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Failure cases
Browse the current case set by type, domain, country, root cause, and collapse pattern.
357 of 357 cases
2013 Singapore Penny Stock Crash
Between 2012 and 2013, John Soh Chee Wen and Quah Su-Ling ran a coordinated scheme to manipulate the shares of three related Singapore-listed companies through 187 trading accounts controlled by associates and nominees. When the scheme unraveled in October 2013, roughly S$8 billion in market value vanished within days, and after one of the longest trials in Singapore's history, both were convicted and given the country's harshest-ever market-manipulation sentences.
- Industry
- Securities Trading
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
3dfx
3dfx made the Voodoo cards that gave 1990s PC gaming its first real 3D graphics, and for a moment it owned the category. Then it made a fatal move. It bought its own card manufacturer and cut out the partners who sold its chips, pushing them straight to Nvidia. Product delays and huge losses followed, and in December 2000 a beaten 3dfx sold its assets to Nvidia and dissolved.
- Company
- 3dfx Interactive
- Industry
- Semiconductors
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
42Floors
42Floors set out to fix the misery of searching for office space online. Then it tried to also become an on-the-ground brokerage, and found it couldn't scale a national search platform and a hands-on brokerage at once. In 2015 it killed the brokerage, laid off half its staff, and refocused.
- Company
- 42Floors
- Industry
- Commercial Real Estate
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $17,400,000
A-11 Football League
The A-11 Football League was a planned professional spring football league built around the A-11 offense, a scheme in which all eleven offensive players could be eligible receivers. Announced in 2013 with USFL-revival team names and a 2014 ESPN broadcast deal for two showcase games, it postponed those games weeks before kickoff, dropped its California franchises over insurance costs, and quietly abandoned the A-11 concept in mid-2014. It never played a game.
- Industry
- Sports & Entertainment
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
A&P (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company)
A&P was America's Walmart before Walmart, the largest retailer in the country for decades, with 16,000 stores at its 1930s peak and a pioneering private-label, vertically integrated model. Then it stopped keeping up. Slow to modernize and squeezed by discounters below and premium grocers above, it declined for half a century, and a debt-laden late acquisition finished it. It went bankrupt twice and was liquidated in 2015.
- Company
- Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company
- Industry
- Grocery Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
A123 Systems
A123 Systems was an MIT-born battery maker that looked like the future of American electric vehicles, raising $371 million in the biggest green-tech IPO of 2009 and a $249 million federal grant. But the EV market did not scale as hoped, it leaned on a few shaky customers, and a costly recall of faulty batteries in Fisker's Karma drained it. A123 went bankrupt in 2012 and its assets were bought by a Chinese conglomerate.
- Company
- A123 Systems
- Industry
- Energy Storage
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- $371,000,000
Aereo
Aereo let you watch and record live broadcast TV over the internet for about $8 a month, using a personal dime-sized antenna it rented you in a data center. The whole company was a bet that this made it a device rental, not a cable operator. In June 2014 the Supreme Court disagreed 6 to 3, and Aereo, with roughly $100 million raised, paused within three days and was bankrupt by November.
- Company
- Aereo
- Industry
- Streaming Media
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $100,000,000
AIG (2008 bailout)
AIG was the world's largest insurer when a single London derivatives desk nearly destroyed it in 2008. AIG Financial Products had sold credit-default swaps insuring tens of billions of dollars of mortgage securities for nearly every major bank on earth, treating the premiums as almost free money. When housing collapsed and a September 2008 downgrade triggered about $13 billion in collateral demands it could not meet, the Federal Reserve stepped in with an $85 billion loan that grew into a rescue of roughly $182 billion, the largest corporate bailout of the crisis.
- Company
- American International Group
- Industry
- Insurance
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Air Berlin
Air Berlin grew into Germany's second-largest airline through debt-funded acquisitions, but never made money and was kept aloft by Abu Dhabi's Etihad Airways. Etihad's hub-feed strategy distracted it from low-cost competition, and when Etihad stopped writing cheques in August 2017 the airline collapsed within weeks.
- Company
- Air Berlin
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Air India
India's flag carrier, nationalized in 1953 after starting life as Tata Airlines, spent the years after a troubled 2007 merger with domestic carrier Indian Airlines losing money every year, taking on tens of billions of dollars in debt while low-cost rivals took its market share. Repeated government bailouts kept it flying without fixing its cost structure, and in 2021 the state sold it back to the Tata Group, ending 69 years of government ownership.
- Company
- Air India
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Airware
Airware raised $118 million from Silicon Valley's best investors to become the operating system of commercial drones. But it could not win in hardware against China's DJI, and its late pivot to enterprise drone-data software could not sell fast enough to pay the bills. After 18 months hunting for cash, it ran out in 2018 and shut down overnight.
- Company
- Airware
- Industry
- Drones
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $118,000,000
Alcatel-Lucent
The 2006 "merger of equals" between France's Alcatel and America's Lucent was meant to create a telecom-equipment champion. Instead it produced a decade of losses, culture clashes, and endless restructuring, before Nokia absorbed what was left in 2016.
- Company
- Alcatel-Lucent
- Industry
- Telecommunications Equipment
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Alitalia
Italy's flag carrier lost money in all but one year of its 75-year life. A high cost base, money-losing routes, and low-cost and high-speed-rail competition made it chronically unprofitable, but serial state bailouts kept it flying instead of forcing reform, until the money and the model both ran out in 2021.
- Company
- Alitalia
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
AltaVista
Before Google, AltaVista was how you searched the web. Built in 1995 to show off Digital Equipment Corporation's fast Alpha chip, it was the first search engine that could index and search the whole internet quickly, and by the late 1990s it was one of the most visited sites online. Then it lost the plot. As Google won on focused, relevance-ranked search, AltaVista turned itself into a cluttered Yahoo-style portal and was passed from owner to owner. Google overtook it by around 2001, and Yahoo quietly switched it off in 2013.
- Company
- Digital Equipment Corporation
- Industry
- Web Search
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Amazon Destinations
Amazon Destinations was Amazon's attempt at hotel booking, a site for short weekend getaways within driving distance of home. It launched in April 2015 in Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles, expanded to 35 cities by July, and then closed without warning that October. Amazon offered no real explanation beyond saying it had "learned a lot," one of the fastest deaths of any Amazon consumer product.
- Company
- Amazon
- Industry
- Online Travel
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Amazon Fire Phone
Amazon's premium-priced smartphone launched into a mature two-OS market with no compelling advantage, and was written off within months.
- Company
- Amazon
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Amazon Local
Amazon Local (originally AmazonLocal) was Amazon's 2011 entry into the daily-deals boom, offering discounted vouchers for local businesses in competition with Groupon and LivingSocial. It launched with a LivingSocial supply partnership and reached roughly 40 US markets, but never became a category leader. Amazon quietly wound the service down in late 2015, closing it alongside its Local Register card-reader business as the entire daily-deals model collapsed industry-wide.
- Company
- Amazon
- Industry
- Local Commerce
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Amazon Restaurants
Amazon Restaurants was Amazon's four-year attempt to win food delivery. Launched in Seattle in 2015 through Prime Now, it offered free delivery for Prime members and no menu markups, and it still could not gain a foothold against Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Deliveroo. Amazon closed the UK service in 2018 and shut the US business in June 2019, then did the telling thing. Instead of competing, it put $575 million into its rival Deliveroo.
- Company
- Amazon
- Industry
- Food Delivery
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Amazon Spark
Amazon Spark was Amazon's Instagram, a shoppable photo feed for Prime members where you posted products you loved and others tapped "smiles" instead of likes. The problem was in the premise. It was built around buying, not around people, so it felt transactional and bland, and it lacked the reasons anyone opens Instagram. About 10,000 Amazon customers used it on day one. Two years later, in 2019, Amazon quietly shut it down.
- Company
- Amazon
- Industry
- Social Commerce
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
AMR Corporation (American Airlines) 2011 Bankruptcy
AMR Corporation, the parent of American Airlines, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 29, 2011, the last of the major US legacy carriers to do so. Delta, United, US Airways, and Northwest had already used bankruptcy in the 2000s to strip out labor costs and dump pension obligations, and American's decision to stay out of court left it competing for a decade with a heavier cost structure than its already-restructured rivals. The bankruptcy cut 13,000 jobs and led to a 2013 merger with US Airways, whose management took control of the combined American Airlines Group.
- Company
- AMR Corporation
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Anbang Insurance Group
Anbang Insurance Group grew into one of China's largest and most acquisitive insurers, known for buying New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel, on the strength of aggressive fundraising that regulators later found illegal. China's insurance regulator seized the company in 2018 after founder Wu Xiaohui was convicted of fraud and embezzlement, and spent two years winding down the takeover before transferring its viable operations to a newly created successor.
- Company
- Anbang Insurance Group Co., Ltd.
- Industry
- Insurance
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Anki
Anki was a consumer robotics star, debuting its AI-driven toy cars at Apple's 2013 stage, then selling 1.5 million Cozmo and Vector robots and nearly $100 million of them in 2017 alone. It still could not make the hardware pay for itself, and depended on the next round of funding to survive. When a late-stage deal with a strategic investor collapsed in 2019, Anki abruptly shut down and laid off its roughly 200 staff.
- Company
- Anki
- Industry
- Consumer Robotics
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $200,000,000
Ansett Australia
One of Australia's two great airlines flew an ageing, under-invested fleet that was grounded over safety while low-cost newcomers and Qantas undercut it. Losing about A$1.3 million a day, it was cut loose by its owner after 9/11 and collapsed in 2001.
- Company
- Ansett Australia
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
AOL–Time Warner
The largest merger of its era united a dot-com darling with a media empire. It then destroyed roughly $99 billion in value as cultures clashed and AOL's business collapsed, widely called the worst merger in corporate history.
- Company
- AOL Time Warner
- Industry
- Media & Internet
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
App.net
App.net was a paid, ad-free social network, a bet that if users, not advertisers, paid the bills, the product would finally serve them. Launched in 2012 on a $750,000 crowdfunding wave, it never pulled enough paying users from free Twitter, ran out of money for staff by 2014, and shut down in 2017.
- Company
- App.net
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Apple AirPower
Apple announced a charge-anywhere wireless mat, hit engineering walls it could not clear, and cancelled it without ever shipping, its first such reversal.
- Company
- Apple
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Apple Lisa
The Apple Lisa, launched in January 1983, was the first personal computer most people could buy with a graphical interface and a mouse, ideas Apple had seen at Xerox PARC. It was also a commercial flop. At $9,995, roughly $25,000 in today's money, it was far too expensive for the business buyers it targeted, and within a year Apple's own cheaper Macintosh delivered the same ideas at a quarter of the price and eclipsed it. Apple discontinued the Lisa in 1985 and later buried thousands of unsold units in a landfill.
- Company
- Apple
- Industry
- Personal Computers
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Apple Maps (2012 launch)
In September 2012 Apple dropped Google Maps as the iPhone default and shipped its own Maps in iOS 6. It was a disaster of wrong locations, roads that did not exist, melted 3D bridges, and no transit directions. Within a week Tim Cook issued Apple's first public product apology and told customers to use rivals instead. The debacle cost software chief Scott Forstall his job. The product eventually recovered, but the launch remains one of tech's most famous failures.
- Company
- Apple
- Industry
- Software (Mapping)
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Apple Newton (MessagePad)
The Apple Newton MessagePad was the original personal digital assistant, a pen-based handheld launched in 1993 whose headline feature, handwriting recognition, famously did not work. Mocked in Doonesbury and on The Simpsons, priced at $699, and years ahead of the technology it needed, it sold a fraction of Apple's hopes. Steve Jobs killed it in 1998 on his return. Its deepest legacy is not the device but the chip it forced Apple to co-create, ARM, which now powers every iPhone.
- Company
- Apple
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Apple Ping
Apple Ping was a music social network bolted into iTunes in 2010 with 160 million users of instant reach. It launched walled off inside a store, stripped of the Facebook integration Apple had planned, and quickly filled with spam and fake accounts. Almost no one used it, and Apple shut it down in 2012.
- Company
- Apple
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Arcandor
Arcandor was a German retail giant. Karstadt department stores, the Quelle mail-order house, and a majority stake in Thomas Cook. Its core businesses were in long decline, and a sale-and-leaseback strategy stripped its store properties, leaving it paying rents it couldn't afford. It filed for insolvency in 2009.
- Company
- Arcandor
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Atari and the 1983 Video Game Crash
In the early 1980s Atari ruled home video games. Then it flooded the market with too many machines and too many bad games, none more infamous than E.T., a rushed movie tie-in widely called the worst game ever made. Consumer confidence collapsed, the US console business crashed by roughly 97 percent, and Atari took a $310 million quarterly loss. In September 1983 it buried mountains of unsold cartridges in a New Mexico landfill, an act so notorious it became a legend later dug up on camera.
- Company
- Atari
- Industry
- Video Games
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Atrium
Atrium raised $75 million to reinvent the law firm, pairing an in-house firm with software that would make legal work dramatically more efficient. The two-company model never cohered, the promised efficiency gains didn't materialize, and after a last-ditch pivot it shut down in 2020.
- Company
- Atrium
- Industry
- Legal Technology
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $75,500,000
Balanced Payments
Balanced built payments infrastructure for online marketplaces and processed hundreds of millions a year. Then its bigger, better-funded YC classmate Stripe moved into the same niche, and in a thin-margin, scale-driven business, Balanced lost its customers and handed them to the rival that beat it.
- Company
- Balanced
- Industry
- Payments
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $3,400,000
Bank of United States (1930 failure)
Despite its official-sounding name, the Bank of United States was an ordinary privately owned commercial bank in New York, not a government institution. Built on immigrant and working-class Jewish depositors on the Lower East Side, it grew rapidly in the 1920s through real estate lending and securities affiliates that left it dangerously exposed once property values and markets turned down after 1929. A run on deposits in December 1930 forced state regulators to close it, at the time the largest bank failure in the country's history.
- Company
- Bank of United States
- Industry
- Commercial Banking
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Barings Bank crisis (1890)
Barings Brothers, London's most prestigious merchant bank, spent the 1880s underwriting a wave of Argentine government and railway bonds. When Argentina's finances collapsed under debt, inflation, and political upheaval in 1889 and 1890, Barings was left holding millions of pounds of unsellable paper against a fraction as much capital. Facing insolvency in November 1890, the bank turned to the Bank of England, whose governor, William Lidderdale, organized a guarantee fund among London's leading banks to cover Barings' liabilities. The rescue held. Barings survived, diminished, and a systemic panic in the City of London was averted, though Argentina's own economy did not escape so lightly.
- Company
- Barings Brothers
- Industry
- Merchant Banking
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Barneys New York
Barneys New York was the temple of American luxury retail, the store that made careers and defined taste for decades. But luxury shopping moved online and to brands' own boutiques, its store-centric model aged, and a sharp rent increase on its Madison Avenue flagship tipped it over. It filed for bankruptcy in 2019, and rather than being saved, was sold for its name and liquidated after 96 years.
- Company
- Barneys New York
- Industry
- Luxury Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Beanie Babies bubble
Beanie Babies were $5 plush toys that became one of the strangest speculative bubbles of the 1990s. Ty Inc. manufactured scarcity by "retiring" specific animals, and a belief took hold that the little beanbag animals were investments, with rare ones reselling for hundreds to a couple thousand dollars on the new online marketplaces. Ty Inc. passed $1 billion in sales at the peak. Then a clumsy 1999 announcement that all Beanies would be retired shook the faith holding prices up, and around 2000 the values collapsed, leaving collectors with bins of near-worthless toys.
- Company
- Ty Inc.
- Industry
- Toys
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Bear Stearns
Bear Stearns was Wall Street's fifth-largest investment bank, 85 years old, and it vanished in a weekend. Loaded with subprime-mortgage bets and funding itself day to day, it hit a classic run in March 2008. Lenders stopped lending, clients pulled out, and the cash ran dry. The Federal Reserve engineered an emergency fire sale to JPMorgan Chase at $2 a share, down from $30 days earlier, backstopped by $30 billion of Fed money. It was the first domino of the 2008 crisis.
- Company
- Bear Stearns
- Industry
- Investment Banking
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Beats Music
Beats Music was a subscription streaming service built by Beats Electronics, the headphones company co-founded by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, with Trent Reznor as chief creative officer. It launched in January 2014 arguing that human curation, not algorithms, was the better way to help people find music. Sixteen months later Apple, which had bought Beats for about $3 billion, folded its technology and curators into the new Apple Music and shut the standalone app down.
- Company
- Beats Electronics
- Industry
- Music Streaming
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Beepi
Beepi promised to fix used-car buying, purchase online, delivered to your door. It raised about $150 million at a $560M valuation, then burned roughly $7 million a month on inflated costs while fighting a market where most people won't buy a car sight-unseen. Two rescue deals collapsed, and it shut down in 2016.
- Company
- Beepi
- Industry
- Used-Car Marketplace
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $150,000,000
Beme
Beme was YouTuber Casey Neistat's video app, you filmed by pressing the phone to your chest, so you could never see the screen, in the name of unedited authenticity. Despite Neistat's huge following it never caught on against Snapchat or Instagram, so CNN bought it for about $25 million in 2016, then shut it down within two years.
