More Startups that Died in 2023

startups that met their end in twenty twenty three. Last episode we covered a cloud services company, a cybersecurity firm, an organization that provided telemedicine services to pet owners, as well as a music streaming service, all of which had to close up shop in twenty twenty four for various reasons. Though I should add that cybersecurity firm did later emerge out of bankruptcy earlier this year and has a new lease on life. So it was only, in the words

of Miracle Max, mostly dead. But what other startups had their end downs in twenty twenty three? See what I did their startups and downs? Well, how about a real estate company that went on to embrace technology. You can think of it as kind of like a cyborg real estate company if you will. It didn't start off as a tech company, but it would embrace tech as part of its DNA. I think of a lot of tech companies when you boil it down, or at least a lot of tech startups end up not really being that

much about tech. Tech tends to get tacked on or you know, sloppily incorporated into the company identity, but in reality you're really just talking about some other business. We Work, I think, is the perfect example. Right. We Work is treated as a tech company. You find articles about we Work in like websites that cover tech news, But we Work is really just a real estate company. You know, it's a company that ends up purchasing or leasing office

space and then sub leases it to tenants. That's it. The tech thing is kind of superfluous, but we still treat it like that because it's part of this startup culture. So please forgive me that some of these intrigues are tech light, But I think, if anything, they really illustrate

problems that exist in the venture capital community. And I would argue venture capital has caused so many problems by elevating ideas that weren't ready like, ideas that just could not be viable, and then pushing them to the moon,

and then ultimately these ideas failed. The example that well, besides we Work, the example that leaps to mind is Therhanose, Right, Theharrannose was a company that was based on a critically flawed premise, one that could not possibly have worked, and there was a lot of sunken cost fallacy going on around Thearrahnose. I've done an episode or two or three about Pharahnose in the past, so we won't go over that. Plus, we're focusing on stuff that died in twenty twenty three.

Therhos's old news. So we are turning to this real estate company, and its story is a doozy because this particular company had raised hundreds of millions of dollars just one year prior to having to liquidate everything. So I'm talking about a company called viv v EEV, and Viv is a special case for us, partly because the tech part of tech startup is debatable, but the other big reason is that Viv was a unicorn. That's a startup that reaches a valuation of at least one billion with

a B dollars. So for a company to hit Unicorn benchmarks and still fizzle out just one year after achieving unicorn status, in fact, that's noteworthy. I mean, that's a that's a precipitous fall. So Viv's origins are rooted back in two thousand and eight, when a'm A Holler and Ami Avrahami founded an asset management and real estate development company in Israel. So Holler and Avrahami had met in

the early two thousands back in Israel. Holler had founded a mobile handset company called IXI Mobile and Avrahami had served as the product manager for that company, and then they continued to go into business with one another, and they would co found a different real estate startup called Really r Eali that launched in twenty fifteen, so that came after VIV, but it would shut down in twenty twenty two after interest rates and inflation hit the real

estate market really hard and it just became an unsustainable business. And as it would turn out, Really would be kind of a preview of what would happen to VIV. Like VIV predated Really and it lasted longer than Really, Like it closed after Really did, but like Really, it would not be able to stick around. So VIV originally started off with a different name. The one that it was known for for the first few years of its existence was the Dragonfly Group, but it switched to VIV in

twenty nineteen. By then, VIV was also changing its focus, like it had been kind of a more classic real estate company, but it would describe itself as quote a vertically integrated developer focused on building innovation end quote. And man, you gotta love buzzwords that don't actually tell you anything. You know, you got to keep it vague, y'all. Anyway,

VIV was emphasizing homes made out of prefabricated elements. So think of like modular homes made up of various cubes, or a homemade of prefabricated walls that essentially click into place. That kind of thing. It's meant to drastically reduce the time and money it takes to construct a building. But a lot of stuff hit around the same time, and I'm sure it made it very challenging to maintain a home building business posing as some sort of tech company.

I guess the prefabricated part was largely seen as the tech element, but the pandemic and inflation and interest rates, all of these things contributed to runaway real estate costs. While potential home buyers were holding back because I mean, who could afford to buy a house in that market In March twenty twenty two, Viv secured a four hundred million dollars in funding. That is when VIV officially hit

Unicorn status in its valuation. But by November of twenty twenty two, just a few months later, the company had had to downsize by around thirty percent, which meant they laid off about one hundred employees. The following year, VIV would be forced to go into liquidation after the company could no longer deliver upon financial obligations they had to their various partners and their employees, meaning they couldn't afford to pay anyone. All US based employees were let go.

At that point, VIV ownership transferred to the real estate company Lenard. That's a that's an enormous real estate company, and according to an Israeli tech journal, the transaction was for quote several dozen million dollars end quote now several dozen million dollars. That's a big junk of change. I wouldn't mind finding several dozen million dollars in my couch.

