The Failure Postmortem

In 2015, a company almost nobody had heard of released a video of a whale breaking through a school gym floor. It had no product to sell and more than half a billion dollars in the bank. Three years l…

In October 1993, a new game console went on sale in the United States. Reviewers called it the most advanced machine ever put under a television, and Time magazine put it on its list of the year's bes…

In June 1999, a company in the Bay Area started bringing groceries to people's homes inside a thirty-minute window. It built its own warehouses, its own vans, and its own picking automation. It spent…

The Segway arrived as a machine that seemed to make balance disappear. Its promise was bigger than a new vehicle: faster than walking, smaller than a car, and capable of changing how short trips worke…

Apple launched the Newton in 1993 as a handheld personal assistant. Its promise was unusually direct: write naturally, and the computer would understand you. The idea was ahead of its time. The launch…

Microsoft launched the Zune in 2006 with a competitive music player, a subscription service, and a bold wireless-sharing pitch. The product had real ideas, but it entered a category where Apple alread…

In 2014, Amazon launched a premium smartphone built around shopping, visual search, and a 3D interface. The price fell from $649 unlocked to 99 cents with a contract within weeks, and Amazon later rec…

The story of Theranos usually gets told as a fraud story. And it is. But zoom out a little and you find something more specific — and more useful for anyone who builds products.

On November 21st, 2019, Franz von Holzhausen threw a steel ball at a window on stage at Tesla's Hawthorne design studio — and the window shattered. It became the most-replayed product demo fail of the…

In 2016, a company called Juicero launched a WiFi-connected cold-press juicer priced at $400 — later cut from $700 — and raised $120 million from some of Silicon Valley's most respected names. The ide…

In the summer of 2011, Google launched a social network with more engineering muscle and more corporate urgency behind it than almost any product in tech history. They had real reasons to be worried —…

April 6, 2020: a streaming platform backed by $1.75 billion and Hollywood's biggest names launched into the world — and shut down six months later. This episode is a calm walk through the wreckage: wh…