Google Ventures — portfolio autopsies

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

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

The Amazon brand aggregator raised $225M from General Atlantic to buy and scale FBA brands and quietly wound down when the aggregator model revealed structural unit-economic failures.

Rabbit burned through $11M trying to deliver groceries in 20 minutes across Cairo — and shut down after just 10 months, becoming a monument to quick commerce hubris

Andreessen Horowitz-backed premium remote work vacation rental startup raised $20M and shut down when it could not turn beautiful cabins into a profitable business.

A co-founder of Google's ex-wife put your DNA in a database. Then she lost the company.

Session replay unicorn that burned through growth-at-all-costs

Hotel delivery robot pioneer outlasted the hype but not the competition.

Pioneered email tracking for sales — then watched everyone else do it for free.

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

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

Google-backed construction drone startup buried by DJI's cheaper alternatives.

The AWS for biology labs burned through $18M proving that robot pipettes don't scale like cloud servers.

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

Shopping inside Instagram. Instagram built it themselves.

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

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

The mobile strategy gaming company that hit $400M in revenue at its peak — then watched the mobile gaming market consolidate around a handful of mega-titles

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

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

Home cleaning marketplace killed by worker misclassification lawsuits

The anonymous sharing app that hit #1 in the App Store — and shut down 15 months later because anonymity enables cruelty at scale

A Google Ventures-backed kids' clothing box imploded under operational chaos and wrong shipments.

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

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

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

100 stamps per user, zero users at scale — Yahoo bought the team, not the product.