Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Failed Startup Post-Mortems

3things.gitbooks.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 68 posts

Re: Failed Startup Post-Mortems

#11

Post by nostrademons »

jacquesm wrote: post #6

Did you obtain the permission of the authors to republish their content like this? And if so, did you leave out stories that may be of interest? Then I'd suggest you link those on a separate list. And if you did not obtain permission then you probably should!

They didn't - my previous startup (Diffle) is on the list, and I was never notified. Nor did cbinsights.com, which has a comment here complaining about how this post ripped off their original compilation of stories. I'm not all that ruffled - I figure that once you put something on the web it will take on a life of its own regardless of what you want - but it would've been a nice courtesy to the folks who sweated over those startups.

Re: Failed Startup Post-Mortems

#13

Post by jacquesm »

nostrademons wrote: post #11
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Did you obtain the permission of the authors to republish their content like this? And if so, did you leave out stories that may be of interest? Then I'd suggest you link those on a separate list. And if you did not obtain permission then you probably should!

They didn't - my previous startup (Diffle) is on the list, and I was never notified. Nor did cbinsights.com, which has a comment here complaining about how this post ripped off their original compilation of stories. I'm not all that ruffled - I figure that once you put something on the web it will take on a life of its own regardless of what you want - but it would've been a nice courtesy to the folks who sweated ove…

Let's hope everybody whose story got lifted is as laid back about it as you are. The obvious solution would be to simply publish a list of links and to then approach the authors to ask for permission for the sake of consistency in the presentation.

Re: Failed Startup Post-Mortems

#14

Post by asanwal »

nostrademons wrote: post #11
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Did you obtain the permission of the authors to republish their content like this? And if so, did you leave out stories that may be of interest? Then I'd suggest you link those on a separate list. And if you did not obtain permission then you probably should!

They didn't - my previous startup (Diffle) is on the list, and I was never notified. Nor did cbinsights.com, which has a comment here complaining about how this post ripped off their original compilation of stories. I'm not all that ruffled - I figure that once you put something on the web it will take on a life of its own regardless of what you want - but it would've been a nice courtesy to the folks who sweated ove…

Hey Jonathan - Anand from CB Insights here. Thx for the comment and for writing a great post-mortem.

One distinction - we didn't republish your post. We linked out to the original post you'd written and quoted a few lines from it which we thought were particularly telling about the reasons behind & process of shutting down.

That was the format we took throughout the post. Original link and a few line excerpt.

Hope that makes sense.

Re: Failed Startup Post-Mortems

#16

Post by tieTYT »

asanwal wrote: post #8

Most of these, given the order, look to be from our original compilation of startup failure post-mortems. We've compiled 101 to date which you can see here. https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/ Perhaps more useful, we also sifted through and analyzed each post-mortem to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. The biggest reasons founders have cited has not been running out of money or…

> Perhaps more useful, we also sifted through and analyzed each post-mortem to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure.

"But you must provide an email to get access to that."

Re: Failed Startup Post-Mortems

#18

Post by trhway »

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #5

There are some interesting stories in here (check out the condom key-chain one), but it would be nice if they were broken down by industry, or at least didn't have quite so many service-offered-over-web/new-blogging-service stories. Maybe its just that there are so many of those these days? It makes me wonder if anyone reading this has some information breaking down startup failure rates by industry or sector... perh…

the key-chain one is hilarious. That sets the tone from the start:

"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn't know the first thing about starting a business. When I asked a successful classmate how to invoice a customer, he suggested I go to one of the large business-supply warehouses. "They sell 'Business in a Box,' " he told me. "It's got everything you need." I didn't realize he was joking until I asked a clerk for one at Office Depot."

Post reply on HN