At 1:30 AM on August 10, 2015, the inboxes of 400 employees simultaneously lit up with a catastrophic message. While most of the workforce slept, an email arrived from CEO Maren Kate Donovan announcing that the startup was ceasing all…
Why Homejoy failed comes down to one broken week in July 2015 but the real story starts two years earlier. Homejoy, a San Francisco cleaning startup that had raised nearly $40 million and booked cleanings in 35 cities across four…
In March 2011, a photo-sharing app nobody had used yet announced it had more money than Google got from the same investor at the same stage. The Color app startup failure happened because Color Labs raised $41 million in venture…
In January 2013, three founders in New York launched an app that Twitter had already agreed to buy four months earlier before it had a single user. Three years later, that same app had over 200 million people watching six-second…
In November 2015, a small Welsh drone company quietly filed for insolvency, and with it went the largest crowdfunding failure Europe had ever seen. The Zano drone Kickstarter failure happened because a small Welsh engineering firm called Torquing Group promised…
The Arrivo Collapse: Executive Summary On December 14, 2018, the remaining employees of Arrivo Corporation learned their jobs were gone. There was no all-hands meeting. There was no official company-wide email from the CEO. They were laid off via text…
