Andreessen Horowitz — portfolio autopsies

The farm management software pioneer was absorbed into Corteva's ag-data empire

Mortgage and banking technology SaaS company that went public at a 4.3 billion dollar valuation and watched revenues collapse 80 percent when US mortgage origination plummeted.

Polish beacon IoT pioneer faded as location-aware retail never materialized at scale

Fashion rental subscription acquired Lord and Taylor department stores and collapsed in the pandemic

Seattle beauty subscription pioneer that burned $56M as subscription fatigue and Birchbox/Ipsy competition destroyed the economics.

The BI unicorn that spent $800M to build a category already owned by Tableau and Salesforce.

The 3D printing marketplace that raised $100M promising to put personal manufacturing online — hollowed out when industrial customers went direct

The Airbnb for science experiments ran out of runway before labs ran out of needs.

Medical drone pioneer that crashed before reaching scale.

Digital media's biggest SPAC at $1.5B. BuzzFeed News shut 18 months later. Stock down 95%.

FarmVille creator — $10B IPO, Facebook algorithm change destroyed it overnight

Flash-sale moms' site IPO'd at $2.5B, acquired for $2.4B, shut down for $0

Sebastian Thrun's $1B EdTech unicorn — built on self-driving cars, nanodegrees, and 12 million learners — collapsed through four rounds of layoffs and sold to Accenture for a fraction of its peak value

Unilever paid $1B for subscription razors — then sold the business 7 years later for approximately 15 cents on the dollar

Daily deals pioneer rejected Google's $6B offer. Stock fell 97%. CEO fired via shareholder letter. From 12,000 employees to under 500.

The auto repair marketplace that couldn't solve the trust problem inherent to car repair.

$40B fintech. Restricted GameStop trading. Congressional hearings. Stock never recovered.

Even $70M and elite backers couldn't let location data compete with Google's monopoly.

The Carnegie Mellon robotics startup that built Cozmo and Vector — beloved consumer robots that sold millions of units but could never generate the margins to survive.

Personalized gut health — until the FBI arrived

$364M couldn't make exploitative lending ethical — regulators noticed.

VC-backed BI darling couldn't escape Tableau's shadow despite $27M and A-list investors.

A $118M drone empire that collapsed overnight with zero severance.

Dalton Caldwell's $50/year ad-free Twitter alternative — crowdfunded $750K in 30 days from developers, built a beloved product, and shut down because users wouldn't pay for social networking

The wearable pioneer that got crushed by the giants it inspired.

The Airbnb for bulldozers — acquired before the market was ready to share.

The startup intelligence platform that knew everything about other companies failing — except how to stop its own slow bleed

$3.2B for fitness trackers that broke. Apple Watch arrived.

A/B testing pioneer sold for a fraction of its valuation after free tools ate the market

API monitoring pioneer undersold by Postman's freemium wave and acquired below investor expectations.

The CEO stole $14.5M from his own ID verification company — then got caught.

Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning's video chat startup — launched in 2012 with celebrity fanfare, overrun with pornography within 24 hours, pivoted three times, and quietly shut down

The $110M startup that tried to build an Android without Google — raised money from Qualcomm, Microsoft, and Samsung to unseat Google's control of mobile, and shut down after 3 years

The fastest-growing HR software startup in history — until it was exposed for letting employees sell insurance without licenses, triggering a $4.5B valuation collapse.

21-year-old Stanford student raised $25M from Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Silicon Valley royalty before launching. The app never achieved meaningful adoption. $25M consumed. Company dissolved 2016.

The $38M home cleaning marketplace killed by worker misclassification lawsuits before it could scale

Design flash-sale site pivoted four times and ran out of identity

The design flash-sale unicorn that raised $336M, grew to 2,000 employees in 18 months — and sold the whole thing for $15M

Home cleaning marketplace killed by worker misclassification lawsuits

Crowdsourced invention platform raised $185M but couldn't manufacture profitably

The $60M education tablet that tried to replace the college backpack and found the iPad had already won

The FarmVille empire — built on Facebook, destroyed when Facebook changed its newsfeed algorithm.