The 'timing' thing is a huge factor in start-up failure. Plenty of things that went bad in the past could very well succeed today. The problem is to overcome the resistance that says 'it didn't work before, why should it work now' and then to repeat that process externally with every other party you interact with other than the customers.
It would be great to bolster that case with success stories of repeat-entrants into the race.
People ask me all the time to bring it back. Was fun when it was happening and I tried to be funny and good-spirited, but now I have more of an appreciation for entrepreneurs and how hard it is to build a business... so I won't bring it back.
Also won't bring it back because of onwards and upwards.. and so on.
Thanks for asking though :) Still makes me happy when people tell me they like my work.
Fuckedcompany served an important role as a reality check on some of the more idiotic aspects of the bubble. As an entrepreneur who was active at that very time I really want to thank you for providing a bit of a backdrop against which my strategy made some sense. I realized early on that 'go big or go home' would probably translate into 'go bust or go home' and I felt that the huge number of businesses that ended up in the 'go bust' bin versus the ones that made it turned the whole art of running a business more into something resembling a lottery.
So I agree fully with not bringing it back but if we ever get into another out-of-control over-hyped dumb money situation then I really hope that you or someone like you will do a re-run of fuckedcompany.com.
Please don't. Lots of horrible things were said there behind a wall of anonymity. Think Secret + 4chan for failed startups. For those of us that tried to do the right thing by our employees, it was very hurtful.
The commentors on fuckedcompany were the kind of people that like to rubberneck around accidents and disasters. Some people get off on other people's misery. That doesn't mean that the site itself served a purpose, and a FC sans comments would already be plenty useful.
Most of these, given the order, look to be from our original compilation of startup failure post-mortems. We've compiled 101 to date which you can see here.
Perhaps more useful, we also sifted through and analyzed each post-mortem to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. The biggest reasons founders have cited has not been running out of money or the economy but building a solution looking for a problem.
We use an ESP to send the emails and sometimes, the PDF goes instantly and sometimes upto an hour. If you didn't receive for some reason, feel free to ping me directly. Email in profile.
It doesn't get that far. I type in my email, press the button and "Please enter a valid email address." appears. Not sure why I've been downvoted for the previous comment, your validator really is broken.
6 alpha chars @ gmail.com, on Firefox and Chrome on OS X 10.9.5. Really should work; doesn't. Console shows that you're passing an empty string to getElementById at some point.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but it's really not cool to copy people's writing wholesale into a book. It's really a terrible way to pay back people who were willing to publicly share their startup failures (in a format they controlled).
Also, the "I'm not profiting, looking to profit from these collected works" disclaimer is almost as bad as "no copyright infringement intended" on YouTube videos. Regardless of your profit, it is still copyright infringement to copy people's content without their consent.
It's especially egregious that the original source is only listed at the end of articles, where there's no reason to bother clicking through (since you've already read it). Plus, in many cases the original sources had relevant and interesting images which are omitted here.
They didn't - my previous startup (Diffle) is on the list, and I was never notified. Nor did cbinsights.com, which has a comment here complaining about how this post ripped off their original compilation of stories. I'm not all that ruffled - I figure that once you put something on the web it will take on a life of its own regardless of what you want - but it would've been a nice courtesy to the folks who sweated over those startups.
Hey Jonathan - Anand from CB Insights here. Thx for the comment and for writing a great post-mortem.
One distinction - we didn't republish your post. We linked out to the original post you'd written and quoted a few lines from it which we thought were particularly telling about the reasons behind & process of shutting down.
That was the format we took throughout the post. Original link and a few line excerpt.
The interesting thing, for me, is that you didn't actually link to the postmortem, you linked to the addendum to the postmortem published 6 months later. The actual postmortem was here:
I wrote the aftermath because I felt that there were a few other things that should be said with the benefit of hindsight, and I'm actually thinking of writing a second aftermath, 6 years later, but want to see how events unfold first. Most of the actual lessons are in the postmortem.
