Founders Fund — portfolio autopsies

Discount marketplace IPO'd at $14B then sold for $173M three years later

Amazon for the price-sensitive: $1 items shipped free, no questions asked

The BI unicorn that spent $800M to build a category already owned by Tableau and Salesforce.

The $176M AGI startup backed by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — acquired by Amazon for the engineers, not the AI.

The largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites — SPAC'd at $2.8B, now a penny stock struggling for survival

The on-demand delivery pioneer swallowed by the capital war it helped start.

The EHR startup valued at $1.5B, sold for $100M, then fined $145M for helping Purdue Pharma promote opioids

The adaptive learning giant that raised $105M promising AI-powered personalisation and sold for $25M

Atlassian's team messenger — killed by Slack, twice

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

The enterprise social network that won the market, sold to Microsoft — and got integrated too slowly to survive Slack.

The a16z-backed social learning network for professionals that professionals never adopted

Plant-based mayo unicorn — caught buying its own product off shelves

The original gig economy marketplace — saved by IKEA after a near-fatal pivot nearly destroyed it.

Dave Morin's "thoughtful" private social network raised $60M to fix Facebook. Sold to Kakao for a nominal sum. Shut down in 2018.

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

Gowalla built the better check-in app. Foursquare built the better network. Facebook acquired Gowalla for the team.