- Company
- Beme
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
BenQ Mobile
Siemens paid Taiwan's BenQ to take its loss-making mobile-phone business off its hands. Within a year BenQ Mobile had burned about €840 million, failed to gain on Nokia and Motorola, and collapsed into insolvency.
- Company
- BenQ
- Industry
- Mobile Phones
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER)
Germany's flagship new airport became a byword for megaproject dysfunction. A fire-safety system that failed its tests, chronic mismanagement, and repeated delays pushed its opening about nine years late and its cost to roughly triple the plan.
- Industry
- Aviation & Public Infrastructure
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Bethlehem Steel
Bethlehem Steel built America, its beams framed the skyscrapers and its plates armored the warships, and it was the country's second-largest steelmaker. Then cheap foreign steel, nimble minimills, and a crushing legacy of pension and retiree costs ground it down. By the 1990s it was carrying four pensioners for every active worker and losing hundreds of millions a year. It went bankrupt in 2001, and in 2003 its assets were sold for scrap-heap prices to a new company.
- Company
- Bethlehem Steel
- Industry
- Steel
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Better Place
The EV battery-swapping startup that raised around $850M and built the infrastructure before proving anyone would buy the cars, then went bankrupt.
- Company
- Better Place
- Industry
- Electric Vehicles
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $850,000,000
Biosphere 2
Biosphere 2 was a sealed, three-acre glass world in the Arizona desert built to prove humans could live inside a self-sustaining ecosystem, a rehearsal for space colonies. Eight people locked themselves in for two years in 1991. The closed system could not hold. Oxygen fell until ten tons had to be pumped in, crops failed and the crew went hungry, the seal was broken repeatedly, and outside scientists resigned over the lack of rigor. It was widely derided as a costly stunt.
- Company
- Space Biosphere Ventures
- Industry
- Environmental Science
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Bird
The fastest startup ever to a billion-dollar valuation blanketed cities with shared e-scooters. But they wore out and vanished faster than they earned, and Bird went from a $2 billion company to bankruptcy in five years.
- Company
- Bird
- Industry
- Micromobility
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Blab
Blab was a live-streaming app for group video chats, a "Periscope for groups", that grew to 3.9 million users in a year. But only about one in ten came back daily, the format never sustained engagement, and against Twitter-backed Periscope it shut down in 2016.
- Company
- Blab
- Industry
- Live Streaming
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Black Bottom and Paradise Valley
Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were the heart of Black Detroit, a near-east-side district of hundreds of Black-owned businesses and a nationally famous music scene. In the name of urban renewal the city condemned it as a slum, and in the 1950s and 1960s it was cleared for the Chrysler Freeway and a modernist housing development. Around 43,000 people were displaced, about 70 percent of them Black, most of them renters who got no compensation and thirty days to leave. The neighborhood was never rebuilt for the people it removed.
- Industry
- Urban Renewal
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
BlackBerry
The smartphone pioneer that dismissed the touchscreen, watched its market share fall from dominance to near zero, and quit making phones.
- Company
- BlackBerry
- Industry
- Smartphones
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
BlackBerry PlayBook
BlackBerry rushed a tablet to challenge the iPad, and shipped it without native email, the very thing its brand was built on. Panned and unsold, the PlayBook forced a $485 million writedown and was gone within two years.
- Company
- BlackBerry
- Industry
- Tablets
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Blockbuster
The video-rental giant that passed on Netflix, leaned on late fees, and abandoned its own online strategy before streaming buried it.
- Company
- Blockbuster
- Industry
- Video Rental
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Blue Apron
Blue Apron went public in June 2017 as the first US meal-kit company to list, pricing at $10 a share after cutting its target range when Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods spooked investors days before the roadshow closed. The stock lost half its value within months and kept sliding as the company burned cash acquiring customers who churned within a few months of signing up. Six years, several CEOs, and a shift to an asset-light delivery model later, Blue Apron sold itself to Marc Lore's Wonder Group in 2023 for $103 million, about five percent of its IPO valuation.
- Company
- Blue Apron
- Industry
- Meal-Kit Delivery
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $300,000,000
Boo.com
A UK online-fashion pioneer that raised about $135M, built a beautiful but unusable website, over-expanded across countries, and collapsed in six months of selling.
- Company
- Boo.com
- Industry
- E-commerce
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $135,000,000
Borders
The bookstore chain that outsourced its website to Amazon and arrived late to e-books, then went bankrupt and liquidated every store.
- Company
- Borders
- Industry
- Bookstore Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Braniff International
When US airlines were deregulated in 1978, Braniff bet on rapid growth, new cities, routes, and about a billion dollars of aircraft. Then debt, fuel costs, and 20% interest rates crushed the over-extended carrier, which shut down in 1982.
- Company
- Braniff International
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
British Leyland
British Leyland Motor Corporation formed in 1968 when the UK government pushed through a merger of Leyland Motors and British Motor Holdings, uniting Austin, Morris, Jaguar, Rover, Triumph, MG and other marques into a single company meant to rival American and continental carmakers. Instead it inherited overlapping brands, aging factories and a fractious workforce, and its cars became known for poor build quality and constant strikes. By 1975 it was insolvent, and the government nationalized it to save a million jobs. It survived another thirteen years as a state-owned company before being broken up and privatized piece by piece.
- Company
- British Leyland
- Industry
- Automotive manufacturing
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Bump
Bump let you tap two phones together to swap contacts and photos, and it was a genuine hit, 125 million downloads. But it never found a way to make money, Apple's AirDrop made phone-tapping redundant, and after Google bought it for a modest ~$35 million, the app was shut down within months.
- Company
- Bump Technologies
- Industry
- Consumer Mobile Apps
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $20,000,000
Cadillac Cimarron
The Cadillac Cimarron was General Motors' attempt to give its most prestigious brand a compact, fuel-efficient entry to compete with European imports. Instead of building a distinct car, GM took its cheap J-body platform, shared with the Chevrolet Cavalier, and sold a lightly dressed-up version as a Cadillac at thousands of dollars above the Cavalier's price. Critics and buyers saw through the badge job immediately. The car sold poorly, damaged Cadillac's reputation for years, and GM discontinued it after the 1988 model year.
- Company
- General Motors
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Casper Sleep
Casper pioneered the direct-to-consumer "bed in a box" mattress and was valued at $1.1 billion in a 2019 private funding round. By the time it went public in February 2020, competition from dozens of copycat DTC brands and incumbent mattress makers had driven up marketing costs and squeezed margins, and the IPO valued the company at under $600 million. The stock fell further as losses continued, and in 2022 private equity firm Durational Capital Management took Casper private again at a fraction of its earlier value.
- Company
- Casper Sleep
- Industry
- Direct-to-Consumer Mattresses and Bedding
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Chrysler (2009 bankruptcy)
Chrysler entered 2009 as the weakest of Detroit's Big Three, owned by a private-equity firm that had bought it at the top of the market and cut its product development to the bone. When US car sales fell about 30 percent in 2008, its thin, aging lineup could not survive. Federal loans were not enough, and in March 2009 President Obama gave it a month to merge with Fiat or fail. On April 30, 2009 Chrysler filed for Chapter 11 with $39.3 billion in assets, and in June its good assets were sold into a new Fiat-led company, wiping out its owner Cerberus.
- Company
- Chrysler
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Circuit City
A leading US electronics retailer fired its most experienced salespeople to cut costs, gutting the service that set it apart. It was bankrupt within two years.
- Company
- Circuit City
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
CNN+
CNN's premium streaming service launched into an imminent merger and was shut down by its new owners about a month later.
- Company
- CNN
- Industry
- Streaming Media
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Coda Automotive
Coda Automotive raised about $125 million to sell an all-electric sedan, built partly in China, to American drivers. The car was plain, its roughly $45,000 price undercut it against the better-known Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, and almost nobody bought it. A 2012 airbag recall covered just 78 cars. Coda went bankrupt in 2013 having sold only around 100.
- Company
- Coda Automotive
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $125,000,000
Cold fusion (1989)
In March 1989 two chemists announced, at a press conference before peer review, that they had produced nuclear fusion in a tabletop jar at room temperature, a limitless clean-energy breakthrough. Within weeks, labs worldwide failed to reproduce it and found the measurements flawed; "cold fusion" became the byword for premature science.
- Company
- University of Utah
- Industry
- Scientific Research
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Color Labs (Color app)
Color raised $41 million before it shipped a single thing, the largest sum Sequoia had ever put into a pre-launch startup. Its app used a phone's sensors to auto-share your photos with strangers within about 100 feet. Almost nobody wanted that. Panned at its March 2011 launch and unable to find traction through repeated pivots, Color became the poster child of Silicon Valley overfunding, and ended less than two years later as a roughly $7 million acqui-hire by Apple.
- Company
- Color Labs
- Industry
- Photo Sharing
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Comet
Comet was one of Britain's biggest electricals chains, but its sales and its lucrative warranty income were sliding as shoppers moved online. In early 2012 a private-equity firm bought it for a token 2 pounds, and within nine months it was gone. When credit insurers pulled cover, suppliers demanded cash upfront, the money ran out, and Comet collapsed into administration with about 6,600 jobs lost.
- Company
- Comet
- Industry
- Electronics Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Commodore International
Commodore dominated home computing with the best-selling Commodore 64 and owned the technically brilliant Amiga. Then boardroom turmoil, revolving-door management, and neglect of software and marketing squandered it all, and it went bankrupt in 1994.
- Company
- Commodore
- Industry
- Home Computers
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Compaq
Compaq was the great IBM-compatible upstart, founded by three engineers in 1982 and the fastest company ever to reach the Fortune 500. By the mid-1990s it had passed IBM to become the biggest PC maker in the world. Then Dell reinvented the business by selling directly to customers at lower prices, and Compaq, tied to its retail channel, could not answer. A $9.6 billion acquisition of Digital Equipment brought problems instead of synergies, the CEO was forced out, and in 2002 a declining Compaq was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard. The brand was gone entirely by 2013.
- Industry
- Personal Computers
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Concorde
Concorde was an engineering triumph and a commercial failure. The Anglo-French supersonic airliner crossed the Atlantic in half the time, but sonic-boom bans confined it to over-water routes, the 1973 oil crisis made its thirst ruinous, and every airline order was cancelled except the two state carriers. Just 20 were built, subsidised by governments, and it was retired in 2003.
- Company
- British Aircraft Corporation / Sud Aviation
- Industry
- Aviation
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
CONTOUR (2002)
CONTOUR (Comet Nucleus Tour) was a NASA Discovery-program spacecraft built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to fly close by and photograph the nuclei of two, potentially three, comets. It launched successfully on July 3, 2002, and spent 43 days in a phasing orbit around Earth. On August 15, 2002, its solid rocket motor fired to push it out of Earth orbit toward comet Encke. No telemetry was designed to be collected during the burn, and no signal was received afterward. Ground telescopes soon found several objects near the spacecraft's expected position, indicating it had broken apart. A NASA investigation board concluded the most likely cause was that exhaust plume heating from the rocket motor, not adequately accounted for in the spacecraft's design, overheated and structurally weakened the forward end of the craft. The exact cause was never confirmed, because no data was returned during the burn itself.
- Company
- NASA
- Industry
- Aerospace and Space Exploration
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Coolest Cooler
The Coolest Cooler was a cooler with a blender, speaker, and phone charger that became the most-funded Kickstarter ever in 2014, raising about $13 million from 60,000 backers. Then the hard part began. It badly underestimated what it cost to build, ran out of money, sold units on Amazon while backers waited, and wound down in 2019 with roughly 20,000 people who paid never getting a cooler.
- Company
- Coolest
- Industry
- Consumer Products
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $13,000,000
Crystal Pepsi
A clear cola that rode novelty to a fast start, then collapsed as the curiosity faded, the taste disappointed, and Coca-Cola sabotaged the category.
- Company
- PepsiCo
- Industry
- Beverages
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
CueCat
The CueCat was a cat-shaped barcode scanner given away free during the dot-com boom so you could scan codes printed in magazines and be whisked to a website. Over a million were shipped. The premise never made sense to anyone, scanning a barcode was more work than typing a web address, so the devices became paperweights. It also quietly tracked what users scanned, sparking a privacy backlash, and hobbyists cracked it within days. Its maker, Digital Convergence, burned through a fortune and folded.
- Company
- Digital Convergence
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Cyanogen Inc
Cyanogen turned a beloved community version of Android into a startup with a war cry, its CEO vowing to put "a bullet through Google's head" and wrest Android from Google's control. But its software still ran on Google's Android and phones still needed Google's apps, so no serious handset maker would abandon Google for it. Its biggest partner walked, and Cyanogen shut down its services and OS at the end of 2016.
- Company
- Cyanogen Inc
- Industry
- Mobile Software
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Daewoo Group
Daewoo grew from a small trading firm into one of South Korea's three largest chaebol, built on aggressive debt-funded global expansion. When the 1997 Asian financial crisis forced its rivals to retrench, Daewoo took on still more debt instead, and in 1999 it collapsed under roughly $50–57 billion of it, one of the largest corporate failures in history.
- Company
- Daewoo Group
- Industry
- Conglomerate
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
DaimlerChrysler
The largest cross-border industrial merger of its time joined Daimler-Benz and Chrysler as "equals." But a German-American culture clash blocked integration, the synergies never came, and Daimler sold Chrysler nine years later for a fraction of the price.
- Company
- DaimlerChrysler
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
DART (2005 autonomous rendezvous demonstration)
NASA's Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology, DART, launched in April 2005 to prove a small spacecraft could find and maneuver near another satellite entirely on its own, without ground control. The plan called for DART to approach the target satellite MUBLCOM, hold at close range, and retreat. A biased GPS velocity reading triggered repeated navigation resets that burned through DART's maneuvering fuel, and a separate targeting error meant its collision-avoidance system never had an accurate read on distance. DART struck MUBLCOM at low speed, then ran out of fuel and began its planned retirement sequence without ever registering that a collision had occurred. This is not the 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which deliberately hit an asteroid and succeeded.
- Company
- NASA
- Industry
- Aerospace and Space Exploration
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Debenhams
Debenhams traded for 243 years, until a 2003 private-equity buyout loaded it with debt and sold the freeholds under its own stores. Left paying rent it once owned and starved of money to modernize, the hollowed-out chain couldn't fight the shift online, and was liquidated in 2021.
- Company
- Debenhams
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
DeLorean Motor Company
The DeLorean Motor Company built one car, the stainless-steel, gull-winged DMC-12, in a British-government-funded factory in Belfast. It was expensive (around $25,000, more than twice the average car), underpowered, and plagued by unreliable electronics, and it launched straight into the 1980-82 recession. Too few people bought it; by the end of 1981 only 3,000 had sold. The company went into receivership in February 1982, and the arrest of founder John DeLorean that October, on charges he was later acquitted of, finished off a firm that was already collapsing.
- Company
- DeLorean Motor Company
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Denver Airport Automated Baggage System
Denver's new airport bet on the world's largest automated baggage system. It mangled and misrouted bags, delayed the airport's opening by about 16 months, and was quietly abandoned a decade later.
- Industry
- Aviation & Systems Engineering
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Dick Smith Electronics
Woolworths sold the Australian electronics chain Dick Smith to a private-equity firm in 2012 for about A$20 million, less than its inventory was worth. Barely a year later it was floated on the stock market at around A$520 million. The dressed-up business couldn't fund its own stock, and it collapsed within weeks in early 2016.
- Company
- Dick Smith Electronics
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Digg
The web's leading social-news site until a 2010 redesign stripped out what users loved, drove them to Reddit, and left Digg to sell for about $500,000.
- Company
- Digg
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
Digital Equipment Corporation was the second-largest computer company in the world, the maker of the VAX minicomputer that a generation of engineers revered. Its founder, Ken Olsen, ran a superbly organized company and was hailed as one of the great CEOs. He also dismissed the personal computer as a toy. DEC clung to its minicomputers as the market moved to cheap PCs and workstations, its own PC flopped, and the once-mighty giant was sold to Compaq in 1998 for $9.6 billion.
- Company
- Digital Equipment Corporation
- Industry
- Computing
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Doppler Labs
Doppler Labs raised over $50 million to build the Here One "smart earbuds", noise-cancelling buds that let you reshape the sounds around you. But the battery lasted only a couple of hours, sales were weak, and as investors turned against hardware it couldn't raise more. It shut down in 2017.
- Company
- Doppler Labs
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $50,000,000
Duke Nukem Forever
3D Realms announced a sequel to its hit 1996 shooter Duke Nukem 3D in 1997, expecting a quick turnaround. Flush with cash and answerable to no publisher deadline, the studio restarted the game on a new engine at least twice, chased whatever technology a rival had just shipped, and let the design grow without limit. The project became gaming's signature vaporware, winning Wired's Vaporware of the Year again and again through the 2000s, and in 2009 3D Realms ran out of money and laid off the team. Gearbox Software acquired the property, finished it with a small crew, and shipped it in 2011 to reviews that called it a relic of the decade it never left.
