny idea, perhaps even an intentional tongue-in-cheek joke. Is it because many of these were HN startups? Are we free to speak our minds here or do we get penalized for criticizing startups in any way?