10 Jun This new site keeps track of failed startups and why they flopped
As more money pours into the tech sector and billion-dollar “unicorn” companies continue to pop up in Silicon Valley, it’s important to take a moment to remember those startups that crashed and burned instead of cashing out.
A new website — Autopsy.io — just launched to keep those failures all together in one neat place, complete with a summary of why each company flopped, in hopes of providing a lesson for others to learn from.
In a simple spreadsheet format, the site lists each startup name, its basic idea, the founder, and the company’s reason for failure with a link to an article about its demise.
“We want the site to be a place you can go to learn from others,” the site’s cocreator, Niral Patel, told Business Insider. “We want to keep it positive.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely about the lessons,” his cofounder Matthew Davies added. “Hopefully people will see the patterns. That seems to be the main thing people are talking about so far. We’ve seen lists of the ten things that everyone does right, and we’re hoping that this will be equally as valuable.”
Davies, cofounder of web agency Milc, first flirted with the idea of keeping track of failed startups last year when the topic came up in conversation with his partner Maryam Mazraei, who was watching her company fall apart. They envisioned a sort-of anti-ProductHunt.
The idea appealed to him, but it continued to get tabled until about a month ago when Patel, his friend and collaborator who currently works for the startup Sameroom, asked whether he had any interesting projects he wanted to work on.