- Company
- 3D Realms
- Industry
- Video Games
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Eagle Hospitality Trust
Eagle Hospitality Trust, a Singapore-listed real estate investment trust holding a portfolio of US hotels, collapsed within a year of its 2019 listing under a structure that let its own founders control both the trust's external manager and the entities leasing its properties. It defaulted on a loan, its auditor refused to certify its accounts, and it filed for US bankruptcy protection before being formally wound up years later with nothing left for unitholders.
- Company
- Eagle Hospitality Trust
- Industry
- Hospitality Real Estate (REIT)
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Ello
Ello was the ad-free "anti-Facebook" that went viral in September 2014 on a manifesto, "You are not a product." Tens of thousands requested invites every hour, but most never came back, it took VC money that jarred with its no-ads ethos, and the hype drained away within weeks. It limped on for years before going dark in 2023.
- Company
- Ello
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $5,900,000
Encyclopaedia Britannica
For 244 years the Encyclopaedia Britannica was the gold standard of reference, a 32-volume set that sold for about 1,400 dollars and sat on shelves as a mark of a serious household. Then free digital knowledge arrived. Microsoft's Encarta, bundled with PCs in the 1990s, gutted Britannica's revenue and forced a fire-sale of the company; then Wikipedia made a paid encyclopedia look quaint. In 2012 Britannica stopped printing. The company survived by going digital, but its flagship product, and the business that had sustained it for two centuries, did not.
- Company
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
- Industry
- Reference Publishing
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Esprit Holdings
Esprit was a global fashion brand, founded in San Francisco in 1968 and built into a Hong Kong-listed retail giant with peak profits around 2007 to 2008. Through the 2010s it missed the shift to fast fashion and e-commerce, churned through CEOs and turnaround plans, and shrank from a continent-spanning retailer into a company shedding markets one bankruptcy filing at a time, culminating in a cascade of European and US insolvencies in 2024.
- Company
- Esprit Holdings
- Industry
- Fashion retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Essential
Backed by a star founder and hundreds of millions in funding, Essential launched a single well-hyped Android phone into a market owned by Apple and Samsung. Poor sales, a cancelled successor, and no path to ship its next device shut the company down after one product.
- Company
- Essential Products
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $330,000,000
eToys.com
The most famous online toy store of the dot-com boom soared to a $76 first-day stock price. It then burned through cash building warehouses for a business it needed only weeks a year, and, out-competed and out of money, went bankrupt in 2001.
- Company
- eToys
- Industry
- E-commerce
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Euro Disney / Disneyland Paris
Disney opened Euro Disney outside Paris in April 1992, its first European theme park, built on projections of 60,000 daily visitors and American-level guest spending. Actual attendance and spending fell well short, French labor and consumer habits clashed with the park's rigid theming and pricing, and the heavily leveraged project bled cash through 1992 and 1993. By early 1994 the debt load forced a restructuring, including a $1 billion rights issue, years of waived Disney fees, bank concessions, and a roughly $345 million to $500 million investment from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for about a 24 percent stake. The park survives today as Disneyland Paris, but under a debt and ownership structure reshaped by that near-collapse.
- Company
- The Walt Disney Company
- Industry
- Theme Parks and Entertainment
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
European Super League
In April 2021, twelve of the richest football clubs in England, Spain, and Italy announced a breakaway European Super League, a closed competition with permanent founding members guaranteed a place no matter how they performed, financed by JPMorgan. It was meant to lock in the game's biggest revenues forever. Instead fans, players, managers, and governments revolted within hours, and the whole project collapsed in about 48 hours as the English clubs pulled out one after another.
- Company
- The Super League Company
- Industry
- Sports & Entertainment
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Everpix
Everpix was a widely admired cloud photo app that automatically organized your entire photo library into "Moments" and hid the blurry duplicates. Critics and users loved it. It still died. Built by ex-Apple engineers on just $1.8 million, it could not raise enough to scale a storage-heavy subscription business against free giants like Google and Facebook, a rescue by Path fell through, and it shut down in December 2013, refunding its paying subscribers on the way out.
- Company
- Everpix
- Industry
- Consumer Software (Photography)
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Excite@Home
Excite@Home was one of the biggest disasters of the dot-com era. It was built in 1999 by merging @Home, a cable-broadband provider that needed billions in infrastructure, with Excite, an also-ran web portal whose content nobody stayed for, for $6.7 billion. The theory was that owning both the pipe and the content would dominate the broadband internet. Instead it lost about $7.4 billion in 2000 alone and filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
- Company
- Excite@Home
- Industry
- Internet
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Exec
Exec promised to instantly run any errand for $25 an hour. But outside founders and engineers, few people could figure out what to do with a "do anything" service. It pivoted to cleaning, got out-funded by rivals like Homejoy and Handybook, and was sold for under $10 million.
- Company
- Exec
- Industry
- On-Demand Services
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $3,300,000
F.W. Woolworth
F.W. Woolworth invented the five-and-dime, the fixed-low-price variety store that put affordable goods on open counters, and grew into a nationwide symbol of retail. Its downfall was location. Its stores sat downtown, with cramped floors and no parking, just as Americans moved to the suburbs, the malls, and the big-box discounters. Woolworth converted to self-service too slowly and never adapted, and by the end of 1997 it closed its last 400 US stores, ending a 118-year era.
- Company
- F.W. Woolworth Company
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Fab.com
A design flash-sale site grew to 10 million members faster than Facebook and raised over $300 million at a $1 billion valuation. Then it burned $14 million a month, pivoted again and again, and sold for about $15 million.
- Company
- Fab
- Industry
- E-commerce
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Facebook Credits
Facebook Credits was Facebook's own virtual currency, piloted in 2009 and pushed into general use through 2011, that the company tried to make the mandatory payment method for every game and app on its platform, taking a 30 percent cut of every transaction. Developers led by Zynga resented the forced conversion from real money to Credits to in-game currency and the fee it locked in. Facebook backed away from the mandate in June 2012 and let developers price directly in local currency again, then wound the currency down entirely.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Media Platforms
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Facebook Gifts
Facebook Gifts let users buy and send real gift cards or physical items, such as chocolate, teddy bears, or coffee, to friends directly through Facebook, timed around the birthdays and life events the platform already surfaced. Built from Facebook's 2012 acquisition of mobile gifting startup Karma, it launched to US users that September, dropped physical goods in 2013 once gift cards proved to be the overwhelming majority of sales, and shut down entirely in August 2014 as Facebook redirected its commerce efforts toward a Buy button and ad-driven retargeting instead of selling products itself.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Commerce
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Facebook Home
Facebook tried to put itself at the center of the phone with a home-screen takeover and a dedicated handset, the HTC First. Within weeks the phone was cut from $99 to 99 cents, and Home was quietly abandoned.
- Company
- Industry
- Mobile Software
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Facebook M
Facebook M was a Messenger assistant that could book a table, order flowers, or plan a trip, because real people were answering behind the "AI." The plan was for those humans to train the software to take over. The economics never got there, M stayed a small Bay Area beta for two and a half years, and Facebook shut it down in 2018.
- Company
- Industry
- Artificial Intelligence
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Facebook Paper
Facebook Paper was a gorgeous, gesture-driven news-reading app that Facebook launched in 2014 to be "the modern age's newspaper." Critics loved how it looked; it made the regular Facebook app seem cluttered by comparison. Almost nobody used it. Built by a small team over a year, it fell out of the top 300 apps within a month and drew barely a million downloads for a company with over a billion users. Facebook shut it down in 2016 and moved its design into Instant Articles.
- Company
- Meta
- Industry
- Consumer Software
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Facebook Poke
Facebook Poke was a Snapchat clone Facebook built in about 12 days after Snapchat refused to be acquired. It hit number one in the App Store the day after its December 2012 launch, then fell out of the top 50 within four days, because people did not want to send disappearing messages to their Facebook friends. It mostly made Snapchat more famous, and Facebook quietly removed it in 2014.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Facebook Slingshot
Facebook Slingshot was Facebook's second attempt at a Snapchat-style disappearing photo and video app, built inside its Creative Labs division and launched in June 2014. Its defining feature required recipients to send their own photo or video back before they could view what a friend had sent them, a mechanic reviewers found confusing rather than compelling. The app never gained real traction against Snapchat, and Facebook pulled it from app stores in December 2015 when it shut Creative Labs down.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Fisker Automotive
Fisker Automotive built the Karma, a gorgeous $100,000 plug-in hybrid designed by Henrik Fisker, on a $529 million federal loan. The car arrived a year and a half late, broke down in a Consumer Reports test, caught fire, and was recalled. When its only battery supplier, A123, went bankrupt in 2012 and the government froze the loan, production stopped, and Fisker collapsed into bankruptcy in 2013.
- Company
- Fisker Automotive
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Flip Video
The Flip was a dead-simple pocket camcorder and the best-selling one on the market. Cisco bought its maker for $590 million in 2009, then abruptly killed it two years later. Whether smartphones doomed it or Cisco sacrificed a still-profitable business to exit consumer is genuinely disputed.
- Company
- Pure Digital
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Flybe
Flybe was Europe's largest independent regional airline, flying about 8 million passengers a year and more than a third of the UK's domestic flights from small airports. It also lost money for years. A January 2020 government-backed rescue bought it weeks, and then the coronavirus demand collapse finished it. In March 2020 Flybe entered administration and grounded every flight, the pandemic's first airline casualty.
- Company
- Flybe
- Industry
- Aviation
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Fokker
A pioneering Dutch aircraft maker, once the world's largest, Fokker could not out-invest Boeing and Airbus in a scale-driven industry. Its new-jet development costs spiralled, and it collapsed in 1996 when owner Daimler-Benz Aerospace cut it loose.
- Company
- Fokker
- Industry
- Aircraft Manufacturing
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Ford Edsel
Ford built a whole new car division on secretive hype, then launched the Edsel into a recession with unloved styling and expectations it couldn't meet. It lost an estimated $250-350 million in about two years.
- Company
- Ford
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Forever 21
Forever 21 built a fast-fashion empire by leasing enormous mall stores across America even as rivals retreated, reaching about 800 shops and $450 million a year in rent. When mall traffic fell and shopping moved online, that footprint became a trap. It went bankrupt in 2019, was rescued, then filed again and shut all its US stores in 2025 as Shein and Temu undercut it.
- Company
- Forever 21
- Industry
- Apparel Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Friendster
The first big social network, which turned down a $30M Google offer, then let slow pages and crashes drive its users to MySpace and Facebook.
- Company
- Friendster
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Fry's Electronics
Fry's Electronics was the temple of the American tech nerd, vast themed superstores stocking everything from resistors to soda, doing about $2 billion a year at its peak. Then Amazon undercut it, its owners' attention drifted, and its shelves slowly went bare. On a single night in February 2021 it told staff every store was closing for good, ending 36 years without warning.
- Company
- Fry's Electronics
- Industry
- Electronics Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
General Magic
General Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 to build a handheld "personal communicator," inventing much of the conceptual blueprint for the smartphone, touchscreens, an app-like software model, email, and a voice assistant, roughly fifteen years before the iPhone. Its 1994 devices, the Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy, were too expensive and too far ahead of the wireless networks they needed, and after a failed pivot to a voice-assistant service called Portico, the company shut down in 2002.
- Company
- General Magic
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $200,000,000
General Motors (2009 bankruptcy)
General Motors was the largest carmaker on Earth for most of the 20th century, and in 2009 it collapsed into the fourth-largest bankruptcy in US history. Decades of crushing legacy pension and health costs, a lineup built around trucks and SUVs while buyers wanted efficiency, and steady losses to foreign rivals had hollowed it out. When US car sales cratered in the 2008 crisis, GM ran out of cash. It filed Chapter 11 with $89 billion in assets and survived only through a $49.5 billion government bailout.
- Company
- General Motors
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Genesis Sample-Return Capsule
Genesis was a NASA mission that spent two and a half years collecting solar wind particles for return to Earth. On September 8, 2004, its sample capsule was meant to deploy a parachute and be snagged in midair by a helicopter. The parachute sequence never fired, and the capsule slammed into the Utah desert at roughly 190 miles per hour. Investigators traced the failure to gravity-switch sensors installed backwards during assembly, a design error that pre-launch reviews and testing failed to catch. Some of the science was salvaged from the wreckage, but the landing itself was a clean engineering and quality-assurance failure.
- Company
- NASA
- Industry
- Aerospace and Space Exploration
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Gilt Groupe
Gilt Groupe pioneered the flash sale, time-limited online sales of discounted luxury goods, and hit a $1 billion valuation. But slim margins, waning novelty, and the difficulty of scaling a profitable e-commerce operation caught up with it, and it sold to Hudson's Bay for $250 million, below what it had raised.
- Company
- Gilt Groupe
- Industry
- Flash-Sale Ecommerce
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $270,000,000
Google Allo
Google Allo was a 2016 "smart messaging" app built around the new Google Assistant, and it was dead on arrival. It launched into a market already owned by WhatsApp, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger, with over a billion users each, and offered nothing compelling enough to make anyone switch. It never reached 50 million users. Google paused it after 18 months, redirected its team to RCS, and shut Allo down in March 2019, one more entry in Google's long graveyard of abandoned messaging apps.
- Company
- Industry
- Messaging
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Answers
Google Answers was a paid question-and-answer marketplace that ran from 2002 to 2006. Users posted questions with a self-set bounty of $2 to $200, and a small pool of vetted freelance researchers competed to answer them for a cut of the fee, with Google keeping 25 percent plus a 50-cent listing charge. The researcher pool never grew past a few hundred, quality and coverage stayed uneven, and free crowdsourced rivals such as Yahoo Answers offered a similar service at no cost. Google shut it down in stages between November and December 2006, without a replacement.
- Company
- Industry
- Internet Services
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Buzz
Google Buzz was Google's 2010 attempt to bolt a social network onto Gmail. To create an instant social graph, it automatically built your public list of followers from the people you emailed most, and exposed that list by default. Overnight, users found their most frequent contacts (ex-spouses, patients, in one case an abusive ex-husband) made public. The backlash was immediate, the FTC charged deceptive privacy practices, and Google accepted 20 years of privacy audits. Buzz was dead within about two years.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Networking
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Clips
Google Clips was a $249 clip-on camera announced in October 2017 that used on-device machine learning to decide, with no screen and no shutter button, when a moment was worth recording. Reviewers found its judgment unpredictable, its no-viewfinder design awkward, and its watching presence unsettling to the people around it. Sales were weak, and Google pulled it from the Google Store in October 2019 without a public announcement.
- Company
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Daydream
Google Daydream was Google's bet on virtual reality you already owned. Slot your phone into a soft headset and go. Launched in 2016 with the Pixel, it never caught on. The core idea had a fatal catch, putting your phone in a headset means losing the phone you use all day, and standalone headsets like Oculus soon did VR better. Google barely nurtured it, did not even mention it at its 2018 developer conference, and killed it in 2019.
- Company
- Industry
- Virtual Reality
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Duo
Google Duo launched in August 2016 as a deliberately simple, one-to-one video calling app built around "Knock Knock," a live preview of the caller shown before a call was answered. Google spent 2016 pushing Duo to replace Hangouts as Android's default video app, then in June 2022 reversed course on its own consolidation, merging Duo into Google Meet and retiring the Duo brand and app name by that August.
- Company
- Industry
- Consumer Messaging and Communications
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Glass
The face-worn computer whose always-on camera provoked a privacy backlash the consumer product never overcame.
- Company
- Industry
- Wearables
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Hangouts
Google Hangouts launched in 2013 to unify Google's fragmented chat products, Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and the Hangouts feature of Google+, into one messaging and video app. Google spent the following decade rebuilding the same unification it had just achieved, splitting Hangouts into Chat and Meet for business users in 2017 and then spending five years migrating consumers off the original app before shutting it down for good in November 2022.
- Company
- Industry
- Consumer Messaging and Communications
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Health
Google Health was a free personal health record service, launched in 2008, that let users store medical history, medications, and lab results and import records from partner hospitals, pharmacies, and insurers. Built to give patients a single home for their own health data, it drew only a narrow base of tech-savvy users and never became a daily habit for the wider public. Google announced its discontinuation in June 2011 and shut it down on January 1, 2012, offering a year-long window to export data before deletion.
- Company
- Industry
- Health Technology
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Inbox
Inbox by Gmail was a well-liked reinvention of email from the Gmail team, built around bundles, snooze, and reminders. Google folded its best ideas into Gmail and shut Inbox down after four years, another entry in Google's long list of retired products.
- Company
- Industry
- Communication Software
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Jamboard
Jamboard was Google's $5,000 55-inch touchscreen digital whiteboard, launched in 2017 to bring cloud collaboration into the conference room and compete with Microsoft's Surface Hub. It never built a large enterprise base, and its cloud-only software fell behind dedicated whiteboarding apps such as Miro and FigJam, especially as remote work reshaped how teams met. In September 2023 Google announced it would wind the product down, pointing customers to third-party alternatives, and the service was fully shut down by the end of 2024.
- Company
- Industry
- Collaboration Hardware
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Knol
Knol was Google's attempt to out-Wikipedia Wikipedia by replacing anonymous collaborative editing with named, credited expert authorship and optional ad-revenue sharing. It launched in beta in July 2008 and never built the traffic, contributor base, or content depth to challenge Wikipedia's dominance. Google announced its shutdown in November 2011, and Knol closed for good in 2012, with authors offered a migration path to WordPress.com or the open-source Annotum platform.
