25 Most Valuable Startups That Failed This Year

Re:25 Most Valuable Startups That Failed This Year by joshstrange on Thursday November 08, 2018 @03:50PM (#18409891)

Wow, what a lazy article, buzzfeed called, they want their listicles back... For real though, we couldn't get a paragraph per company on what they do and why they failed? I'm not asking for deep deep insights or breaking down every mistake they made but with ZERO research let me do one for Theranos:

    Medical company that claimed they could run a number of tests with just 1 drop of blood. Turned out they lied about their abilities and really didn't create any new tech but used existing tech and due to the low sample size they had a number of false positive/negatives.

I think my fasts are about 90% correct but still if I can do that in a minute with no research I think that I "journalist" can manage to do that for 25 startups.

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Re:25 Most Valuable Startups That Failed This Year by Fission on Thursday November 08, 2018 @06:50PM (#18411125)

I think that it's particularly difficult to write about why a company failed. Theranos is an extreme example, because the root cause of the company's failure is pretty clear and because there's a lot of mindshare and commentary about their issues. For many other companies, failure is a culmination of many different issues, many of which are likely to be private. As a result, unless someone with good internal insight into the failure of the company makes a public post, a la Shyp founder Kevin [1], there likely isn't one comprehensive single cause of failure, and any speculation would likely be doing a disservice to the company.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-we-d...

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