Looking to dig up some startup history.
Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#2Maybe not the most expensive, but one of the silliest - AllAdvantage https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000...
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#3Juicero is the commonly mentioned one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#4Earn (previously 21 BTC) was not the biggest but it clearly made little sense from the beginning.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#5Maybe not the most expensive, but one of the silliest - AllAdvantage https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000...
This idea of an "infomediary"--a company that collects and aggregates information from a lot of users--has long been popular among Net gurus. AllAdvantage was supposed to finance the whole deal by selling advertisers information about its members' surfing habits. But that hasn't happened. It took in a meager $9 million in the first quarter of 2000. The prospect of "highly targeted" banner ads is still hypothetical; the information is all there, stored in AllAdvantage's data banks, but only a tiny fraction of it is currently useful to advertisers.
Pretty funny to read this two decades later, where advertising giants built on top of users' data are some of the biggest companies in the world. Although they obviously offer a service that economically scales a little better than "pay each of your users"
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#6Maybe not the most expensive, but one of the silliest - AllAdvantage https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000...
This idea of an "infomediary"--a company that collects and aggregates information from a lot of users--has long been popular among Net gurus. AllAdvantage was supposed to finance the whole deal by selling advertisers information about its members' surfing habits. But that hasn't happened. It took in a meager $9 million in the first quarter of 2000. The prospect of "highly targeted" banner ads is still hypothetical; t…
Being early is often the same as being wrong
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#7What was that recent celeb-laden attempt to make a Netflix for short form and vertical entertainment?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#8Maybe not the most expensive, but one of the silliest - AllAdvantage https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000...
Yeah, that one was doomed from the start. Hacks to hide the popup and automate pretend-browsing came out almost immediately. As a teenager with a lot of free time on his hands, AllAdvantage was a great way to make a few bucks while doing what I already was all day.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#9Theranos comes to mind. Reaching back a bit more - Webvan, Pets.com, MySpace.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?
#10In a sense, Uber. Billions of dollars invested with the promise of winning the race to self-driving. It wasn't the only massive mistake they made, but after they killed that homeless lady in Arizona, they killed their self-driving units as well.