- Company
- Industry
- Online Publishing
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Latitude
Google Latitude was a real-time location-sharing service that let opted-in friends see each other on a map from their phones or browsers. Launched in February 2009, it drew immediate privacy criticism over how easily it could be misused for covert tracking, and it never became more than a niche product. Google folded its location-sharing features into Google+ and retired Latitude as a standalone service on August 9, 2013.
- Company
- Industry
- Location and Mapping Software
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google OnHub
Google OnHub was a $200 cylindrical Wi-Fi router launched in August 2015 with TP-Link and later Asus, built to make home networking simple through a mobile app and to seed future smart-home features via dormant Weave, Thread, and Bluetooth radios. Reviewers liked its design and setup but questioned whether it justified its price against ordinary routers, and it lacked the mesh networking that would define the category. Google's own Google Wifi, launched in December 2016, offered true mesh coverage and effectively superseded OnHub. Google ended all OnHub support in January 2023.
- Company
- Industry
- Consumer Networking Hardware
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Play Music
Google Play Music was Google's music streaming service and cloud locker, launched in 2011 and expanded in 2013 with an on-demand subscription tier. Google spent years running it alongside a separate, overlapping YouTube Music product before deciding to merge the two, announcing in 2020 that Play Music would shut down and its users would be migrated to YouTube Music by the end of the year.
- Company
- Industry
- Music Streaming Software
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Podcasts
Google's dedicated podcast app, launched in 2018, never won a meaningful share of listeners against Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Overcast. In 2023 Google announced it would fold the app into YouTube Music, and by mid-2024 Google Podcasts was gone, the fourth time Google had asked podcast and music listeners to migrate to a new Google app in under a decade.
- Company
- Industry
- Software
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Reader
A beloved RSS reader with a devoted following that Google shut down anyway, judging it too niche and hard to justify against bigger bets.
- Company
- Industry
- Software
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Stadia
Google's cloud-gaming platform launched with too few games, never found an audience, and was shut down three years later.
- Company
- Industry
- Cloud Gaming
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Trips
Google Trips was a standalone travel app that scanned a user's Gmail to automatically assemble flight, hotel, car, and restaurant confirmations into day-by-day itineraries, added offline access and guides to more than 200 cities, and drew generally positive reviews after its 2016 launch. Three years later Google shut it down, folding its reservation-tracking and destination features into Google Maps and Google Search instead of keeping it as a separate product.
- Company
- Industry
- Consumer Software and Travel
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google Wave
Google tried to merge email, instant messaging, and collaborative documents into real-time "waves." It dazzled at its unveiling but confused nearly everyone who tried it, and Google halted development barely a year later, citing weak adoption.
- Company
- Industry
- Communication Software
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Google+
Google's answer to Facebook, forced across its products yet barely used, was wound down after a data-exposure bug hastened the decision.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
GoPro Karma
GoPro's first drone launched to fanfare, then had to be recalled within weeks when units lost power and fell from the sky. GoPro left the drone business a year later.
- Company
- GoPro
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Grooveshark
Grooveshark let anyone upload and stream music for free and grew to some 20 million users, on a catalog it largely didn't have the rights to. After years of label lawsuits and a ruling that its own employees had uploaded thousands of copyrighted songs, it shut down overnight in a 2015 settlement.
- Company
- Grooveshark
- Industry
- Music Streaming
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Groupon
Groupon pioneered the "daily deal" and IPO'd in 2011 at a $13 billion valuation. Months later it had to restate its results after its auditor found a "material weakness" in its financial controls, and the daily-deal model itself faded. Its stock lost more than 80% of its value within a year.
- Company
- Groupon
- Industry
- Local Commerce
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Grundig
A post-war German champion, Grundig became Europe's biggest radio maker. Ground down over decades by lower-cost Japanese and Asian rivals it could not match on price, it went bankrupt in 2003 after years of losses.
- Company
- Grundig
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Hailo (US Operations)
Hailo was a London-founded taxi-hailing app that partnered with licensed cab drivers instead of fighting them, a contrast to Uber's approach. It expanded into Boston, Chicago, New York, Washington, Toronto, and Montreal between 2012 and 2013, then abruptly shut down all of its North American operations in October 2014, citing unsustainable marketing costs and price competition from Uber and Lyft. Hailo itself survived, refocusing on Europe and Asia before merging into myTaxi in 2016.
- Company
- Hailo
- Industry
- Ride-Hailing and Taxi Technology
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Hanbo Steel
Hanbo Steel, a South Korean conglomerate that vaulted from the 28th to the 14th-largest chaebol in a single year through politically connected bank loans, collapsed into receivership in January 1997 with roughly $6 billion in losses. The bribery scandal that followed implicated senior aides to President Kim Young-sam, including his own son, and became the opening domino in South Korea's slide into the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
- Company
- Hanbo Steel Industry Co.
- Industry
- Steel Manufacturing
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Hanjin Shipping
South Korea's largest container line ordered a wave of ships just before the 2008 crash. A years-long shipping glut and its own debt then sank it, and its 2016 collapse stranded ships and billions in cargo at sea, snarling global trade.
- Company
- Hanjin
- Industry
- Container Shipping
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
HD DVD
Toshiba's high-definition disc format lost a format war to Sony's Blu-ray when studios and retailers defected, and was abandoned within weeks.
- Company
- Toshiba
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Heaven's Gate
Heaven's Gate was Michael Cimino's 1980 Western epic, greenlit with near-total creative control after his Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter. The shoot ran a year over schedule under his obsessive perfectionism, and the budget grew roughly fourfold to about $44 million. The theatrical cut was savaged by critics and pulled after a week; a shorter re-edit also flopped, and the film earned back barely $3.5 million domestically. The disaster is widely credited as the direct cause of United Artists' 1981 sale to MGM, ending its run as a major independent studio and Hollywood's era of unchecked directorial control.
- Company
- United Artists
- Industry
- Film Production
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Hipmunk
Hipmunk was a beloved travel-search site that sorted flights by "agony." But it couldn't beat Google Flights, Kayak, and Expedia as an independent business in a consolidating market. It sold to Concur (SAP) in 2016, was quietly neglected, and shut down in 2020.
- Company
- Hipmunk
- Industry
- Travel Search
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $55,000,000
HMV
HMV was Britain's dominant music and entertainment retailer for most of a century, the famous record shop on nearly every high street. It moved to digital far too late, ceding CDs to Amazon and downloads to iTunes and then streaming to Spotify. It collapsed into administration in 2013, was rescued and cut down, collapsed again in 2018, and survives only as a fraction of its former self.
- Company
- HMV
- Industry
- Music Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Homejoy
An on-demand home-cleaning startup used deep discounts to sign up customers who didn't come back. Its cut left too little for good cleaners, and, facing lawsuits over whether those cleaners were employees, it shut down in 2015.
- Company
- Homejoy
- Industry
- On-demand Services
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
House of Fraser
House of Fraser traded from 1849, but a century of prime freehold acquisitions and repeated changes of owner, Icelandic investors, then a Chinese conglomerate, left it without the sustained investment to modernize or compete online. Carrying roughly £400 million of debt, it collapsed into administration in August 2018 and was bought out of insolvency by Sports Direct.
- Company
- House of Fraser
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Houseparty
Houseparty was a group video chat app, from the same team behind Meerkat, that the pandemic turned into a phenomenon. Downloads jumped from about 570,000 to over 17 million in a single month in early 2020 as lockdowns hit. But the boom was borrowed. Once life reopened, users drained away as fast as they had arrived, and its owner Epic Games shut it down in 2021.
- Company
- Houseparty
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
HP TouchPad
HP's well-reviewed webOS tablet launched into the iPad's shadow with no app ecosystem, sold dismally, and was killed 49 days later.
- Company
- HP
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Hubble Space Telescope Primary-Mirror Flaw
The Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990 carrying a primary mirror ground to the wrong shape, its edge too flat by about 2,200 nanometers because the device used to test the mirror during grinding was itself misassembled. The result was spherical aberration that left Hubble's images badly blurred, a public embarrassment for NASA. Astronauts corrected the flaw with corrective optics during a December 1993 servicing mission, after which Hubble became one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built.
- Company
- NASA
- Industry
- Aerospace and Space Science
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Hughes H-4 Hercules (Spruce Goose)
The Hughes H-4 Hercules was a giant wooden flying boat commissioned by the US government in 1942 to ferry troops and cargo across the Atlantic without risking German U-boats, built largely of birch because wartime rules restricted aluminum and steel. Material shortages, engineering problems, and Howard Hughes' own perfectionism delayed it so long that it was not completed until 1947, two years after the war it was built for had ended, prompting a Senate investigation into the spending. Hughes personally flew it once, a 26-second, roughly one-mile hop at low altitude over Long Beach Harbor on November 2, 1947, then it never flew again.
- Company
- Hughes Aircraft
- Industry
- Aerospace and Defense
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Hummer
The Hummer was the ultimate symbol of American excess, a civilian version of the military Humvee turned into a giant, gas-guzzling status symbol by GM in the boom years. Then the world turned against it. When gas hit $4 a gallon, the recession bit, and environmental backlash grew, the vehicle that got under 20 miles per gallon became unsellable. Sales fell from a 2006 peak of over 70,000 to about 9,000, a deal to sell the brand to China collapsed, and GM killed Hummer in its 2009 bankruptcy.
- Company
- General Motors
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Hyflux
Hyflux built Singapore's largest desalination-and-power plant on a 2011 bid industry observers called unsustainably low. When a national power-market glut cratered electricity prices, the plant's losses dragged down the whole water-treatment group, and Singapore's largest corporate collapse left roughly tens of thousands of retail bondholders and preference shareholders with heavy losses.
- Company
- Hyflux Ltd
- Industry
- Water Treatment & Desalination
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
IBM OS/2
IBM and Microsoft jointly built OS/2 in the late 1980s to replace MS-DOS, but the partnership fractured as Windows 3.0 took off in 1990, and Microsoft walked away to build Windows on its own. IBM kept developing OS/2 alone through 2.0 in 1992 and the Warp line in 1994-1996, producing an operating system widely regarded as more technically capable than contemporary Windows. It never won meaningful market share, held back by IBM's pricing, weak third-party driver and application support, and a sales operation that could not match Microsoft's OEM relationships. IBM discontinued OS/2 sales in 2005 and ended support in 2006.
- Company
- IBM
- Industry
- Operating Systems
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
IGTV
IGTV was Instagram's 2018 push into long-form vertical video, a standalone app and a YouTube challenger aimed at its billion users. Barely 1% ever downloaded the app, creators had little reason to post, and as TikTok's short-form video took over, Instagram folded IGTV away and pivoted everything to Reels, shutting the app in 2022.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Instagram Threads (2019 companion app)
Instagram Threads was a standalone camera-first app Instagram launched in October 2019, built around the Close Friends list, letting users auto-share photos, video, and status updates with a small circle. It never found an audience beyond a niche, reaching roughly 13.7 million installs against Instagram's own billion-plus user base, and Instagram quietly discontinued it in December 2021, folding its ideas back into the main app.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Intel Vaunt
Intel Vaunt was a pair of smart glasses that looked like ordinary eyeglasses, using a low-power laser to project a small monochrome image directly onto the wearer's retina instead of a bulky screen. Intel showed working prototypes to journalists in February 2018 to strong early impressions, but by April 2018 it had closed the New Devices Group that built them, and Vaunt never reached the market it was designed for.
- Company
- Intel
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics and Wearables
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Iridium (original)
A $5 billion constellation of 66 satellites promised a phone that worked anywhere on Earth. But cheap cellular spread during its long build, and the original venture went bankrupt nine months after launch.
- Company
- Motorola
- Industry
- Satellite Communications
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
J.C. Penney (Ron Johnson era)
A celebrated Apple retail executive tried to remake J.C. Penney by scrapping coupons and sales for everyday low prices, and drove away the bargain-hunting customers it depended on, with sales down about 25% in a year.
- Company
- J.C. Penney
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
J.Crew
J.Crew was a preppy American apparel chain that TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners took private in a 2011 leveraged buyout, loading the company with roughly $1.6 billion in debt. The private equity owners collected an estimated $766 million in dividends and fees over the following years while J.Crew's own retail performance weakened. By 2017 the company was restructuring debt through a controversial maneuver that moved its trademarks out of lenders' reach. The COVID-19 retail shutdown pushed the already debt-strained company into Chapter 11 in May 2020, the first major national retailer bankruptcy of the pandemic. It emerged four months later with lenders holding the equity and the buyout debt eliminated.
- Company
- J.Crew Group
- Industry
- Apparel Retail
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Jaiku
Jaiku was a Finnish microblogging service that launched alongside Twitter in 2006 and, on mobile, was arguably better. Google bought it in 2007, then did almost nothing with it for years while Twitter ran away with the market, before shutting it down in 2012.
- Company
- Jaiku
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Jawbone
The audio-and-wearables maker that raised over $900M and was once valued near $3B, then liquidated as product problems and Fitbit and Apple overtook it.
- Company
- Jawbone
- Industry
- Consumer Hardware
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $900,000,000
Jet Airways
Jet Airways grew into one of India's largest full-service airlines, then stopped flying in April 2019 under about $1.2 billion of debt. A high-cost model, low-cost competition, rising fuel, and a weak rupee bled it for years; when lenders wouldn't extend more cash, it grounded its whole fleet within weeks.
- Company
- Jet Airways
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Jibo
Jibo was the friendly social robot for the home, funded by an enthusiastic 2014 crowdfunding campaign and more than $70 million in all. But it shipped nearly three years late, cost hundreds of dollars to do little that a $50 Amazon Echo could not, and by the time it arrived, smart speakers had taken the market. The company sold off its assets in 2018, and in 2019 the robots said goodbye as their servers went dark.
- Company
- Jibo
- Industry
- Consumer Robotics
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $70,000,000
Juicero
The $700 Wi-Fi juice press, backed by $120M in venture capital, that became a punchline when reporters found you could squeeze its packs by hand.
- Company
- Juicero
- Industry
- Consumer Hardware
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $120,000,000
Kiko
One of Y Combinator's very first startups, Kiko was an early Ajax web calendar. It is remembered as the app "Google Calendar killed", but its own founders later admitted a standalone calendar with no email and no revenue model was doomed regardless. They auctioned it on eBay and went on to build Twitch.
- Company
- Kiko
- Industry
- Productivity Software
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Kingfisher Airlines
Kingfisher Airlines launched in 2005 as India's glamorous premium carrier and never made a profit. A disastrous move into low-cost flying via Air Deccan, debt-funded expansion, high fuel costs, and fierce competition drained it for years, until unpaid staff, grounded planes, and a suspended license ended it in 2012.
- Company
- Kingfisher Airlines
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Klout
Klout tried to turn online influence into a single number, scoring every social-media user from 1 to 100. For a few years the score was everywhere, cited in marketing decks and even job interviews. It was also widely mocked as a gameable vanity metric that ranked a tech blogger above the US president. Lithium bought Klout for about $200 million in 2014, could not make it fit, and quietly shut it down in 2018.
- Company
- Klout
- Industry
- Social Media Analytics
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Kmart
Kmart helped invent American discount retailing. Through the 1990s it was squeezed between Walmart's lower prices and Target's more upscale appeal, never carving out a position of its own, and failing execution left it filing what was then the largest US retail bankruptcy in January 2002.
- Company
- Kmart
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Knight Capital
A botched software deployment left obsolete code running on a Knight Capital trading server. Its automated system fired millions of erroneous orders for about 45 minutes, a ~$440 million loss, roughly the whole firm's value, that ended its independence.
- Company
- Knight Capital
- Industry
- Trading & Market-Making
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Kodak
The company that invented the digital camera but delayed embracing it to protect its film business, and filed for bankruptcy as digital took over.
- Company
- Kodak
- Industry
- Photography
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Kozmo.com
A dot-com darling promised free one-hour delivery of videos, snacks, and small goods with no minimum order. It burned about $280 million learning that delivering low-value items for free can never turn a profit, and shut down abruptly in 2001.
- Company
- Kozmo
- Industry
- On-demand Delivery
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Lamarckian inheritance
For most of the 19th century, the leading explanation for heredity was not natural selection but the inheritance of acquired characters, the idea, proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1809, that traits an organism developed during its own life, a stretched neck, a strengthened limb, could be passed to its offspring. It was not a fringe belief. Charles Darwin built it into successive editions of On the Origin of Species as a secondary mechanism and proposed his own theory, pangenesis, to explain it. Only when August Weismann's germ-plasm theory and, later, Mendelian genetics gave biology a testable alternative did the idea lose its place, a decline completed by the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s.
- Company
- Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle
- Industry
- Scientific Research
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
LeEco
Jia Yueting built LeEco from a video-streaming platform into a sprawling "ecosystem" spanning smartphones, television hardware, and electric vehicles, funding simultaneous expansion across every front with tens of billions of yuan in debt. When the strategy outran its financing in 2016 and 2017, Chinese courts froze billions in assets, Jia fled to the United States, and securities regulators later banned him for life over IPO-era disclosure fraud.
