I had actually assumed it was the studio behind the Fable games, or some sort of mmrpg based on the games.

I have no idea why my startup Halo failed.

Same, my initial reaction is shock and disgust that I was missing out on a fable mmorpg

Or maybe it's that you're well informed and X wasn't well known...

When a product shuts down it's usually because it wasn't profitable (or not profitable enough). Either they didn't get enough paying customers or they set their pricing too low. For whatever reason- but there's probably some correlation between a product shutting down and many people not being aware of its existence.

Even without being well known, these stories can hit the front page if a few people upvote a post quickly, and then the post gets a few sympathy votes as it rises up the page.

When a VC-backed company shuts down, it's usually because they weren't growing. You can only get to the next round of funding if you're still growing—otherwise you run out of runway.

I don't think profit plays a big role.

Profit plays the biggest role, growth is secondary. Another round of funding is only necessary if they aren't profitable enough to sustain themselves on their own.

Although, as I think about it, maybe as an AI company nobody ever expected them to ever get to profitability so the only way to continue their existence was through continued funding.

IMO the biggest detriment of VC-backed companies is that they can still get killed when they're profitable because they're just not profitable enough.

You found a company and own 100%. You get investment and bring on partners, you set aside 20% for employee shares, etc. All of a sudden there's a dozen owners and nobody owns 50%. You're profitable in the sense that everyone's payroll clears and you're making rent, with money left over, but it's not enough to invest in anything big, and the investors won't put up anything more because your growth has stalled.

Every investor who was previously your "partner" will be trying to shut the company down and sell it for parts.

VCs don't make their money by having a portfolio of companies throwing off $200k/yr in profit to a dozen different investors.

Maybe if you had heard of it, it wouldn't be winding down

This is what happens when massive amounts of free money slosh around courtesy of ZIRP. Question is: will everybody rush to join whatever new darling graces the front page? Or will they finally learn their lesson?

This seems like a weird comment to make a throwaway for :)

The very best example of that is the Kagi search engine which, if you spend on time of HN, looks very widely used, but actually has less than 10,000 customers.

It is the right order of magnitude, but when stats are already publiclcy available let's be accurate :)

https://kagi.com/stats

Ah yeah, my information is probably from a year+ ago since they passed 20K only in January 2024

Yeah, I thought it was the F#-to-JS compiler, and I was sad for a moment. I've never heard of this app so it's hard for me to be too upset over it.