Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — portfolio autopsies

MIT-born emotion AI pioneer acquired by Smart Eye — a cautionary tale of niche AI markets.

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

Luxury travel subscription company that went public via SPAC at 1.1 billion dollars and watched its stock collapse 95 percent as subscribers refused to pay high membership fees for limited supply.

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

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

The psychology-based weight loss app that COVID turbo-charged — then reality hit

The homework help unicorn IPO'd at $7B and lost 80% of its value the day ChatGPT made its core product obsolete

The Stanford MOOC pioneer IPO'd at $4.3B in 2021 and fell 80% as lifetime learning economics proved unworkable

Unilever paid $1B for subscription razors — then sold the business 7 years later for approximately 15 cents on the dollar

America's leading electric bus maker — backed by Amazon, Daimler, and the Biden administration — bankrupt in August 2023 when component shortages and fixed-price contracts created an unsurvivable cost squeeze.

FarmVille creator — $10B IPO, Facebook algorithm change destroyed it overnight

Daily deals pioneer rejected Google's $6B offer. Stock fell 97%. CEO fired via shareholder letter. From 12,000 employees to under 500.

The Netflix of fashion ran out of occasions when COVID cancelled every event that justified the subscription

Laid off everyone in 2019, rebuilt alone, then couldn't raise the $20M it needed to win.

The radical transparency fashion brand that was opaque about its own culture — exposed during the racial justice moment of 2020

The machine that was going to change the world — it changed the punchline.

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

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

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

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 wearable pioneer that got crushed by the giants it inspired.

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

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

The invisible backbone of 7 million smart homes, commoditized and absorbed by its own partners.

The flash sale home décor unicorn that Bed Bath & Beyond bought for less than its last funding round

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

Good Technology raised $425M, was about to IPO, sold to BlackBerry. BlackBerry killed the product within a year.

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

Crowdsourced invention platform raised $185M but couldn't manufacture profitably

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

The $99 Kickstarter gaming console that briefly made the industry nervous — then disappeared.

Pioneered in-store mobile rewards, only to discover walking in isn't the same as buying.

Shoppable photos before Pinterest Shopping — the right idea with no platform to live on

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

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

The original social network that invented the template — and gave it to MySpace and Facebook to execute.

Jonathan Abrams built the first major social network, declined a $30M Google offer in 2003. Servers crashed under growth. MySpace overtook them in 2004. Sold to MOL Global for $100M in 2009. Shut entirely 2015.