Ask HN: Is Slowing Down Failed Startups Possible? I have heard it said that sometimes great ideas are killed by start-up culture i.e. pressuring it to grow too quickly and take risks in hopes of 100x-ing the investment. Is it not possible to take these failed startups and turn them into small profitable businesses without the start-up pressures. |
I can't name companies specifically, but I know a few where VC-backed startups ended up buying out their VCs and bootstrapped their way to a modest success. The reasoning was simple: VC invested a Seed or Series A, 5 years later the company is breaking even and clearly won't return money to the investor, so the investor wants to cut their losses and stop "wasting" their time. VCs are on a fixed time horizon so they want to get out after 7-ish years.
One really cool case was the employees (rather than the founders!) actually put in a bid to buy the company and clean up the cap table.
These companies were big enough to merit the attention of their founders/employees but not the attention of VCs looking for a 50x return.
These situations are very rare, however. To your point about startup culture, if the culture itself is focused on bleeding money and growing to a unicorn at all costs, then I don't think anyone would want to go through the processes above.