Powa raised $200 MILLION.
Valued at $2.7 BILLION.
Claimed to have 1,000+ merchants signed up.
Turned out: most deals were letters of intent, not contracts.
Collapsed in 2016.
Lesson: Press releases are not revenue. Intent is not traction.
Polaroid invented instant photography.
Owned the market for 50 years. Saw digital coming and called it "a fad." Went bankrupt in 2001. Then came back as a nostalgia brand.
Lesson: The future doesn't care about your glorious past. Adapt, or become a collector's item.
AOL was the internet for 30M people in the 90s.
Merged with Time Warner for $165 BILLION.
Disaster. Refused to adapt to broadband.
Stuck on dial-up while the world moved on.
Now a footnote.
Yesterday's monopoly is tomorrow's museum piece.
Van Gogh painted 2,100+ works in his lifetime.
Sold exactly ONE painting while alive.
Died poor, unknown, mentally tormented.
Today his paintings sell for $100M+.
The world's timing is not your timing. Keep creating anyway.
Homejoy raised $40M for on-demand home cleaning.
Grew like crazy.
Burned like crazy.
Unit economics never worked.
Lost $20 on every $25 cleaning job.
Shut down in 2 years.
Growth that loses money on every customer is not growth. It's a fire.
@PeterDiamandis Diamandis is doing what he always does, pushing pure abundance optimism. “The future will be better if we build it” is his lifelong brand, straight from the Abundance book and XPRIZE playbook.
Borders was the king of bookstores.
Saw Amazon coming and said: "People want to touch books."
Then they outsourced their online store to Amazon.
Handed their customers to the enemy.
Gone by 2011.
You can't beat someone by helping them win.