Startup Failures in 2013

$249M US government grant. $257M Chinese acquisition. American battery dream sold to China.

The best search engine of the 1990s — until Google launched and made relevance the only metric that mattered.

The French-American publisher of Atari, Driver, Roller Coaster Tycoon and Dungeons and Dragons filed Chapter 11 in January 2013 after decades of mismanagement.

AOL paid $850M for Europe's biggest social network and drove it into the ground in two years.

The social network AOL paid $850M for — sold back to its founder for $1M five years later, after AOL did nothing with it while Facebook took all its users

Battery-swapping EV network raised $850M and failed to get one carmaker to commit

The dot-com luxury discounter that survived the crash but not the smartphones

The graphic design unicorn almost died at seed stage. 100 investor rejections.

DailyBooth was an early web photo-sharing service that allowed users to share daily photos.

A social travel network that let users coordinate trips and share travel plans with their contact list.

The best photo app that ever existed shut down because it could not raise $500K. 55,000 users lost their photos. Co-founders published every financial document.

The best photo product ever built — shut down because 55,000 users wouldn't pay enough to sustain it

Facebook replaced your Android homescreen with Facebook. Users replaced it with the uninstall button.

Henrik Fisker's original EV company — raised $1.17B, built the Karma sports car, then lost its battery supplier, had 320 cars destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, and collapsed

A social newsreader application.

28 million users loved asking anonymous questions. Some of those questions were horrifying.

4 million sticker collectors who never turned into a monetizable TV ad business.

Google's opt-in location sharing — shut down to force users to Google+.

Google killed its most beloved product to prop up Google+. One product died. Both were gone within 2 years.

Brilliant audio fingerprinting tech, acquired by Yahoo in 4 months, killed in 2 years.

iVillage had 15M women readers. NBC bought it for $600M. They turned it into a Today.com redirect.

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

Apple's mapping disaster became Locationary's exit — the acqui-hire you can't refuse.

Microsoft built a tablet that looked like a tablet but ran nothing. $900M write-down.

Check-in for TV shows sounded clever until nobody cared what their friends were watching.

The social network that pivoted to Asian e-commerce — and failed at both

Monopoly meets Foursquare — 7 million users couldn't save it when location gaming fell out of fashion.

Sprint paid $36 billion to acquire Nextel and spent the next decade destroying the network they bought.

YC co-founder of today's YC President built "post by email" blogging. Twitter acquired it to improve posting UX. Shut it 13 months later.

After Twitter shut Posterous, the founder raised $500K to relaunch as Posterous Spaces — shut after 3 months when free users wouldn't pay for the same functionality

A Facebook marketing platform that provided custom content recommendations and insights to help page owners optimize their posts for better engagement and sales.

Invented internet streaming in 1995 — then made the product so annoying that users welcomed its replacement.

The teenage founder who gamified check-ins then abandoned them for mobile payments.

Technically superior to the CD, cheaper than DAT — beaten by a compressed audio file.

An innovative bookmarking service that allowed users to save videos and articles for offline viewing.

Live streaming before YouTube existed — but it could not survive what came after.

Built the social layer for barcodes, then discovered nobody was going to scan anything.

An online flash sale platform that offered discounted high-end fashion brands and accessories to budget-conscious consumers.

The virtual DJ room that built the internet's most social music experience — and was shut down by music licensing costs

The YC-backed tutor marketplace that could not survive its own unit economics

It really whipped the llama's ass — then AOL whipped Winamp's.

27 million teenage bloggers. By 2013 they were all on Facebook. Xanga sold for $60K.

The sleep science startup that built a clinically validated sleep monitor and couldn't monetise beyond the hardware sale

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