Startup Failures

Former employees and observers say Mashable is a story of a company that lost its editorial focus, overspent and fumbled its pivot to video. (2017)

Wired Magazine, 2017: "Venture funding for hardware startups hit an eight-year high in 2016, with investors pouring $4.4 billion into 624 startups,... (2017)

I’m shutting down Esper, an enterprise machine learning (ML) startup that I founded 4 years ago. We raised roughly $4M of venture capital and were ... (2017)

The beauty-box startup finally reached a deal, but it will leave some investors with nothing. Perhaps the problem wasn’t money. .. (2018)

Drone operating system startup Airware today suddenly informed employees it will cease operations immediately despite having raised $118 million fr... (2018)

Mattermark, the site for startup and company data, is shutting down its own business after selling in a disappointing outcome to FullContact. In a ... (2017)

The company is laying off hundreds of jobs, and said its Karma drone will be the last it makes (2018)

Perhaps some edtech companies can get a second life.Back in May 2016, Curriculet, a venture-backed startup that built a student-facing platform wit... (2017)

The ride-hailing service is a giant, but companies that aim to get stuff done on demand for customers, like food delivery, grocery shopping and par... (2018)

Remember all the “Uber for x” startups? A few years ago a ton of “Uber for x” startups got funded, but very few of them – maybe none? – worked out.... (2018)

StumbleUpon, the social content discovery platform founded way back in 2001, is closing down. (2018)

The Google Cemetery - List of dead google products and why they died. (2018)

We analyzed 101+ startup failure post-mortems to identify the top reasons startups fail. Here they are. (2018)

On-demand food delivery startup Munchery is shutting down, the startup announced in an e-mail to customers on Monday. (2019)

Avni Patel Thompson founded Poppy, which helped parents book the best caregivers. They went through the YC Winter 2016 batch and recently shut down... (2019)

Before it even launched in early 2013, more than 1 million people signed up to try Mailbox. A month later, at the height of the app’s popularity, D... (2015)

As I quietly lamented (or at least noted) the impending death of GeoCities today, I wanted to double-check my memory that it was once one of the ve... (2009)

The 2010s were the decade of Google filling up its product graveyard, Apple stubbornly denying obvious missteps, and Microsoft writing off billions... (2019)

It’s a hard, hard fall. (2019)

+400 YC-backed startups have closed their doors in the last 15 years. Here are some of their biggest failures, sorted by funding. The truth is t... (2020)

The founder was pushed out after clashing with experienced executives, highlighting a generational and gender divide within the clothing retailer. (2020)

The roller coaster for Yahoo finally ends. This timeline shows where Yahoo execs went wrong during the company's 20 year history. (2016)

Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia on The Ringer The live trivia app was once the obsession of the internet, but then it all went wrong ... (2020)

Around a year ago I left my job as a Developer Advocate to bootstrap a company. I had around $12K in savings. Enough to cover a year of expenses an... (2020)

A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review VC's have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employ... (2019)