The End of the Runway: Tales of Startup Failure Keep Growing

This month, dozens of companies will graduate from the ever-growing collection of startup accelerators. Most of them will fail. That’s a truth that’s been baked into the startup culture for so long that “fail fast” is a mantra and conferences celebrate and seek to learn from flameouts.

This week, the research firm CB Insights updated its trove of startup postmortems, jargon-rich blog posts charting their journey from ideation to minimum viable products, pivots, friends and family rounds, and the final realization that they’ve reached the end of the runway before taking flight. At the most basic level, the new stories from venture-backed companies Canvas Networks, Outbox, and others are mostly the same. Like Jeanette Cajide’s photo-sharing startup Blurtt, they ran out of money and couldn’t raise more.