E-cig unicorn NJOY goes terminally bankrupt
After raising $70 million from backers like Peter Thiel and Bruno Mars at a valuation in excess of $1 Billion, e-cigarette manufacturer NJOY has filed for bankruptcy. It has an accumulated deficit of...
View Article‘Sup’ is down.
The ‘Sup’ app, whose “boil the ocean” mission was to help people figure out which of their friends are nearby, and possibly available to hang with, will be shutting down. Despite being touted as “a...
View ArticleOla raises $300 million in a down-round
India’s Uber-wanna-be for cabs, Ola capitulated and took $300 million from existing hostage investor, Softbank at a $3.5B valuations, after 6 months of unsuccessfully scouring for $500M at a $5B...
View Article#tangodown Lily Robotics
After collecting pre-orders from approximately 60,000 customers, autonomous camera drone maker Lily Robotics has declared bankruptcy and is shutting down. The company is looking for a buyer for it’s...
View ArticleAnswers.com files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
Answer Corp, parent company to Answers.com has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a maneuver to jettison close to half-a-billion in debt. Top creditors are: Yahoo, Inc. with an unsecured claim of...
View ArticleAmazon trashes diapers.com, soap.com et al
Amazon announced today that it will shutdown the entire Quidsi division, which it purchased for $545 million in 2010, citing lack of profitability. The Quidsi division included various retailers,...
View ArticleMad Catz delisted from NYSE, files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy
Peripheral maker Mad Catz has thrown in the towel after unsuccessfully scouring for (pick one), bank financing, an equity infusion or sale of assets. Apparently after enjoying a fairly solid business...
View ArticleWhat went wrong at Social Capital?
“Social Capital arrived in Silicon Valley seven years ago with a charismatic co-founder, former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya who also owns a piece of the Golden State Warriors. It raised...
View ArticleCanada’s “Disrupted”, eh
The inaugural post of this blog was a review of Dan Lyon’s “Disrupted”, which put a point to the unicorn economy, where money losing companies crowd out real businesses by sucking up all the oxygen in...
View ArticleMunchery is over.
On demand food delivery start-up Munchery is bankrupt and shutting down effective immediately. They’ve burned through $125 million in VC, their last round was $87 million in 2015 at a $300 million...
View ArticleWeCash-out, before IPO
The WSJ today reported on how WeWork co-founder and CEO Andrew Neumann has extracted $700,000,000 in share sales and loans from his money-losing, pre-IPO unicorn. So far Neumann has purchased 4 homes...
View ArticleUnicorns Jump The Shark: WeWork IPO In Danger of being Shelved
For some reason the investing public seems to be giving the WeWork IPO a suboptimal reception. After multiple reductions in the IPO sticker price, from 40B down to 20B and now perhaps even less, the...
View ArticleVentureCrapital initiates coverage on $TSLAQ
I had all but mothballed this project because, frankly, I was neglecting it. But lately I’ve been feeling like some kind of inflection point has been reached. When multiple unicorns are underwater or...
View ArticleBloomberg: WeWork floats “governance change” to salvage IPO
As per Bloomberg: WeWork desperately scrambles to salvage an IPO being spurned by the investing public by floating a “governance shakeup” although any reforms would still leave Neumann with total...
View ArticlePley, that hot start-up that rented Legos by the month inexplicably failed.
So yeah, I decided with WeWork and $TSLAQ and assorted unicorn b.s (like TIL that Softbank put $300M into a dog walking app can you believe that?) even though I’m busy with normal things, I am...
View ArticleTesla to lay off up to half of sales and delivery staff
CNBC reported Friday that Tesla will be laying off up to half of it’s sales and delivery staff, this comes on the heels of other layoffs reported earlier in the week. Salaried employees are looking at...
View ArticleAirBnB Pivots to “Virtual Experiences”, Lands $1 Billion Down Round
AirBnB, the tech unicorn that monetizes your spare room has been hit hard by the Coronavirus academic. As the company and the phenomenon grew, more and more “investors” levered up to buy more...
View ArticleSiri: What is a “Unicorn circle jerk”?
Carta, a unicorn that makes dashboards for managing equity investments in other unicorns is laying off staff and sniffing out a cash injection from existing backers. Bloomberg reports that the company...
View ArticleThematic next-wave portfolio constructor Motif goes bust
Motif trading platform, which claimed to use data driven methodologies to enable the creation of thematic and “next-wave” portfolios (translation: they grep 10Q’s for keywords) has rather abruptly shut...
View ArticleMemo to Robinhood traders: “Bankruptcy” usually means the equity gets wiped out
Quick primer on how it works, given Hertz is about to pull the world’s first Initial Bankruptcy Offering: The senior debt holders are first in line Subordinated debt holders are next in line Creditors,...
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