- Company
- LeEco (Leshi Internet Information & Technology Corp.)
- Industry
- Consumer Technology Conglomerate
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers was a 158-year-old Wall Street institution and the fourth-largest US investment bank when it filed the largest bankruptcy in American history on September 15, 2008, with $639 billion in assets and $613 billion in debts. Under CEO Richard Fuld it had loaded up on subprime mortgages and extreme leverage, funding itself day to day in the repo market. When the government declined to rescue it, its collapse froze the global financial system and helped trigger the Great Recession.
- Company
- Lehman Brothers
- Industry
- Investment Banking
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Lewis spacecraft
Lewis was a NASA Earth-observation satellite built by TRW under the Small Spacecraft Technology Initiative, NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" push to prove that small satellites could be built fast and cheap with minimal government oversight. It launched successfully on August 23, 1997, but within three days a flawed attitude-control safe mode let the spacecraft spin out of control and point its solar arrays away from the sun. The battery drained, ground controllers never regained contact, and the spacecraft reentered the atmosphere and was destroyed on September 28, 1997, without returning any usable science data.
- Company
- NASA
- Industry
- Aerospace and Space Exploration
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Libra / Diem (Meta's cryptocurrency)
In 2019 Facebook unveiled Libra, a plan for a global digital currency backed by a basket of national currencies and run by an association of some thirty companies. It was one of the most ambitious things Facebook ever attempted, and regulators and central banks around the world moved to stop it almost immediately. Over three years the project shrank from a world currency to a single US stablecoin, rebranded to Diem, and in 2022 gave up entirely, selling its assets for about $200 million.
- Company
- Meta
- Industry
- Cryptocurrency
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
London Millennium Bridge Opening-Day Wobble
London's Millennium Bridge, a steel suspension footbridge across the Thames designed by Arup, Foster and Partners, and sculptor Anthony Caro, opened on June 10, 2000 to roughly 90,000 pedestrians. Under crowd load the bridge swayed sideways by as much as 70 millimeters, a resonance effect called synchronous lateral excitation that its designers had not accounted for. It closed after two days and stayed shut for nearly two years while engineers retrofitted 37 dampers, reopening in February 2002 and performing without incident since.
- Company
- Arup
- Industry
- Civil & Structural Engineering
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Long-Term Capital Management
A hedge fund run by Nobel laureates earned spectacular returns on enormous leverage. Then the 1998 Russian default broke its models, cost it about $4.6 billion, and forced a Federal Reserve-organized bank rescue.
- Company
- Long-Term Capital Management
- Industry
- Hedge Funds
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Loopt
Loopt was a pioneer of location-based social networking, years before Foursquare. But it never won the space it helped invent, and as rivals pulled ahead its prospects faded. In 2012 it sold to a prepaid-card company, Green Dot, for its mobile team and patents, not its product.
- Company
- Loopt
- Industry
- Location-Based Social
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $17,000,000
Luckin Coffee
Luckin Coffee rushed to a Nasdaq IPO on the strength of explosive store growth across China, then had employees fabricate more than $300 million in sales to keep that growth story alive. A short-seller report forced an internal investigation that confirmed the fraud, Nasdaq delisted the stock, and the company paid a record SEC penalty before its Cayman Islands parent filed for bankruptcy protection in 2021.
- Company
- Luckin Coffee Inc.
- Industry
- Coffee Retail
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Luxe
Luxe let you summon a valet by app to park your car anywhere in the city and bring it back on demand. It raised over $75 million, including $50 million from Hertz, but on-demand valet parking had no path to a profitable margin, and after retreating from city after city it shut the service in 2017 and was acqui-hired by Volvo.
- Company
- Luxe
- Industry
- Transportation
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $75,000,000
Lytro
Lytro's "light-field" camera captured a whole field of light, letting you refocus a photo after taking it, a genuine technical marvel. But the cameras never found a broad market, a pivot to VR didn't save it, and after raising over $200 million, Lytro sold its patents to Google for about $40 million and shut down.
- Company
- Lytro
- Industry
- Cameras
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $200,000,000
Macy's Nationalization of May Department Stores
In 2005 Federated Department Stores bought its rival May Department Stores and inherited a portfolio of century-old regional chains with fierce local followings, among them Marshall Field's in Chicago, Filene's in Boston, and Kaufmann's in Pittsburgh. In September 2006 Federated erased nearly all of them, converting roughly 400 stores nationwide to the single Macy's nameplate. The move triggered organized boycotts, street protests, and years of depressed sales in the hardest-hit markets, showing how a single rebranding decision can destroy loyalty a company did not build and cannot easily buy back.
- Company
- Federated Department Stores
- Industry
- Department Store Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Magic Leap
An augmented-reality startup that raised more than $2.6 billion on secrecy and hype, shipped a headset few wanted, and abandoned its consumer dream for enterprise.
- Company
- Magic Leap
- Industry
- Augmented Reality
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $2,600,000,000
Maple
Maple was David Chang's much-hyped New York meal startup, no storefront, its own kitchens, chef-quality lunches at $12 all-in, delivered fast. It owned the entire food cycle to control quality and cost, but the margins never worked, and in 2017 it shut down and folded its technology into Deliveroo.
- Company
- Maple
- Industry
- Food Delivery
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $25,000,000
Maplin
Maplin was Britain's high-street gadget and electronics-components shop, the place to buy a cable, a resistor, or a drone across 200-plus stores. Successive private-equity owners loaded it with debt while its niche, cheap components and cables, moved to Amazon and eBay. When credit insurers pulled cover in 2017, forcing it to pay for stock upfront, the end came fast. Maplin collapsed into administration in 2018, and all its stores closed.
- Company
- Maplin
- Industry
- Electronics Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Marconi (GEC)
Britain's GEC sold its rock-solid defense business and bet the proceeds on a debt-fuelled spree of overpriced US telecom acquisitions at the peak of the boom. Then the telecom market collapsed, destroying the 115-year-old company and leaving shareholders with 0.5%.
- Company
- Marconi
- Industry
- Telecommunications Equipment
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Mars Climate Orbiter
NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter launched in December 1998 to study the Martian atmosphere and relay data for a companion lander. On September 23, 1999, it approached Mars far lower than planned and was destroyed, because Lockheed Martin's ground navigation software output thruster force in pound-force seconds while JPL's flight software expected newton-seconds. The unconverted unit mismatch pushed the spacecraft's estimated position dozens of kilometers off, and no one caught it before arrival.
- Company
- NASA
- Industry
- Aerospace and Space Exploration
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Mars Observer
NASA's Mars Observer launched in September 1992 as the agency's first mission to Mars in 17 years, carrying an $813 million payload built to map the planet's surface, atmosphere, climate, and magnetic field. On August 21, 1993, three days before it was due to enter orbit, ground controllers lost contact with the spacecraft while pressurizing its propulsion system, and it was never heard from again. An investigation board later named a probable rupture in the fuel-pressurization lines as the most likely cause, but without telemetry the diagnosis was never confirmed.
- Company
- NASA
- Industry
- Aerospace and Space Exploration
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Mars Polar Lander
NASA's Mars Polar Lander was built to set down near the Martian south pole and dig for water ice with a robotic arm, the first attempted landing in that region. It reached Mars on December 3, 1999, after an eleven-month cruise, entered its descent sequence, and was never heard from again. A review board later concluded that vibration from the landing legs swinging into place was misread by the flight software as ground contact, shutting off the descent engines while the lander was still roughly 40 meters above the surface. It hit the ground at high speed. The loss came two months after its sibling mission, Mars Climate Orbiter, and ended NASA's low-cost "faster, better, cheaper" approach to Mars exploration.
- Company
- NASA
- Industry
- Aerospace and Space Exploration
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
McDonald's Arch Deluxe
McDonald's spent a reported $300 million to sell adults a "grown-up" burger. It learned that customers came to McDonald's for exactly what it already was, not an upscale sandwich priced above the Big Mac.
- Company
- McDonald's
- Industry
- Fast Food
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Medici Bank
The Medici Bank was Europe's dominant merchant bank under Cosimo de' Medici, pioneering a branch-network holding-company structure and serving as the Papacy's chief financier. After Cosimo's death in 1464 it passed to heirs with little interest in banking, above all Lorenzo "the Magnificent," who left branch managers largely unsupervised. Bad loans to Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of Burgundy wrecked the London and Bruges branches, the bank lost the lucrative papal account to a rival, and by 1494, when the Medici were driven from Florence, the bank was insolvent and dissolved.
- Company
- Medici Bank
- Industry
- Merchant Banking
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Meerkat
Meerkat was the live-streaming app that took over SXSW 2015, and it ran on Twitter's social graph. Weeks in, Twitter cut off that access with about two hours' notice, bought and promoted a rival called Periscope, and Meerkat was finished within months.
- Company
- Meerkat
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $12,000,000
Merrill Lynch
Merrill Lynch was one of Wall Street's most storied firms, built on an army of retail brokers, when it destroyed itself chasing the subprime boom. Under CEO Stan O'Neal it turned itself into a factory for mortgage-backed CDOs and piled the bonds onto its own balance sheet, holding some $41 billion of subprime exposure by 2006. When housing collapsed the write-downs ran to tens of billions. O'Neal was ousted in 2007, and in September 2008, the weekend Lehman Brothers failed, a crumbling Merrill agreed to be bought by Bank of America, ending its independence.
- Company
- Merrill Lynch
- Industry
- Investment Banking
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Meta Portal
Meta Portal was Facebook's video-calling screen for the living room, launched in 2018, just weeks after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a breach of 50 million accounts. Asking people to put a Facebook camera and microphone in their home was a hard sell at the worst possible moment. Portal never passed 1% of the smart-display market, and Meta discontinued it in 2022.
- Company
- Meta
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Meta Spark
Meta Spark, launched in 2017 as Spark AR, let independent creators and brands build the camera filters and effects seen across Instagram and Facebook. It grew into what Meta called the largest platform for mobile AR, with hundreds of thousands of creators worldwide. In August 2024 Meta announced it would shut the platform down entirely by January 2025, redirecting resources toward AR glasses and next-generation form factors and leaving creators who had built businesses on Spark with a few months to find alternatives.
- Company
- Meta
- Industry
- Augmented Reality and Creator Tools
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
MG Rover
Sold by BMW for a token £10, MG Rover tried to survive as Britain's last mass-market carmaker, stripped of its profitable brands and never profitable. A Chinese rescue fell through, and it collapsed in 2005 with about 6,000 Longbridge jobs lost.
- Company
- MG Rover Group
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Microsoft Band
Microsoft's $199 fitness wearable launched to a first-day sellout and a well-reviewed sequel. But modest sales against Fitbit and the Apple Watch led Microsoft to exit wearables after two years, with no Band 3.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Wearables
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Microsoft Bob
Microsoft Bob was Microsoft's 1995 attempt to make the PC friendly by turning it into a cartoon house, with rooms full of clickable objects and a talking dog named Rover to guide you. Meant to be warmer than Windows, it landed as expensive, patronizing, and pointless, panned by the press and ignored by buyers. It was discontinued within about a year. Its most lasting legacy is Comic Sans, the font created for it.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Consumer Software
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Microsoft Encarta
In 1993 Microsoft's Encarta helped kill the printed encyclopedia, a multimedia reference on a single CD-ROM that made the expensive shelf of leather-bound volumes look obsolete. Then it was killed in turn. Wikipedia, launched in 2001, offered far more, for free, written by anyone, and Encarta's paid, closed, editor-written model could not compete. By 2009 Wikipedia had about 2.7 million English articles to Encarta's 42,000 and drew 97 percent of online-encyclopedia traffic, and Microsoft shut Encarta down.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Reference Software
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Microsoft Kin
After buying the Sidekick maker and spending about a billion dollars, Microsoft launched the Kin "social phones" for teens. It killed them 48 days later, having reportedly sold fewer than 10,000 units.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Mobile Phones
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Microsoft Zune
Microsoft's music player arrived years after the iPod had won, then was overtaken by the smartphone before it could differentiate.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Mississippi Bubble
The Mississippi Bubble was Europe's first great stock-market boom and bust, engineered in France by the Scottish financier John Law. From 1716 Law built a system that fused a colonial trading company, given a monopoly on French Louisiana, with a state bank that printed paper money to buy its shares. Promoted with promises of Louisiana gold, the shares soared toward 10,000 livres before investors rushed to redeem their paper notes for real coin in 1720 and found there was almost none. The scheme collapsed, ruining investors across Europe, and Law fled France in disguise.
- Company
- Mississippi Company
- Industry
- Public Finance
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Mixer
Microsoft's game-streaming service bet that signing Twitch's biggest stars to exclusive deals would let it leapfrog the market leaders. The audiences didn't follow, and Microsoft shut Mixer down less than a year later, pushing users to Facebook Gaming.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Game Streaming
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Monarch Airlines
Monarch spent fifty years flying British holidaymakers to the sun, then reinvented itself as a scheduled low-cost airline against Ryanair and easyJet. Terrorism gutted its North African and Mediterranean routes and a weak post-Brexit pound raised costs, and in October 2017 it became the largest UK airline ever to collapse.
- Company
- Monarch Airlines
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Montgomery Ward
Montgomery Ward invented the mail-order catalog in 1872 and grew into one of America's great retailers. Then its chairman, Sewell Avery, became convinced a depression would follow World War II, refused to open a single new store, and hoarded $327 million in cash for a downturn that never came. While Ward's sat still, Sears expanded and left it far behind. It never recovered, limping through the discount era before Walmart and Target finished it off and it liquidated in 2001.
- Company
- Montgomery Ward
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Montreal Expos relocation to Washington
The Montreal Expos joined Major League Baseball in 1969 as its first team outside the United States. Over the next three and a half decades a weak Canadian dollar, a deficient stadium, and a strike-shortened 1994 season the team never recovered from ground down its attendance and finances. In 2002 the other 29 MLB clubs bought the Expos outright to keep the franchise alive, ran it collectively for three seasons, and in September 2004 moved it to Washington DC, where it became the Washington Nationals for 2005.
- Industry
- Sports & Entertainment
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Mothercare
Mothercare was the British high street's default shop for prams, cots, and baby clothes for half a century. Then supermarkets and Amazon sold the same things cheaper and easier, and Mothercare, outdated and undifferentiated, gave parents little reason to make the trip. Its UK stores went into administration in 2019, though the brand lives on through licensing.
- Company
- Mothercare
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Motorola (mobile phones)
Motorola built the first mobile phone and, in 2004, the RAZR, the thinnest, coolest handset in the world and a global smash. Then it stopped. While the iPhone reinvented the phone as a pocket computer, Motorola kept milking the RAZR with new colors and gimmicks, and by 2011 it held under 9 percent of the market, behind even a collapsing BlackBerry. Google bought its phone arm for $12.5 billion mostly for the patents, then sold the rest to Lenovo for $2.9 billion.
- Company
- Motorola
- Industry
- Mobile Phones
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Move Loot
Move Loot was a San Francisco startup that tried to make selling secondhand furniture as easy as calling a rideshare, handling pickup, listing, storage, and delivery itself rather than leaving buyers and sellers to Craigslist. Backed by Y Combinator and roughly $22 million from investors including Index Ventures and Google Ventures, it expanded into seven markets before the cost of moving and storing bulky furniture, a wave of unreported layoffs, and a botched nationwide rollout caught up with it. It shut down in mid-2016 and sold its customer list to the home-services company Handy.
- Industry
- E-commerce and Logistics
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $22,000,000
MoviePass
The $9.95-a-month unlimited movie subscription that grew explosively while losing money on nearly every ticket, and collapsed within two years.
- Company
- MoviePass
- Industry
- Movie Subscription
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Munchery
Munchery cooked its own fresh meals and delivered them, raising $125 million at a $300M valuation. But food delivery's economics were punishing, it over-expanded, burned cash, made far too much food, and thrashed through strategies. It abruptly shut down in 2019, leaving small vendors unpaid.
- Company
- Munchery
- Industry
- Food Delivery
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $125,000,000
MySpace
The world's biggest social network let its product stagnate under News Corp while chasing ad revenue. A cleaner, faster Facebook took everything, turning a $580 million purchase into a $35 million sale.
- Company
- MySpace
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Napster (original)
Napster made free music feel infinite and grew to tens of millions of users. It was shut down within two years when courts found its unlicensed file-sharing to be copyright infringement.
- Company
- Napster
- Industry
- Music & File Sharing
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
NASA's Constellation Program
Announced in 2005, Constellation was NASA's plan to replace the Space Shuttle with the Ares I and Ares V rockets, the Orion crew capsule, and the Altair lunar lander, and to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020. The program slipped year after year, ran well over its original budget, and struggled with technical problems including dangerous vibration in the Ares I rocket. An independent panel, the Augustine Commission, found in 2009 that the program's goals could not be met within its funding. President Obama's proposed fiscal year 2011 budget eliminated Constellation's funding in February 2010, after roughly $9 billion in spending, though the Orion capsule survived into what became the Artemis program.
