Well, gotta mention Color:
Color Looks To Reinvent Social Interaction With Its Mobile Photo App (And $41 Million In Funding)
That’s right, early in 2011, the startup Color, with its undeniably impressive founder / management team raised $41M from big-name investors like Sequoia, Bain Capital and SVB, for yet another social network app.
Just to prove that even at the time this raised a lot of eyebrows, here’s a piece from Business Insider covering the round:
So what happened? It didn’t stick. Whether its product wasn’t differentiated enough from Facebook / Twitter / Path / Instagram / Foursquare (at the time), or users were just overwhelmed from the abundance of social channels offered to them, it just didn’t stick. I used it for a few days. It was OK. But nothing special.
At the end of the day, with most of the money it raised reportedly still in the bank, Color was acquired by Apple:
Color Labs To Be Acquired By Apple
The fact that the price wasn’t reported suggests it was a smallish acquihire.
So what happened? It didn’t stick. Whether its product wasn’t differentiated enough from Facebook / Twitter / Path / Instagram / Foursquare (at the time), or users were just overwhelmed from the abundance of social channels offered to them, it just didn’t stick. I used it for a few days. It was OK. But nothing special.
At the end of the day, with most of the money it raised reportedly still in the bank, Color was acquired by Apple:
Color Labs To Be Acquired By Apple
The fact that the price wasn’t reported suggests it was a smallish acquihire.
2. From a sensational crash-and-burn standpoint: Tiger Telematics, the makers of the Gizmondo.
Formed by a small electronics distributor and a carpet distributor, they burned through hundreds of millions of dollars, leasing supercars for the executives, buying a modelling agency (they did have great booth babes at E3), and paying shell companies huge sums to develop games. One of the executives (who ended up going to jail) crashed his Ferrari Enzo in a street race on the PCH in Malibu. At the end they were burning through 500,000 UKP per day.
We fully expect someday for someone to write a screenplay based on the company.
3. Out of the latest bunch: Clinkle who raised $25m as SEED (!) round from TOP names, including Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital, Intuit, Peter Thiel, Accel Ventures, Index Partners, Richard Branson and a Saudi sheikh (or was it a prince?)… The “big idea” revolved around mobile payments. The money was raised on the basis of some sleek demo (i.e. nice animation!) with, it seems, ZERO due diligence – funding something like that a year before Apple Pay’s launch (those in the know should have known) was indeed a “no brainer”, with emphasis on “no”… It’s an open question as to who screwed up more: Lucas (CEO) or all those who bought his fairytale.
4. . Steve Jobs spent $100,000 on the next logo
The machines he built were fantastic but they were waaaay too expensive.
The OS built for NeXT computers was the best. It was called NextStep and current Mac OSX is built on top of it
IBM approached Steve and offered to make it their main OS instead of Windows.
Steve Jobs could have replaced Bill Gates as the world’s richest man had that deal gone through. However because of his arrogance that deal never happened.
The machines which manufactured the computers didn’t have the same color.
Steve got those machines re-colored to a particular shade of green. It cost a bomb and delayed the launch of the NeXT computers.
At the time, Bill Gates would have one day hoped to be as rich, as Steve was
when he launched NeXT. He almost became bankrupt with NeXT.
It was the success of Pixar which changed his fortune.
NeXT was a failure.
However it was a blessing in disguise. Everything happens for the best.
The failure at NeXT changed Steve. His later success at Apple had its beginnings in the failure at NeXT. He went on to create the most awesome products ever and changed the world!
Shows you, that a single failure doesn’t define you
By Quora