Postmortems like this are always a bit unfair. You ask employees who lost their job when the company folded what was wrong with the company, and they'll air every little complaint or inefficiency that existed within the company.
Isn't the ethos of Silicon Valley to 'hack it together' with tape and glue? Moreover, I'm pretty sure that's the reality of almost every high growth company. I'm sure you could find matching stories from within almost every winning unicorn: key bugs they didn't catch, poor decisions that cost them along the way, leadership gaffes, etc.
I think there are a couple interesting points to consider that the other comments address: difficulty of direct services, customer acquisition costs, 1099s. But we should expect more from reporters than to throw in every other possible anecdote they could dig up.
"Isn't the ethos of Silicon Valley to 'hack it together' with tape and glue?".
That explains the low single digit success rate. And that is not really the ethos either. It is mostly a translation of lack-of-experience.
Silicon Valley is a business arrangement. Some folks have money which they spread over a bunch of high-risk/high-return investments. They net out positive. What we get is handful of mega successes, tons and tons of failures, lot of marketing noise, opportunity to work on some cutting edge experimental stuff. It has a mix of people living well (which we hear about) and people who endure bad living conditions.
> Postmortems like this are always a bit unfair. You ask employees who lost their job when the company folded what was wrong with the company, and they'll air every little complaint or inefficiency that existed within the company.
Couldn't agree more. I work at a unicorn and if we blow it there will be a very similar hindsight- and mediocre-employee- biased article. We aren't idiots, we are all taking calculated risks and sometimes they don't pan out.
Also, if Homejoy ended up becoming the next Uber the anecdote about working over Christmas would have been celebrated instead of derided.
Isn't the ethos of Silicon Valley to 'hack it together' with tape and glue? Moreover, I'm pretty sure that's the reality of almost every high growth company. I'm sure you could find matching stories from within almost every winning unicorn: key bugs they didn't catch, poor decisions that cost them along the way, leadership gaffes, etc.
I think there are a couple interesting points to consider that the other comments address: difficulty of direct services, customer acquisition costs, 1099s. But we should expect more from reporters than to throw in every other possible anecdote they could dig up.