- Industry
- Aerospace
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Nasty Gal
Nasty Gal was the poster child of the social-media fashion era, built by Sophia Amoruso from an eBay vintage store into a $300 million online brand and a
- Company
- Nasty Gal
- Industry
- E-commerce
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- $65,000,000
National Aero-Space Plane / X-30
The National Aero-Space Plane was a joint NASA, DARPA, and Air Force program announced by President Reagan in 1986 to build a scramjet-powered vehicle that would take off from a runway and fly directly to orbit, the X-30. Seven years and roughly $1.7 to 3 billion later, the required scramjet propulsion and heat-resistant materials had not been demonstrated at anything close to flight scale, no prototype was ever built, and the program was wound down in 1993 without a single test flight.
- Industry
- Aerospace
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Netscape
Netscape Navigator took the early web by storm, holding about 90% of the browser market and staging a legendary 1995 IPO. Then Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer free with Windows, and there was no business left in selling a browser.
- Company
- Netscape Communications
- Industry
- Web Browsers
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
New Coke
Coca-Cola replaced its 99-year-old formula after winning taste tests, misjudged customers' attachment to the original, and reversed course in 79 days.
- Company
- Coca-Cola
- Industry
- Beverages
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Nexus Q
The Nexus Q was Google's $299 spherical media streamer, unveiled in 2012 to do less than a $99 Apple TV, stream only Google's own services, and only with an Android phone as its remote. Reviews were brutal, and Google postponed the launch indefinitely before it ever went on sale, giving pre-order units away free.
- Company
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Nintendo Virtual Boy
The Virtual Boy was Nintendo's 1995 attempt at 3D gaming, a red-and-black console you hunched over on a tabletop stand and peered into like a viewfinder. It rendered everything in eye-straining monochrome red, gave players headaches and neck fatigue, and shipped with just 14 games in the US. It was not portable like the Game Boy and not comfortable like a TV console. Nintendo pulled it within a year, its shortest-lived system ever.
- Company
- Nintendo
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Nintendo Wii U
A capable console undone by a confusing name and marketing that left buyers thinking it was a Wii accessory. Nintendo's worst-selling home console.
- Company
- Nintendo
- Industry
- Video Game Consoles
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Noble Group
Noble Group built years of reported profit on aggressive mark-to-market valuations of long-term commodity contracts rather than realized cash flow. An anonymous research outfit's 2015 allegations that the numbers were overstated triggered a credit downgrade and a 99 percent share-price collapse, and Singapore regulators later fined the company a record sum for publishing misleading financial statements.
- Company
- Noble Group Limited
- Industry
- Commodities Trading
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Nokia (mobile phones)
The world's largest phone maker clung to its aging software, missed the smartphone shift, and sold its handset business to Microsoft.
- Company
- Nokia
- Industry
- Mobile Phones
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Nokia N-Gage
The Nokia N-Gage was a 2003 gaming phone, Nokia's attempt to take on the Game Boy Advance while also being your mobile. It failed at both. You had to hold the tall device sideways against your face to make calls (the infamous "taco phone"), its screen was half the size of a real handheld's, and changing a game meant powering down and removing the battery. Nokia hoped to sell 6 million; it sold about 2 million, and shut the platform down in 2009.
- Company
- Nokia
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Nortel
Once worth about C$350 billion, more than a third of the entire Toronto Stock Exchange, Nortel abandoned innovation for a debt-fuelled acquisition spree. Gutted by the telecom bust and out-competed by cheaper rivals, it filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
- Company
- Nortel Networks
- Industry
- Telecommunications Equipment
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Northern Rock
A fast-growing UK mortgage lender funded itself not with deposits but by borrowing short-term in wholesale money markets. When those markets froze in 2007, it triggered the first run on a British bank in 150 years and was nationalized.
- Company
- Northern Rock
- Industry
- Banking & Mortgages
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Oculus Go
Oculus Go was Facebook's standalone, no-PC-required VR headset, launched in May 2018 at $199 as an entry point meant to bring virtual reality to a mass audience. It sold well for a budget device, but its fixed 3-degrees-of-freedom tracking limited it to seated, look-around experiences and left it unable to run the more capable roomscale content developers wanted to build. Facebook discontinued it in June 2020 in favor of the 6-degrees-of-freedom Oculus Quest, wound down its app store over the following two years, and phased out software support by 2022.
- Company
- Facebook (renamed Meta in 2021)
- Industry
- Virtual Reality Hardware
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Oculus Rooms
Oculus Rooms was Facebook's virtual hangout app, letting friends meet as avatars in a decorated VR room to chat, watch videos, and play games together. Launched in December 2016 for Gear VR and later made the flagship social app bundled with the standalone Oculus Go, it ran alongside a companion app, Oculus Venues, for watching live concerts and sports as a group. Neither app was ported to the Oculus Quest when it launched in 2019, and Facebook shut Rooms down in October 2019 as it redirected its social VR ambitions toward a more ambitious platform, Facebook Horizon.
- Company
- Industry
- Virtual Reality Software
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Ofo
Ofo scaled a dockless bike-sharing service to more than 10 million bikes across 250 cities on the strength of venture funding rather than profit. When investors stopped underwriting the losses and a merger with rival Mobike fell through, the company could not refund tens of millions of dollars in user deposits, and it collapsed under public protest and government pressure.
- Company
- Ofo (Dongxia Datong Technology Co.)
- Industry
- Bike Sharing
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile was America's oldest car brand, founded in 1897, the maker of the first mass-produced American automobile and once home to the best-selling car in the country. It died in 2004, not from a single disaster but from a slow loss of identity. Decades of sharing engines and platforms with other GM divisions blurred what an Oldsmobile even was, and when import brands captured its middle-income buyers, GM had no clear reason to keep it. The last Oldsmobile, an Alero, left the Lansing line on April 29, 2004, after 106 years and more than 35 million cars.
- Company
- Oldsmobile
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Olympia & York
Olympia & York was one of the world's largest property developers, run by Canada's Reichmann family. It bet the company on Canary Wharf, a vast speculative office complex in London's Docklands, built on enormous debt before the tenants or the promised transit link arrived. When the early-1990s property market crashed, the empty towers helped bring the whole empire down.
- Company
- Olympia & York
- Industry
- Real Estate
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Olympus Corporation
Olympus, the Japanese camera and medical-equipment maker, concealed roughly $1.7 billion in investment losses for more than two decades using loss-hiding schemes routed through inflated acquisition fees. Newly appointed British CEO Michael Woodford was fired within weeks of questioning the payments, then went public, triggering a criminal prosecution that ended in guilty pleas and suspended prison sentences for three former executives.
- Company
- Olympus Corporation
- Industry
- Precision Instruments & Optics
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
OMGPOP
OMGPOP's drawing game Draw Something was a viral sensation, and Zynga bought the studio for about $200 million at the very peak. Days later the game began shedding millions of players, and barely a year on, Zynga shut OMGPOP down.
- Company
- OMGPOP
- Industry
- Mobile Games
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
One.Tel
One.Tel grew explosively into one of Australia's biggest companies, backed by the Murdoch and Packer empires, then collapsed in 2001. Ruinous cash burn and weak financial visibility meant it was insolvent months before anyone acted; when its backers pulled a rescue, it fell apart within days.
- Company
- One.Tel
- Industry
- Telecommunications
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
OnLive
OnLive streamed console-quality games from remote data centers years before home internet could deliver them lag-free. Real-world latency and ruinous infrastructure costs collapsed the company in 2012; it was fire-sold for $4.8M after a valuation near $1.8B.
- Company
- OnLive
- Industry
- Cloud Gaming
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Osborne Computer Corporation
Osborne made the first commercially successful portable computer and grew explosively. Then, the story goes, it killed itself by showing off future models before the current one sold, though historians argue competition and finances mattered as much.
- Company
- Osborne Computer
- Industry
- Personal Computers
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Ouya
A record-breaking Kickstarter promised a cheap, open Android console to "open the last closed platform", the TV. But the hardware was weak, the games were weaker, and outside its backers almost no one bought it, so Ouya was sold for parts within two years.
- Company
- Ouya
- Industry
- Video Game Consoles
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Palm, Inc.
Palm invented the mainstream PDA with the 1996 PalmPilot and once controlled well over half that market, but a fractured corporate history and a slow response to smartphones let BlackBerry and then the iPhone pass it by, ending in a 2010 sale to HP for a fraction of its dot-com value.
- Company
- Palm, Inc.
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Pan Am
Pan American World Airways was the iconic face of US international flying, and had almost no domestic network. When deregulation opened its skies to domestic rivals in 1978, its model was exposed; a costly acquisition meant to fix that only loaded on debt, it sold its crown jewels to survive, and after the Lockerbie bombing and years of losses it shut down in December 1991.
- Company
- Pan American World Airways
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Parse
Parse was a backend-as-a-service that let mobile developers skip building their own servers. After Facebook bought it in 2013, some 600,000 apps came to depend on it, then Facebook decided the platform wasn't core and shut Parse down, a landmark lesson in building on someone else's platform.
- Company
- Parse
- Industry
- Developer Tools
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Path
Path was a beautifully designed "personal" social network capped at 50 friends. Silicon Valley's bet that intimacy could beat scale. It turned down $100 million from Google, then couldn't grow against Facebook and Instagram, sold to Korea's Kakao in 2015, and shut down in 2018.
- Company
- Path
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $70,000,000
Payless ShoeSource
Payless ShoeSource sold cheap shoes from thousands of mall and strip-mall stores for decades. A $2 billion leveraged buyout in 2012 saddled it with debt just as shoe shopping moved online to Amazon and Zappos and to discounters like Walmart and Target. It went bankrupt in 2017, failed to fix the business, and in 2019 filed again and liquidated all of its roughly 2,100 stores in North America.
- Company
- Payless ShoeSource
- Industry
- Footwear Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Pebble
The record-breaking crowdfunded smartwatch that could not survive the platform owners entering its market.
- Company
- Pebble
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $30,603,775
Periscope
Periscope was the live-video-streaming app Twitter bought for roughly $100 million before it had even launched, folded tightly into Twitter, and watched become an award-winning hit within months. Over the next few years Twitter built live video directly into its main app, and Periscope's standalone role faded until Twitter shut it down in March 2021, citing years of declining usage and rising maintenance cost.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Pets.com
The sock-puppet dot-com that sold pet supplies below cost, outspent its revenue many times over on marketing, and collapsed nine months after its IPO.
- Company
- Pets.com
- Industry
- E-commerce
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Philips CD-i
Philips' CD-i tried to be a multimedia player, an educational device, and a game console all at once. Expensive and unfocused, with an infamously weak game library, it never found a market, reportedly costing Philips close to $1 billion.
- Company
- Philips
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Phlogiston theory
For most of the 18th century, phlogiston was chemistry's leading idea. Named by Georg Stahl in 1718, it held that a fire-substance, phlogiston, was released whenever things burned or metals rusted, and it unified combustion, rusting, and respiration under one elegant theory. It had one stubborn problem. Metals gain weight when they burn, the opposite of what losing phlogiston should do. When Lavoisier weighed things carefully and showed combustion is combination with oxygen, the whole framework collapsed in the Chemical Revolution of the 1790s.
- Company
- University of Halle
- Industry
- Scientific Research
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Pier 1 Imports
Pier 1 Imports sold quirky, affordable home furnishings and was a mall fixture for decades. Then it lost the thread. It thought it competed with Pottery Barn while its shoppers were actually going to Target and HomeGoods, it fumbled e-commerce, and it kept too many aging stores. It filed for bankruptcy in early 2020, failed to find a buyer, and COVID turned the closure into a full liquidation of its 900-plus stores.
- Company
- Pier 1 Imports
- Industry
- Home Goods Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Piltdown Man
In 1912 the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson presented skull and jaw fragments from a gravel pit at Piltdown, England, as a new early human ancestor, Eoanthropus dawsoni. Much of the British scientific establishment accepted it as genuine for four decades, a case study not in one man's forgery but in a field's failure to verify extraordinary evidence. The find fit the expectation that large brains preceded upright walking in human evolution, and it flattered British scientific standing at a moment of national rivalry, so contrary evidence, including Raymond Dart's 1924 Taung Child, was dismissed or sidelined for years. In 1953, fluorine dating and other forensic tests showed the skull was a modern human cranium and the jaw an orangutan's, both filed and stained to look ancient and to fit together.
- Industry
- Scientific Research
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
PlayStation Vita
Sony's technically impressive handheld launched into the rise of smartphone gaming, saddled with expensive proprietary memory cards. Starved of software as Sony pivoted to the PlayStation 4, it sold about 16 million units and was quietly retired.
- Company
- Sony
- Industry
- Video Games
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Polaroid
Polaroid invented instant photography and for decades made fat margins selling the film that fed its cameras. Digital cameras quietly ate that cash cow, and Polaroid, already loaded with debt from years of costly bets and a hostile-takeover defense, had no cushion. Nearly $1 billion in debt and profitable in just one of its last five years, it filed for bankruptcy in 2001; the name survived, sold from owner to owner.
- Company
- Polaroid
- Industry
- Photography
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Polywater
Polywater was a supposed new, polymerized form of water, denser, thicker, boiling near 1,000°F, reported from Soviet labs and chased worldwide in the late 1960s, amid Cold War fears of a "polywater gap" and even that it might turn all of Earth's water solid. Hundreds of papers later, it turned out to be ordinary water contaminated with sweat and grime.
- Company
- Institute of Physical Chemistry, Moscow
- Industry
- Scientific Research
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Pontiac Aztek
The Pontiac Aztek was GM's early crossover SUV, and it became a punchline. When GM unveiled it in 2001, the auto-show audience gasped, and Consumer Reports said people would point and laugh at drivers. A genuinely useful, competent vehicle had been cost-shaved and compromised in development into something widely called deformed. It also launched badly, no all-wheel drive for months, priced above its target buyers. GM aimed for 75,000 sales a year and never cleared 28,000, cancelling it in 2005.
- Company
- General Motors
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Powa Technologies
One of Britain's most-hyped startups raised around $175 million and claimed a $2.7 billion valuation. But its flagship product had almost no real customers, and Powa burned through the money and collapsed into administration.
- Company
- Powa Technologies
- Industry
- Fintech & Mobile Commerce
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $175,000,000
Prim
Prim offered door-to-door laundry, wash, fold, and delivery for $25 a bag. But sending a person to drive to your home and back for one or two bags burned more money than the bag was worth, and reliable laundromat supply proved impossible. It shut down six months after launch.
- Company
- Prim
- Industry
- On-Demand Laundry
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Quaker Oats & Snapple
Fresh off its triumph with Gatorade, Quaker Oats paid $1.7 billion for Snapple. It then misread the quirky brand and its small-store distributors, and sold it three years later for $300 million, a roughly $1.4 billion loss.
- Company
- Quaker Oats
- Industry
- Beverages
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Quibi
The $1.75-billion short-form streaming bet that launched into a pandemic and shut down within six months.
- Company
- Quibi
- Industry
- Streaming Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $1,750,000,000
Quirky
Quirky crowdsourced inventions, the public submitted ideas, the community voted, and Quirky manufactured and sold the winners, sharing royalties. But making physical products is capital-intensive and low-margin, it launched far too many, and real hits were rare. It went bankrupt after raising about $185 million.
- Company
- Quirky
- Industry
- Consumer Products
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $185,000,000
RadioShack
A onetime electronics-retail institution that lost its identity, missed the shift to e-commerce and smartphones, and drowned in debt and too many stores.
- Company
- RadioShack
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Rapportive
Rapportive was a Y Combinator-backed Gmail extension that showed a sender's social-media profile inline in the inbox. LinkedIn acquired it in February 2012, then spent the next eight years stripping its cross-network features and folding it into Sales Navigator, before sunsetting the extension entirely in March 2020, citing low adoption and leaving its original devoted users with no replacement.
- Company
- Rapportive
- Industry
- Email Productivity Tools
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $1,000,000
RBS and the ABN AMRO Acquisition
At the top of the market in 2007, an RBS-led consortium paid about €71 billion for ABN AMRO, the largest banking takeover ever, funded largely by debt. Within a year the deal had helped push Royal Bank of Scotland into a £24bn loss and a UK government rescue.
- Company
- Royal Bank of Scotland
- Industry
- Banking
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
RCA
RCA was the company that put radio and then television into American homes, built by David Sarnoff into a broadcasting and electronics giant that owned NBC and set the nation's TV standards. Under his son Robert it lost its way, diversifying into rental cars, book publishing, real estate, and carpets while its core electronics business fell behind. A doomed bid to challenge IBM in computers ended in a $490 million write-off in 1971, its videodisc flopped, and years of management chaos followed. In 1986 the diminished company was swallowed by General Electric and broken up.
- Company
- RCA
- Industry
- Electronics and Broadcasting
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Rdio
Rdio was a beautifully designed music-streaming service that critics loved. But it was slow to launch a free tier, out-marketed by Spotify, and bleeding about $2 million a month against brutal economics, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2015, its technology bought by Pandora.
- Company
- Rdio
- Industry
- Music Streaming
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $125,000,000
Rethink Robotics
Founded by iRobot's Rodney Brooks, Rethink pioneered friendly "collaborative robots", Baxter and Sawyer, meant to work safely beside people. But the robots weren't precise or robust enough for real factories, nimbler rivals moved faster, and after raising nearly $150 million it closed in 2018.