(I'm not miffed - I think one of the great strengths of the web is the ease of linking to and republishing content. But I do think it's worth pointing out that one of the pitfalls of aggregators is that you lose the original context of the post - in my case, there was a whole blog that tracked the startup journey, day by day, and not just a single post.)
Let's hope everybody whose story got lifted is as laid back about it as you are. The obvious solution would be to simply publish a list of links and to then approach the authors to ask for permission for the sake of consistency in the presentation.
It would be even better if authors who are going to say yes to a request like that would make it clear, by using a Creative Commons license in the first place.
That eliminates the possibility of saying yes on a case-by-case basis, though. I'm generally okay with stuff I write on the Internet appearing in compilations, reblogs, commentary, articles, etc. - but I have declined if, for example, the journalist seems to be writing a piece with a particular slant that I feel misrepresents what I was trying to say.
That's why you write in situations like these in the first place. That's a way to pre-emptively stake your position giving journalists minimal room for creative mis-interpretation.
Interviews are a totally different situation and 'on the record' quotes out of context are the very reason I avoid interviews like the plague. I've yet to have one where that didn't happen, journalists are also called 'reporters' but from my experience 'reporting' to them does not mean reporting what was told to them but retelling in a way that suits their own agenda.
> journalists are also called 'reporters' but from my experience 'reporting' to them does not mean reporting what was told to them but retelling in a way that suits their own agenda
I've seen arguments that there are too many facts to be told, so it is the very job of a journalist to take those facts and tell a story by selectively highlighting ones that matter in that story.
I disagree with the premise. I think we (the audience) could handle all the facts if they were given to us straight. The narrative journalists are creating is not helpful, is actively harmful - because it's always someone's agenda and because they twist the facts too much (i.e. they lie through their teeth) to tell that story.
INB4 I get accused of generalizing, I'm invoking Sturgeon's law twice - once on journalists and once on critical thinking of general population, all that while giving a friendly reminder that this "general population" is the majority of the electorate. Sometimes all that crap tends to reinforce instead of cancelling out.
There are some interesting stories in here (check out the condom key-chain one), but it would be nice if they were broken down by industry, or at least didn't have quite so many service-offered-over-web/new-blogging-service stories. Maybe its just that there are so many of those these days? It makes me wonder if anyone reading this has some information breaking down startup failure rates by industry or sector... perhaps with average capitalization and length of operation before failure. It would make sense to me that the typical cat-video-sharing startup might have a much higher failure rate, but lower capital cost and years invested, than say, genomics startups or solar power startups. It might be good to see how gift stores, enterprise software or financial services fit in between those extremes.
Thanks for posting them here. This is great HN content.
the key-chain one is hilarious. That sets the tone from the start:
"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn't know the first thing about starting a business. When I asked a successful classmate how to invoice a customer, he suggested I go to one of the large business-supply warehouses. "They sell 'Business in a Box,' " he told me. "It's got everything you need." I didn't realize he was joking until I asked a clerk for one at Office Depot."
Great idea. Would be useful to have a summary of the business model at the top of each article. For example #68 Overto I've got no idea what they did and I want to know before reading about why they failed.
Yeah, there are some suckers in this post who do nothing better than complain.
Author did not copy anyone's content rather simply linked and compiled the list.
By that logic you should also complain about Google because all they do is show results for query and link to other people's content.
Author copied everybody's content verbatim without obtaining permission first, what you are saying is simply not true.
I think this is a very worthwhile project but that doesn't mean the author should trample over other people's rights.
So no, your 'logic' does not hold up for google because they LINK to the content rather than that they copy it and display it in their own environment (incidentally, google images does do that and I think they ought to be slapped for that).
This is an amazing resource. I just read a couple of them, it is gut-wrenching to read the founders' stories, but a reminder to everyone else to learn and not repeat them.
a while back I asked for something like this except for current startups, successfull or not, and what they have learned. currently I'm following Mediums startup section
http://amazon.com/FD-Companies-Spectacular-Dot-com-Flameouts...
I think many of them could be successful if relaunched today.