The suits are probably wondering the same thing posed on Quora: “ Why specifically did MySpace fall so fast and so far?” Last week, News Corp hinted in an earnings call that it will shut down MySpace if the site doesn’t turn a profit, or at least stop bleeding money, soon. These long-winded answers usually leave the impression that each startup was the victim of a perfect storm of problems. Developer Eston Bond ruminated on memes, self-expression, novelty and penises for 1,925 words, in answer to a question about the decline of Chatroulette, the site that lets users video chat with random strangers. Entrepreneur Nik Black wrote an extremely thorough 2,025-word pre-requiem, complete with 12 citations, for a company called Six Apart. The question about personalized news startups yielded a discussion so extensive and high brow, it was hard to believe it came from the Internet. Questions about failures at Kmart and Google elicited responses from former employees. But the answers come in from all over the web. The question “Why did Jumpcut fail?,” referring to the video startup acquired and shut down by Yahoo!, elicited an earnest 830-word answer from a member of the Jumpcut team, mostly whining about the fact that Jumpcut never got hooked up with Flickr. The Why Did X Fail questions often attract long thoughtful reflections by X’s founders. Quora now contains referenda on the likes of Google Buzz, Google Wave, Facebook Places, Friendster, “ personalized news startups,” witch burning and “ Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” (actually, Why Did X Television Show Fail has its own sub-topic, but the only other question is about “ Arrested Development”). Regular people could care less, right? But one popular Quora topic holds interest for anyone interested in the human condition: Why Did X Fail. Other common constructions with their own topics on Quora include Is X Profitable, How Does X Make Money, and How Much Did X Acquire Y For, which is a wonderful catalog of cutesy startup names and Valley gossip, with queries like “ How much did Kabam acquire Wonderhill for?” and “ Is Adult Friend Finder really going around the valley begging VCs to invest in them?” (Ohhhhh shit!) Quora’s well-connected founders were able to get high-profile investors, entrepreneurs and personalities (Ashton Kutcher!) to sign up early, turning the site into a salon where techsters in Silicon Valley could talk inside baseball, like “Did Caterina Fake quit Hunch and if so, why?” ( answered by Fake, who founded Flickr) and “Why has Craigslist innovated so little with its product?” answered by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and 9 others (we’re all Craigslist experts now), and filed under the topic Questions That Contain Assumptions. ![]() They raised $11 million earlier this year. The site was founded in 2009 by some former Facebook employees who have convinced people it’s worth somewhere upwards of $80 million. is a question and answer site similar to Yahoo! Answers, but much smaller, more feature-rich and way less dim. ![]() ![]() So why do so many startups fail so hard? Students of failure, I have found the answers, exquisite in detail, right here on the Internet! Some even sounded interesting, even if the sender was usually either insecure and desperate (“It would great if you could give us some exposure, because we don’t have any investors”) or delusional and PUMPED (“ called us ‘Twitter meets Groupon!’”) The thing would vanish regardless of whether we wrote about it, so you can scratch “insufficient enthusiasm in tech blogosphere?” off that sticky note you stuck to the mirror during your post-failure introspection. Sure, some of these emails would start with “Dear Sir/Madam” and continue: “We developed an innovative concept: a set of two connected lamps called Ping!” But most of the pitches I saw were from tech entrepreneurs pitching all the wonderful social networks, web sites and productivity tools you’ve never heard of. I used to write for a tech blog that got a hundred pitches for no-name apps and companies every day.
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