- Company
- Rethink Robotics
- Industry
- Robotics
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $150,000,000
Robinsons (Singapore)
Robinsons, Singapore's oldest department store, could not survive the combined pressure of e-commerce competition and the COVID-19 pandemic after six consecutive years of losses. It closed its remaining physical stores between August 2020 and January 2021, ending 162 years of continuous retail operation, before its brand and inventory were sold to relaunch as an online-only retailer.
- Company
- Robinsons & Co. (Singapore) Pte Ltd
- Industry
- Department Store Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Saab Automobile
A beloved, quirky Swedish carmaker was absorbed into General Motors and lost the distinctive identity that was its only edge. Never reaching the scale to be profitable, it went bankrupt in 2011 when a last-minute rescue was blocked.
- Company
- Saab
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Saatchi & Saatchi
Saatchi & Saatchi grew from a small London agency into the world's largest advertising group through a debt-funded acquisition spree in the 1970s and 1980s. The spending outran the business, profits collapsed after 1988, and by the early 1990s the group was overextended and its share price had fallen sharply. In December 1994, a shareholder revolt led by US fund manager David Herro forced founder Maurice Saatchi out as chairman. Maurice and several senior executives left soon after to found the rival agency M&C Saatchi, taking major clients including British Airways.
- Company
- Saatchi & Saatchi
- Industry
- Advertising
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Satyam Computer Services
Satyam, then India's fourth-largest IT services company, collapsed when founder Ramalinga Raju confessed in January 2009 to a years-long scheme of fabricated revenue, phantom employees, and falsified bank balances totaling roughly $1 billion. An emergency government-organized sale kept the company operating under Tech Mahindra, while Raju was convicted in 2015, though his appeal against that conviction remained unresolved more than a decade later.
- Company
- Satyam Computer Services Limited
- Industry
- IT Services
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
ScaleFactor
ScaleFactor raised $100 million selling AI that would automate small-business bookkeeping. Behind the software, dozens of human accountants did the work by hand, often with errors, and when customers churned, the startup blamed COVID and shut down in 2020.
- Company
- ScaleFactor
- Industry
- Fintech
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $100,000,000
Schlecker
Schlecker was Germany's biggest drugstore chain, around 14,000 small, cramped shops on seemingly every corner. As rivals dm and Rossmann won shoppers with bigger, brighter, better-run stores, Schlecker kept its dated format and bled money for years, until it filed for insolvency in 2012, found no buyer, and closed everything.
- Company
- Schlecker
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Sears (Lampert era)
Once America's dominant retailer, Sears was merged with Kmart and run as a turnaround that starved its stores of investment. Leaning on financial engineering and asset sales, it declined for years and went bankrupt in 2018.
- Company
- Sears
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Secret
Secret let people post anonymous confessions and rumors, and it briefly caught fire, raising about $35 million at a $100 million valuation. But anonymity bred cyberbullying the company was slow to control, a panicked redesign turned it into a Yik Yak clone, and it shut down about 16 months after launch.
- Company
- Secret
- Industry
- Anonymous Social
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Estimated: $35,000,000
Seeso
Seeso was NBCUniversal's ad-free, comedy-only streaming service, SNL and Monty Python alongside originals, for $3.99 a month. But a single-genre subscription was too narrow when Netflix and a growing wave of broad services offered plenty of comedy too. It shut down about 18 months after launch.
- Company
- Seeso
- Industry
- Streaming Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Sega Dreamcast
A pioneering console, the first with built-in online play, overwhelmed by the PlayStation 2 and Sega's own damaged reputation, ending Sega's hardware business.
- Company
- Sega
- Industry
- Video Game Consoles
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Segway PT
The self-balancing personal transporter hyped as world-changing that sold a tiny fraction of its projections and never found a mass use case.
- Company
- Segway
- Industry
- Personal Transportation
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Shyp
Shyp let you photograph an item and, for a flat $5, have a courier pick it up, package it, and ship it. The flat fee could never cover the variable cost of shipping anything from a bike to a laptop, and a growth-at-all-costs expansion burned the runway before the model could be fixed.
- Company
- Shyp
- Industry
- Logistics
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $62,000,000
Sidecar
Sidecar invented much of what modern ridesharing takes for granted, everyday drivers, driver destinations, shared rides, upfront pricing. But it raised about $35 million against Uber's $6.6 billion and Lyft's $1.26 billion, and in a winner-take-most market that gap was fatal. It shut down at the end of 2015.
- Company
- Sidecar
- Industry
- Ridesharing
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $35,000,000
Silicon Graphics (SGI)
Silicon Graphics built the powerful, expensive workstations that rendered the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and ran Hollywood and science, doing $3.66 billion in sales at its 1997 peak. Then cheap PCs with commodity 3D graphics cards from Nvidia and ATI caught up and did the same work for a fraction of the price. SGI could not replace its high-margin business, went bankrupt twice, and was sold for parts in 2009.
- Company
- Silicon Graphics
- Industry
- Computing Hardware
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Silicon Valley Bank
Silicon Valley Bank was the bank of the tech industry, holding the cash of a huge share of US startups and venture funds. It parked that money in long-dated bonds just before interest rates soared, taking losses it could not absorb. When it admitted the hole, a coordinated run pulled $42 billion in a day, and regulators seized the second-largest bank failure in US history within 48 hours in March 2023.
- Company
- Silicon Valley Bank
- Industry
- Banking
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Sinclair C5
Clive Sinclair's battery-electric tricycle launched in 1985 to instant ridicule, too low to feel safe, too short-ranged to be useful, wanted by almost no one. It sank his vehicle company within ten months.
- Company
- Sinclair
- Industry
- Electric Vehicles
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Sino-Forest Corporation
Sino-Forest, a Toronto-listed company claiming vast timber holdings across China, collapsed after short-seller Muddy Waters Research alleged in 2011 that its assets and revenue were fabricated through undisclosed control of nominally independent suppliers. The company filed for bankruptcy protection within a year, and a Canadian regulatory tribunal later found the company and five executives had committed fraud.
- Company
- Sino-Forest Corporation
- Industry
- Forestry & Timber
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Snapdeal
Snapdeal grew into one of India's most valuable e-commerce startups by racing Flipkart and Amazon to build market share, reaching a valuation near $6.5 billion. When it lost that race, a proposed rescue acquisition by Flipkart collapsed after early investors blocked the terms, and Snapdeal cut 80 percent of its staff within days and shrank into a much smaller discount retailer.
- Company
- Jasper Infotech Private Limited (Snapdeal)
- Industry
- E-Commerce
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Sogo
Sogo, once Japan's leading department store chain by sales, filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2000 carrying roughly $17.3 billion in debt accumulated through real estate investments made during Japan's 1980s asset-price bubble. It was, at the time, the largest bankruptcy by a non-financial Japanese company in the postwar era, and its collapse marked a symbolic break from Japan's tradition of quietly bailing out troubled major companies.
- Company
- Sogo Co., Ltd.
- Industry
- Department Store Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Solyndra
Solyndra made an ingenious tubular solar panel that needed no tilt and half the mounting hardware, and it won a $535 million federal loan guarantee to build a robotic factory. Its whole cost advantage rested on silicon staying expensive. Silicon prices then fell roughly eightfold and cheap Chinese panels flooded the market, so in 2011 Solyndra went bankrupt, laid off 1,100 workers, and became a political scandal.
- Company
- Solyndra
- Industry
- Solar Energy
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Sony Betamax
The technically respected videotape format lost the home-video war to VHS. Sony kept Betamax closed and short-recording, while JVC licensed VHS widely and let it record a whole movie.
- Company
- Sony
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
South Sea Bubble
The South Sea Bubble of 1720 was Britain's first great stock-market mania, and it gave the world the word "bubble." The South Sea Company offered to swallow the national debt in exchange for its shares, then, through rumor, bribery, and financial trickery, drove those shares from about £128 to nearly £1,000 in months. At the peak the company was worth more than all the land in Britain. Then it crashed, ruining thousands of investors, breaking banks, and famously costing Isaac Newton a fortune.
- Company
- South Sea Company
- Industry
- Public Finance
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
SpoonRocket
SpoonRocket cooked its own cheap meals and delivered them in about ten minutes. It reached positive unit margins, but the model was capital-hungry, and when the venture-funding climate froze in early 2016, it couldn't raise the money to keep scaling and shut down.
- Company
- SpoonRocket
- Industry
- Food Delivery
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Estimated: $13,500,000
Sprig
Sprig cooked its own healthy meals in its own kitchens and delivered them in minutes, owning the entire chain from sourcing to your door. It raised $56.7 million on that vertically integrated model, but the economics of doing everything itself never worked at scale, and it shut down in 2017.
- Company
- Sprig
- Industry
- Food Delivery
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $56,700,000
Starbucks' 2007-2008 Overexpansion and Store-Closure Reset
Through the mid-2000s Starbucks pursued saturating store growth, opening thousands of stores a year and clustering multiple locations in the same market, while efficiency measures like flavor-locked packaging and automatic espresso machines traded away sensory parts of the in-store experience. In February 2007 founder Howard Schultz, who had stepped back from daily leadership, wrote an internal memo warning that the company had diluted its own brand. The memo leaked, and as the 2008 financial crisis hit consumer spending, Starbucks announced hundreds of US store closures, cut jobs, and Schultz returned as CEO to close every US store for one evening in February 2008 to retrain baristas.
- Company
- Starbucks
- Industry
- Coffee and Quick-Service Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Steam Machines
Valve's Steam Machines were living-room gaming PCs running its own Linux-based SteamOS. Caught between a console and a PC, with fewer games, worse performance, and a confusing range of prices, they had no clear customer. Fewer than half a million sold, partners bailed, and Valve quietly shelved the whole idea.
- Company
- Valve
- Industry
- Video Games
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
STX Offshore & Shipbuilding
STX, once the world's fourth-largest shipbuilding group after an aggressive run of international acquisitions, spent nearly a decade in successive debt restructurings once a global shipbuilding downturn exposed the debt behind that expansion. Despite trillions of won in creditor support, the company shrank from a multinational conglomerate to a workforce of a few hundred before being sold to a private-equity consortium and relaunched under a new name.
- Company
- STX Offshore & Shipbuilding Co., Ltd.
- Industry
- Shipbuilding
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Sun Microsystems
A Silicon Valley icon worth over $200 billion at the dot-com peak, Sun built the servers that ran the early web. Then cheap commodity Linux servers undercut its proprietary hardware, a shift its own engineers had foreseen, and after a decade of failed turnarounds Oracle bought it for a fraction of its former worth.
- Company
- Sun Microsystems
- Industry
- Enterprise Computing
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Suzlon Energy
Suzlon Energy grew into the world's fifth-largest wind turbine manufacturer through aggressive international acquisitions, then defaulted on what was at the time India's largest corporate bond default after the 2008 financial crisis exposed the debt behind that expansion. It took more than a decade and multiple restructurings, including diluting founder Tulsi Tanti's family from majority to minority ownership, before the company became debt-free and staged a dramatic recovery.
- Company
- Suzlon Energy Limited
- Industry
- Wind Energy Equipment
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Swiber Holdings
Swiber Holdings, a fast-growing Singapore-listed offshore oil-services contractor, collapsed when the 2014-2016 oil price crash gutted demand for its work. Facing roughly USD 539 million in net liabilities, it moved from an attempted liquidation into judicial management within days in mid-2016, then spent more than six years in restructuring limbo before finally being wound up and delisted.
- Company
- Swiber Holdings Limited
- Industry
- Offshore Oil & Gas Services
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Swissair
Switzerland's flag carrier was so solid it was called "the Flying Bank." Then a strategy of buying stakes in failing airlines buried it in debt, and the post-9/11 downturn grounded its fleet when it ran out of cash in 2001.
- Company
- Swissair
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Sydney Opera House
The Sydney Opera House is one of the most beloved buildings on Earth, and its construction was a procurement catastrophe. Jorn Utzon's competition-winning design was budgeted at about 7 million Australian dollars and four years; it ended up roughly 1457 percent over budget and took some fourteen years. Fighting the New South Wales government over cost and control, Utzon resigned in 1966, left Australia, and never returned, his name unmentioned when the building opened in 1973.
- Company
- Government of New South Wales
- Industry
- Public Architecture & Construction
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tacoma Narrows Bridge
The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened across Puget Sound on July 1, 1940, and immediately began swaying so dramatically in wind that it earned the nickname Galloping Gertie and drew sightseers hoping to feel the motion. On November 7, 1940, in a moderate wind of roughly 40 mph, the deck twisted into a violent torsional oscillation and collapsed into the water. No person died; the only casualty was a dog named Tubby, left in an abandoned car. The federal investigation that followed, led by aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, found the slender, shallow deck was aerodynamically unstable in a way 1930s bridge engineering had not accounted for, and the collapse became the founding case study for aeroelastic design in modern bridge engineering.
- Industry
- Civil and Structural Engineering
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Target Canada
Target rushed more than 100 stores across Canada in a single year on an untested inventory system. Empty shelves, high prices, and a supply-chain meltdown burned about $2 billion and forced a full retreat within two years.
- Company
- Target
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tata Nano
Marketed as "the world's cheapest car," Tata's ~$2,000 Nano was meant to put India's scooter families into a safe car. But the "cheapest" label branded it a poor man's car, and status-conscious buyers stayed away.
- Company
- Tata Motors
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tesco Fresh & Easy
Britain's biggest grocer spent years researching America, then opened a chain of small self-checkout convenience stores that misread how Americans shop. After well over £1 billion in losses, Tesco abandoned the US in 2013.
- Company
- Tesco
- Industry
- Grocery Retail
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair
Robert Moses built a second World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, Queens, promising it would turn a large profit for New York City and finish the park he had begun in the 1930s. He funded it by charging exhibitors rent and running it across two seasons, both violations of the world's-fair sanctioning body's rules, which cost the fair its official recognition and kept most major European nations away. Attendance and revenue fell well short of Moses's projections, and the fair closed in 1965 having repaid bondholders only a small fraction of what they were owed.
- Company
- New York World's Fair 1964-1965 Corporation
- Industry
- Public Exhibitions & Civic Events
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
The British Railway Mania
In the mid-1840s British investors poured money into hundreds of new railway companies, chasing double-digit dividends on the strength of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway's early success. Parliament approved 263 railway acts in 1846 alone, authorizing thousands of miles of track with little check on whether the capital or the demand behind them was real. When the Bank of England raised interest rates and confidence broke in 1845 to 1847, share prices fell by roughly two-thirds, ruining many middle-class investors even as much of the physical network they had funded went on to become permanent national infrastructure.
- Industry
- Rail Transport
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
The Chicago Spire
The Chicago Spire was a planned 150-story, roughly 2,000-foot residential tower designed by Santiago Calatrava for a site on the Chicago River, which would have been the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Developer Garrett Kelleher broke ground in 2007 and excavated a deep circular foundation hole, but the 2008 financial crisis froze the credit markets the project needed to fund construction above grade. Work never resumed. The hole sat empty and fenced in downtown Chicago for years, a well-known local landmark of failure, until Kelleher lost the site to creditor Related Midwest in 2014.
- Company
- Shelbourne Development Group
- Industry
- Real Estate Development
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
The Gateway Mall
For more than a hundred years St. Louis tried to build a grand civic mall through downtown, a linear ribbon of parks and plazas from the Old Courthouse toward Union Station. It cleared block after block over the decades, and in 1983 and 1984 it imploded three historic buildings over failed petitions and lawsuits. What it never built was the coherent, lively space it kept promising. The result was a fragmented chain of underused plazas and parking that the city's own 2009 plan finally admitted had been assembled piecemeal, through disconnected design moves.
- Industry
- Urban Renewal
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
The Lower Hill District
In the 1950s Pittsburgh set out to remake its downtown with a gleaming domed arena and a modern district around it. It chose to build on the Lower Hill District, the downtown edge of one of the most important Black neighborhoods in America. The city cleared roughly 95 acres and displaced around 8,000 residents and more than 400 businesses. It built the Civic Arena and almost nothing else. For decades the surrounding land was a field of surface parking, the arena itself was torn down in 2011, and the Hill has spent generations pressing to be made whole.
- Industry
- Urban Renewal
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
The Millennium Dome
The UK government built the Millennium Dome in Greenwich as the centerpiece of Britain's millennium celebrations, funded largely by National Lottery grants and run by the New Millennium Experience Company. Its business plan assumed 12 million paying visitors in 2000; roughly 6.5 million came, and the Millennium Commission approved four emergency grants totaling 179 million pounds during the year to keep the exhibition open. The dome itself survived, reopening in 2007 as The O2 arena.
- Company
- New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC)
- Industry
- Public Architecture & Exhibitions
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
The Oak Street Connector
In the 1950s New Haven's Mayor Richard C. Lee made his city a national showcase of urban renewal, and the Oak Street neighborhood was the first target. The dense district of Italian and Jewish immigrants and Black families was cleared, its 881 families and 350 businesses displaced, to build the Route 34 expressway. The highway was never finished. It ended in a mile-long stub that led nowhere and cut the Hill district off from downtown, and since 2013 the city has been trying to tear it back out.
