Lessons From A Failed Startup

Lessons From A Failed Startup

Perry Ogwuche who was previously a YC founder talks to other founders from the YC community and beyond with inactive companies to learn from their stories and unique experiences with running a business that they eventually had to shut down. Lessons from a failed startup podcast focuses on the stories of entrepreneurs who have started businesses that are among the 95% of businesses that don’t quite make it to the finish line.

Episodes

February 16, 2021 35 mins

Nathan Lustig, the managing partner of Magma Partners, a seed stage investment fund, shares his perspective on how he views founders with a failed startup under their belt.

Learn more about Nathan:
- Blog: https://www.nathanlustig.com/about/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/nathanlustig
- Magma Partners website: https://www.magmapartners.com/
- Crossing Boarders podcast with Nathan Lustig: https://latamlist.c...

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Praful Mathur shares his experience with building a YCombinator company and loosing his  co-founders and biggest investor in the process. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/prafulmathur/

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Ayush Kumar shares his experience with shutting his company and trying to get back into the workforce afterwards. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akumar0630/

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Peer and I talk about his experience with shutting down his company Mage and getting an acquisition offer for his newer company Lean Hire, from On Deck, the very next day, which was when we recorded this episode. 

Peer now serves as the head of product at On Deck. 

Lean Hire Acquisition: https://www.beondeck.com/post/lean-hire

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João De Paula previous co-founder and CTO of Glio, the Amazon market place for Latin America shares his story about building the company and having to shut it down after 6 plus years of running it. 

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Gaurav Maken, previous co-founder of YCombinator's Mylk Guys shares his experience with building a growing business that he had to shut down at the height of their growth. Gaurav talks about the importance of focusing on what matters for your business and the importance of learning from the successes and failures of founders.

https://twitter.com/gauravmaken
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaurav-maken/

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Colin Hayhurst a successful entrepreneur , and startup mentor, shares his experience in starting and shutting down the YCombinator backed company GoScale that he co-founded with James Cunningham. 

The YC practice interview app, referred too, can be found here and the associated TechCrunch article here.

Colin has a deep technical and commercial background with startups in engineering and applied physics software, web infrastructure, m...

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Renji Bijoy, founder and CEO of ImmersedVR talk about his company AraJoy which pivoted to becoming Immersed. He talk about the process he went through to realize that his initial ideas was bad and that he needed to pivot. He also talks about his startup hack to finding good developers for cheap and more. 

Connect with Renji:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RenjiBijoy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renjibijoy/

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Pranshu, co-founder of Prayas Analytics- the google analytics for retail stores talks about the importance of founder market fit. He discusses his experience with shutting down Prayas after not being able to get any "real" customers even though they had money in the bank. Discusses how it was for him to get back out there after shutting down his company. 

You can connect with Pranshu on Twitter: @pranshu_m

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John Coogan, co-founder and former CTO of Soylent shares his story publicly for the first time about his failures before Soylent. 

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Kristen Fang, previous co-founder of StrattyX, a trading interface that allowed you set up sophisticated “if-this-then-that” rules and execute orders on the stock market, talks about her experience with shutting down the company after being in the top 4 of Tech Crunch disrupt 2019 and midway through YCombinators Winter batch of 2020. 


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MoveLoot was an online market place to buy and sell used furniture. They were part of YCombinator's winter 2014 batch. MoveLoot experienced a lot of growth and expanded to multiple cities including NY and LA. They raised multiple rounds of funding summing up to $22m, but ultimately the company had to shut down. Perry dives deep to learn what happened from co-founder Shruti Shah and draw out lessons learned. 

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Vikram  Rangraj and his co-founder had a really awesome idea to build Dropleaf, a video game subscription service for all you can play video games. Essentially Netflix for video games. They got into the prestigious YCombinator in 2017 and had to shut down only 2 years later. Vikram is currently the Chief Academic Officer at Rize Education and he shared his experience of building and shutting down Dropleaf in 2017.

Twitter:...

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October 28, 2020 5 mins

Introducing Lessons From A Failed Startup Podcast. Perry Ogwuche gives a brief intro about the podcast and briefly describes his experience with his failed startup.

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