Sequoia Capital — portfolio autopsies

Pan-African P2P payments platform that burned through $86M chasing continental scale before collapse.

Pan-African payments app raised $32M and shut down in 2022 unable to close Series B

The corporate-backed digital car insurer that could not escape its parent shadow

Enterprise content marketing platform that raised $74M and was acquired by Seismic below last round valuation.

Digital twin startup for cities couldn't compete with GIS giants and ran out of cash.

The $2.6B revenue platform that couldn't forecast its own revenue collapse.

Unity retroactively changed pricing on 3 million developers — and lost its CEO

The $3.2B home services marketplace that couldn't solve the offline trust problem

Sweden's food waste marketplace had the mission but Too Good To Go had the execution.

Yahoo paid $1.1B for Tumblr — Automattic later bought it for $3M after the NSFW ban destroyed the community

The note-taking unicorn that tried to become a platform — and got outclassed by apps that just took better notes.

Europe's most valuable fintech lost 85% of its $45.6B valuation in a single down round — the largest VC devaluation in history

Anonymous confessional social network raised $61M from Sequoia. Peaked at 25M monthly users in 2014. Reddit and TikTok absorbed the use case. Shut September 2022.

Europe's most valuable startup lost 85% of its valuation in 13 months as interest rates ended the BNPL party

Google tried to be Facebook. 500 million accounts. Zero daily users.

Google's $200M data pipeline buy quietly died within months of acquisition.

Turned down $44.6B from Microsoft. Sold for $4.5B nine years later.

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

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

The enterprise social network that IPO'd at $2B — sold for $462M after Slack changed everything

Human-curated search results — Google's Panda algorithm update killed it in one update.

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

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

Meebo let you use AIM, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger in a browser tab. Google acquired it. Shut it down in 6 weeks.

Raised $41M before anyone used the product. Launched to near-universal confusion. Acquired by Apple for ~$7M. Returned 1 cent on the dollar.

The location-sharing app that arrived before smartphones were ready for it.

The internet TV startup founded by the creators of Skype — $45M from CBS, Viacom, and Warner, then shut down a year after launch when YouTube went HD

The music social network with 23M users that let you stream any song for free — destroyed by record label licensing terms that charged $0.25 per stream before Spotify existed