- Industry
- Urban Renewal
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
The Pei Plan
In 1964 Oklahoma City hired the celebrated architect I.M. Pei to reinvent its downtown. Over the next decade and a half, urban renewal cleared roughly 530 buildings across the core, about 40 percent of downtown, to make way for a modern district anchored by a 100 million dollar shopping galleria. The galleria was never built. Much of the cleared land became surface parking for a generation, and by 1988 a city councilman was calling downtown dead and admitting the city had helped kill it.
- Industry
- Urban Renewal
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
The Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project
For close to a century, la calle was the Mexican-American heart of downtown Tucson, an 80-acre district of homes, shops, and plazas. In 1966 Tucson voters approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project, the state's first major urban renewal, and the city condemned the barrio as a slum and cleared it. Some 263 buildings across 29 blocks were demolished and the community scattered, replaced by a civic superblock and an office complex that was so poorly planned it underperformed for decades and was itself torn down in 2018.
- Industry
- Urban Renewal
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Thomas Cook
The world's oldest holiday firm, 178 years old, was strangled by debt built from ill-fated deals, above all its 2007 merger with MyTravel. Unable to invest as travel moved online and hit by external shocks, it collapsed in 2019, stranding some 600,000 travellers.
- Company
- Thomas Cook Group
- Industry
- Travel & Tourism
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tongyang Group
Tongyang Group, a South Korean conglomerate built from a cement business into a financial-services empire, collapsed into court receivership in September 2013 after its chairman directed the group's brokerage to sell roughly 1.9 trillion won in commercial paper and corporate bonds to tens of thousands of retail investors without disclosing the group's deteriorating finances. He was convicted of fraud, and after an appeal that cut his original sentence nearly in half, South Korea's Supreme Court finalized a seven-year prison term.
- Company
- Tongyang Group
- Industry
- Diversified Conglomerate (Cement, Financial Services)
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Toshiba Accounting Scandal
Toshiba, one of Japan's most storied industrial conglomerates, overstated its profits by roughly $1.2 billion over seven years through a mix of delayed loss recognition and improperly accelerated revenue across several business units. An independent investigation found the practice was systemic and known to top executives, under a corporate culture where subordinates could not challenge leadership's earnings targets, forcing the resignation of the CEO and two predecessor presidents.
- Company
- Toshiba Corporation
- Industry
- Diversified Electronics & Industrial Conglomerate
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tower Records
For decades Tower Records was where you went for music. Russ Solomon built it from a Sacramento drugstore counter into a global chain of about 200 record superstores generating roughly a billion dollars a year, cathedrals of vinyl and CDs with deep catalogs and staff who knew everything. Then the music moved. Napster and Apple's iTunes pulled buyers to downloads, big-box stores undercut CD prices, and Tower, loaded with debt from a late expansion, could not adjust. Revenue halved in a single year and the chain was liquidated in 2006.
- Company
- MTS Incorporated
- Industry
- Music Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Toys "R" Us
An iconic toy retailer was loaded with billions in buyout debt that starved its response to Amazon and big-box rivals. It ended in bankruptcy and the loss of its US stores.
- Company
- Toys "R" Us
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tsinghua Unigroup
Tsinghua Unigroup, a state-linked Chinese semiconductor conglomerate, borrowed tens of billions of dollars to fund a global chip-industry acquisition spree meant to build a national champion. When revenue never caught up to the debt service, the company began defaulting on bonds in 2020 and was forced into court-ordered bankruptcy restructuring, emerging under an entirely new investor group two years later.
- Company
- Tsinghua Unigroup Co., Ltd.
- Industry
- Semiconductors
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tucker Corporation
The Tucker 48, nicknamed the Torpedo, was one of the most advanced cars of the 1940s, with a rear engine, a swiveling center headlight, and safety features Detroit would not adopt for decades. Preston Tucker built his company on money raised from stock and dealer franchises before he had a product, then ran short of cash and drew an SEC fraud investigation that froze his financing. The company collapsed in 1949 after building just 51 cars. Tucker was acquitted of all charges in 1950, but by then there was nothing left to save.
- Company
- Tucker Corporation
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tulip Mania
Tulip Mania is the world's most famous speculative bubble, when 1630s Dutch traders supposedly paid a house's worth for a single flower bulb before prices crashed to nothing in February 1637. It became the eternal warning about crowds losing their minds over an asset with no real value. But the famous version, a whole nation ruined, comes from a sensational 1841 book, and modern historians argue the mania was far smaller and did almost no economic damage. Its true size is the real dispute.
- Industry
- Financial Speculation
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tumblr
Tumblr was one of the most beloved social platforms of the 2010s, and it became a byword for value destruction. Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion in 2013, then let it languish, never figured out how to make money from it, and in December 2018 banned adult content to stay in Apple's App Store, gutting the traffic and community that gave it life. In 2019 Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic for about $3 million, a 99.7 percent collapse in six years.
- Company
- Tumblr
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Turntable.fm
Turntable.fm was a 2011 viral hit where people took turns DJ-ing in virtual rooms. But paying to license the music was ruinously expensive, and the active, attention-heavy format never became a daily habit. It shut down in 2013.
- Company
- Turntable.fm
- Industry
- Social Music
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Tutorspree
The YC-backed "Airbnb for tutoring" grew almost entirely through free Google search. When a 2013 Google algorithm update cut its traffic by roughly 80% overnight, no other channel could replace the lost customers, and single-channel dependency ended the company.
- Company
- Tutorspree
- Industry
- Online Tutoring
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $1,800,000
TWA (Trans World Airlines)
Trans World Airlines was one of America's premier carriers, a pioneer of transatlantic flight, when the investor Carl Icahn won a hostile takeover of it in 1985. He took TWA private in a 1988 leveraged buyout that loaded it with heavy debt, fought fare wars it could not afford, and in 1991 sold its prized London routes to American Airlines to raise cash. TWA filed for bankruptcy in 1992 and never truly recovered, losing money almost every year. In 2001 American Airlines bought its assets, and one of the great names of the jet age ceased to exist.
- Company
- Trans World Airlines
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
United States Football League
The USFL launched in 1983 with a deliberately different plan than prior NFL rivals, playing in spring and summer to avoid competing head-to-head with the NFL, targeting lower-cost markets, and signing stars like Herschel Walker, Jim Kelly, and Steve Young. In 1984 its owners, led by New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump, voted to abandon that plan for a fall 1986 season meant to force a merger with the NFL, backed by an antitrust lawsuit. The league won the lawsuit in 1986 but was awarded $1 in damages, and folded before playing a single fall game.
- Industry
- Sports & Entertainment
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
US Airways / America West Merger Seniority Integration
In 2005 the smaller, healthier America West Airlines acquired the bankrupt US Airways in a reverse merger, kept the larger carrier's name and brand, and installed America West's own management team, led by Doug Parker, to run the combined airline. What the merger could not integrate was the pilots. A 2007 binding arbitration meant to combine the two seniority lists instead split the pilot group into bitter factions, and the resulting legal fight ran for roughly a decade, through a breakaway union, lawsuits, an injunction against a work slowdown, and unresolved grievances that were still unsettled when US Airways itself merged with American Airlines in 2013.
- Company
- US Airways
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Verizon go90
Verizon spent over a billion dollars building go90, a free mobile-video service meant to win millennials from YouTube and Netflix. The audience never came, and after three years Verizon folded it and took a ~$900 million charge.
- Company
- Verizon
- Industry
- Streaming Video
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Vertu
Vertu made handmade luxury phones for the super-rich, sapphire screens and gold or platinum, priced from about $10,000 to over $200,000. The specs were ordinary, the market tiny, and the economics never worked. Spun out of Nokia in 1998, it was passed between four owners in a few years before collapsing into administration in 2017 with £138 million of debt.
- Company
- Vertu
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Vessel
Vessel was ex-Hulu CEO Jason Kilar's "Hulu for YouTube", pay $2.99 a month to watch creators' videos 72 hours before they hit YouTube free. It raised over $130 million on that bet, but not enough people would pay for early access to free content, and Verizon bought it for its tech and shut the service in 2016.
- Company
- Vessel
- Industry
- Streaming Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $130,000,000
Viddy
Viddy was "the Instagram for video," a 15-second-clip app that exploded in 2012 to a claimed 50 million users, most arriving through Facebook's Open Graph, which auto-shared their activity to friends. It raised $30 million at a $370 million valuation. Then Facebook changed its algorithm, the free growth vanished overnight, and Viddy laid off a third of its staff, handed $18 million back to investors, sold to Fullscreen for $20 million, and shut down in December 2014.
- Company
- Viddy
- Industry
- Video Sharing (Social Media)
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
Vine
The six-second video app that defined a genre, then was shut down by a struggling Twitter that never gave its creators a way to earn.
- Company
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Walmart Germany
Walmart brought its US superstore playbook to Germany and found it didn't translate. It couldn't beat Aldi on price, its American service put customers off, and rigid labor rules left no room for its model, and it exited in 2006 at a ~$1 billion loss.
- Company
- Walmart
- Industry
- Retail
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Wang Laboratories
Wang Laboratories owned the office. Founded by the inventor An Wang, it dominated word processing in the 1970s and 1980s with dedicated machines that captured a third of the world market. Then the personal computer arrived, and Wang's proprietary systems, brilliant for one task, could not adapt to a world of open standards and networked PCs. Losses piled up, the founding family's $1.6 billion stake shrank to $50 million, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1992.
- Company
- Wang Laboratories
- Industry
- Computing
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Washington Mutual (WaMu)
Washington Mutual was the largest bank failure in US history. A 119-year-old thrift that grew into the country's biggest savings-and-loan on a culture it branded "The Power of Yes," WaMu wrote aggressive subprime and option-ARM mortgages, ignored its own risk officers, and was rated well-capitalized by regulators on the very day it collapsed. When the crisis hit, customers pulled $16.7 billion in ten days; regulators seized it and sold it to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion.
- Company
- Washington Mutual
- Industry
- Banking
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Washio
Washio was the "Uber for laundry", press a button, someone picks up your dirty clothes and returns them washed within a day. It raised about $17 million and reached seven cities, but the on-demand economics never worked, and in 2016 it became a poster child of the "Uber for X" bust.
- Company
- Washio
- Industry
- On-Demand Laundry
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $16,820,000
WebTV
WebTV was a 1996 set-top box that let people browse the internet and send email on an ordinary television using a remote control, built for households that did not own a computer. Microsoft bought the company in 1997 for roughly $425 million, a large bet that television, not the PC, would be the on-ramp to the internet for most American homes. The product found a loyal niche, especially among older users, was rebranded MSN TV in 2001, and kept shrinking for over a decade as cheap PCs, broadband, and smartphones overtook it, until Microsoft finally shut the service down on September 30, 2013.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Consumer Electronics and Online Services
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Webvan
The dot-com grocery-delivery startup that spent a billion dollars building warehouses before proving anyone wanted the service, and went bankrupt in 2001.
- Company
- Webvan
- Industry
- Online Grocery
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Estimated: $800,000,000
Windows Phone
Microsoft's mobile OS arrived after iOS and Android had won, and never escaped the app gap that starved it of both developers and users.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Mobile Operating Systems
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Windows Vista
Windows Vista was Microsoft's long-delayed 2007 successor to Windows XP, and it arrived slower than the thing it replaced. Its Aero interface dragged, its User Account Control nagged users with endless permission prompts, and it was incompatible with heaps of existing hardware and software. People refused to upgrade. Vista peaked below 24% share while XP kept 62%. Microsoft rushed out Windows 7 in under three years, and Vista became a byword for a bad release.
- Company
- Microsoft
- Industry
- Operating Systems
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Workplace from Meta
Workplace was Meta's enterprise version of Facebook, opened to businesses as Facebook at Work in 2015 and launched broadly in October 2016 to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams. It reached about 7 million paid users at its peak, but growth stalled after the pandemic-era remote-work surge faded. In May 2024 Meta announced it would wind the product down, redirecting investment to AI and the metaverse, with full shutdown completed by mid-2026.
- Company
- Meta
- Industry
- Enterprise Collaboration Software
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
WOW air
WOW air turned Iceland into a cut-price bridge across the Atlantic, growing from nothing to millions of passengers on dirt-cheap fares via Reykjavik. Then it over-reached into long-haul routes its ultra-low-cost model didn't fit, and with fuel rising and rescues falling through it collapsed overnight in March 2019.
- Company
- WOW air
- Industry
- Airlines
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
X-33 / VentureStar
The X-33 was a half-scale technology demonstrator NASA and Lockheed Martin built to prove out a fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, VentureStar, meant to replace the Space Shuttle at a fraction of its cost. The vehicle's novel lightweight composite liquid-hydrogen fuel tanks failed repeatedly in ground testing, most seriously in November 1999, and the composite technology could not be matured within budget. NASA cancelled the program in 2001 after roughly $1.3 billion in combined public and Lockheed Martin spending, without a single test flight. VentureStar, which depended entirely on the X-33's technology, died with it.
- Industry
- Aerospace
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Xerox and the personal computer
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center invented the modern personal computer, the graphical interface, the mouse, Ethernet, and the laser printer. Then Xerox, a copier company run by executives who could not see past photocopying, failed to commercialize almost any of it. Steve Jobs toured PARC in 1979, saw the future, and built it at Apple for a fraction of the price. The one great exception, laser printing, earned Xerox billions, which is why "Xerox fumbled the future" is a fiercely contested verdict.
- Company
- Xerox
- Industry
- Computing
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Yahoo
Yahoo was one of the internet's original giants, worth about $125 billion at the dot-com peak. It turned down Microsoft's ~$44.6 billion takeover in 2008, missed the shift to mobile and social, and after a failed turnaround under Marissa Mayer agreed in 2016 to sell its core business to Verizon for about $4.83 billion, a fraction of what it had walked away from.
- Company
- Yahoo
- Industry
- Internet
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Yahoo Screen
Yahoo Screen was Yahoo's bid to be a premium YouTube, a video hub that revived the cancelled sitcom Community and streamed the first live NFL regular-season game. But it couldn't sell the ads to pay for that content, took a $42 million write-off, and Yahoo quietly shut it down in January 2016.
- Company
- Yahoo
- Industry
- Streaming Media
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Yamaichi Securities
Yamaichi Securities, one of Japan's "big four" brokerages and nearly a century old, self-liquidated in November 1997 after a magazine investigation exposed decades of hidden trading losses concealed through off-balance-sheet shell companies. Its collapse, arriving alongside several other major Japanese financial-institution failures that same month, became one of the most alarming moments of the Asian financial crisis.
- Company
- Yamaichi Securities Co., Ltd.
- Industry
- Securities Brokerage
- Layer
- Governance
- Raised
- Not recorded
Yik Yak
Yik Yak was an anonymous, hyperlocal app that exploded on US college campuses and hit a ~$400 million valuation. The same anonymity that fueled it enabled cyberbullying and threats, and when the founders reined it in, they killed the thing users came for. It shut down in 2017, sold for about $1 million.
- Company
- Yik Yak
- Industry
- Social Media
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Estimated: $73,400,000
Yobongo
Yobongo was a mobile app that let strangers chat with people near them in real time, built by two Justin.tv veterans and launched at SXSW 2011 to a wave of press attention. It raised $1.35 million from well-known investors, drew only tens of thousands of monthly users, and was acquired for its team by the photo-book company Mixbook in March 2012, a deal its own CEO described as a cautionary tale about social discovery.
- Company
- Yobongo
- Industry
- Mobile Social Networking
- Layer
- Thesis
- Raised
- Not recorded
Yugo
The Yugo was the cheapest car in America and, by reputation, the worst. Imported from communist Yugoslavia by entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin starting in 1985 at about $3,995, it sold briskly at first, then earned a legend for falling apart, with engines that died, electrical systems that sizzled, and parts that dropped off. Over 120,000 were sold before its reputation, and the violent collapse of Yugoslavia itself, finished it. It left US showrooms in 1992 as a national punchline for cheap junk.
- Company
- Global Motors
- Industry
- Automotive
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- Not recorded
Zano
Zano was a palm-sized selfie drone that became Europe's most-funded Kickstarter, raising £2.3 million from 12,000 backers in 2014 on the promise of obstacle-dodging, swarming autonomy. The tiny Welsh company behind it could not actually build it. A year later the drone barely flew indoors, the CEO resigned, and the company collapsed into liquidation with almost nothing delivered.
- Company
- Torquing Group
- Industry
- Drones
- Layer
- Execution
- Raised
- £2,335,119
Zima
A clear, citrus malt beverage that rode the early-90s "clear craze" to a huge 1994 debut, then collapsed as the taste disappointed and an unmasculine, joke-brand image took hold.
- Company
- Coors Brewing Company
- Industry
- Beverages
- Layer
- Strategy
- Raised
- Not recorded
Zynga
Zynga was the king of Facebook gaming, FarmVille, Words With Friends, and IPO'd in December 2011. Then Facebook changed the rules that fed its viral growth, players moved to mobile, and a business built almost entirely on one platform it didn't control lost about three-quarters of its value within a year.
- Company
- Zynga
- Industry
- Social Gaming
- Layer
- Environment
- Raised
- Not recorded
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