From the article:
> [...] This is not an overstatement: building 50+ hardware products a year as a startup is the modern-day version of gluing feathers to your arms and flying.
> It may sound harsh but at nearly every step of the way, the loftiness of Quirky’s ambitions far outpaced the laws of physics. The 6 year journey of the company was a balancing act between an extraordinarily bold vision and a fundamentally broken business model.
I'm feeling a disconnect here. It's important for everyone involved in something like this to what to put the positive spin on things. But, how do we say "founder with perfect background", "stacked board", "exceptional team of ____", "top-tier investors", yet have them all part of a company that utterly fails to understand some fundamentals of constructing a healthy business?
If a founder has the perfect background, they know roughly how much of the elephant to bite off. A stacked board would know when to redirect the actions and efforts of their operating team wildly throwing themselves at any effort they dreamed up. Exceptional engineers and designers see a flood of independent projects and say "no."
It's easy to hindsight a failure, for sure. But maybe we could be more honest with ourselves and talk about a team that and some lessons to learn, and did just that. I feel like we're often asking too much of young startups like this -- everyone has to be a visionary or a rockstar, every engineer needs to come from Stanford or name-a-school, every board stacked with billion dollar tech board members.
Maybe we can instead let "we had a team with promise and opportunity" be enough?