Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the most expensive startup failure?

14 pointssergiomattei23 comments

Looking to dig up some startup history.

Juicero is the commonly mentioned one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero

I watched a tear down of one of their machines, actually some decent engineering work, but a hairbrained product in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ&ab_channel=AvE

Maybe 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"

Being early is often the same as being wrong

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.

I wouldn't consider it a failure, I earned a couple meals running that and resource editing aim to have Internet Explorer in the window title; I might have edited mirc as well, but I quit IRC during that time period. Didn't have to fake anything else.

Oh I made a (relative) killing with it too. I was running it 24/7 on multiple computers with bots to simulate activity. The fact that they didn’t realize that no human being can be awake 24/7 baffles me.

Here's a recent site listing 200+ startup failures with approximate funding amounts.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/biggest-startup-failures...

Magic Leap ($3.5B funding) for a second-rate Hololens competitor. They're not dead yet, but the CEO is a pedigreed butcher from Microsoft.

Star Citizen is a video game that had a crowd-funding campaign in 2012, ten years ago, and has since raised over $500 million from its player base and another ~$150 million from private groups.

It's still in alpha.

Most of the player base have resigned to calling the game vaporware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen#Delays_and_extend...

In 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.

Theranos comes to mind. Reaching back a bit more - Webvan, Pets.com, MySpace.

was myspace a failure? it lasted years and tom was able to retire for life

I don't see MySpace as a failure. It had its time and place and remained relevant for surprisingly long time after Facebook took their crown with MySpace Music.

Probably not the most expensive but certainly one of the most prominently featured failure in the early days of the internet.

Govworks.com by that sleezy dude Kaleil Isaza Tuzman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjk-WmtNs3g&t=19s

Not a startup, but Facebook has dumped billions into "the metaverse" and it's a stunning failure.

What was that recent celeb-laden attempt to make a Netflix for short form and vertical entertainment?

Quibi [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi

”The service raised $1.75 billion from investors. It launched in April 2020, but shut down in December 2020 after falling short of its subscriber projections.”

Earn (previously 21 BTC) was not the biggest but it clearly made little sense from the beginning.

WeWork perhaps.

FTX?

facebook

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