That would be awesome. But we also have to remember that just a year earlier, VIV had hit a billion dollar valuation, so being sold for a few dozen million dollars was a heck of a markdown. Avrahami was let go, as was another co founder named Dafna Akiva, who had served as the chief revenue officer for the company. And hitting a billion dollars of value only to go bust a year later is really rough. Like it's hard to put into perspective how something like that happens. Now. Obviously

we're talking about an incredibly expensive business. Anything that's involved with home construction. We all know that those costs went up around the pandemic era. I mean, there were supply chain issues. Raw material costs were through the roof, Like if you wanted to build a house around twenty twenty to like twenty twenty two, it was suddenly way more expensive. Then you also had things like labor shortages, which made

it even more complicated. You had shortages in skilled labor, so if you needed someone like a skilled electrician or plumber, that was really hard to come by. There were just not that many out there that you could get access to. So there were a lot of factors that all happened at the same time, and it's possible that VIV would have stuck around had it been just a little bit more established. I don't necessarily know that it was mismanaged or anything, but there were a lot of external factors

that were stacked against it. But you know, hitting a billion dollars of value only to go bust a year later is tough. What if instead you hit two billion dollars in value and still went bust. And what if the company was known for pizza making robots. That's right, we have pizza making robots coming up next with our story of a company called Zoom. Zu me. I will tell you that sad tale after we come back from

this quick break to think our sponsors. Okay, so the super easy but not entirely accurate description of Zoom is that it was a startup that used a kind of food truck delivery service for pizza, but it had other

tech elements to it. For example, a robot back at Zoom headquarters would do some early prep on a pizza, so you would have this pizza dough, it would already be formed into the shape of a pizza, and a robotic arm would apply pizza sauce, the idea being that it would be a consistent amount of sauce and consistently distributed because you've got a robot, it's just going to do the same thing over and over and over again. You never have to worry about having repetitive stress injury.

You just might have to do some maintenance every now and then. That was the first part. You might say, huh, that seems like a pretty high tech solution to something that's not really a problem. That's a key early indicator. After that, you would actually have a human staff member who would add toppings according to the order that were coming in to Zoom. So customers would order a pizza

with certain stuff. The robot would put some sauce on a pizza, a human would put toppings on the pizza, and then they would load this uncooked pizza into the back of a delivery truck. Now, the delivery trucks had ovens with GPS trackers in them, so the oven would know quote unquote where it was, and it was programmed so that it would bake the pizza at a rate that, in theory, would mean the pizza would be fully cooked shortly before the truck would actually arrive at the customer's location.

So the idea is that this pizza is hot and ready. Little Caesars, eat your heart out hot and ready as the truck is pulling up to deliver this pizza, and then there was another robot in the trucks that could cut the pizza, slice it into the proper slices, and then boom, the customer would have themselves a really, really fresh pizza delivered to their home or play of business. However, just saying that zoom was this, that's doing a disservice to the company, which was more than just pizza. They

had larger ambitions. When they actually formed those ambitions, that's hard to say. A lot of the accounts suggest that at least after the pizza business failed spoiler alert, that they were like, oh, well, that was just kind of a use case, a test case for what we want to do, which is a much larger idea. Some people have suggested that maybe they said that only after the pizza thing failed, when they said, how can we take these ideas we had and turned them into something viable.

I don't know the truth of the matter, but the story goes that they had these larger ambitions. Unfortunately, just delivering on the promise of a well made pizza would turn out to be a lot harder than they anticipated.

Let alone, the more lofty goals of doing stuff like using data to predict consumer behavior so that you can maximize your fleet of delivery vehicles and thus, you know, deliver more than just pizza, and to do so really efficiently, not to mention, you know, be able to anticipate things within the supply chain so that you're able to cut costs that way. Those were sort of the big ideas

that would form when they formed. I don't know if it was actually part of the plan all along to make this a larger business, or if it was just something that kind of came up after the pizza delivery business started to falter. I can't say for sure. Now for this particular entry in our list of startups that failed in twenty twenty three, I am relying heavily on an amazing piece, truly. It's a great article and it's

written by Jared Herman. It's a ja ryd Jared Herman and Herman wrote an article titled Why Zoom Died, How Melting Cheese Burnt a two point three billion pizza delivery startup run by robots. It's a great title. You can find that piece on how they grow. That's the website it's a thorough explanation of the mistakes that led to Zoom's demise by someone who really understands business far better than I do. So if you want insights as to what went wrong that go well beyond my capabilities, I

recommend checking out that article, all right. So co founders Julia Collins and Alex Garden got the initial idea for Zoom sometime around twenty fifteen, and the goal was to take a lot of the labor costs out of making pizza. You would automate as much of the process as possible, and this would be disrupting the pizza market Silicon Valley style. Now, the plan included a big data element as well, not just consumer behavior, but everything up and down the supply chain.

So the thought was, if you can be nimble, then you can take advantage of the market. You can buy from different suppliers to minimize costs while you are guaranteeing the best quality ingredients for your pizza, and you can measure the convenience of buying from one place that might

charge more, but that place might be closer to your operations. Therefore, it would reduce transportation costs and minimize food waste through stuff like spoilage, so like, there are all these different factors that usually are very difficult to account for, and the idea was that with data you could start to anticipate these things more effectively and thus run at a level of efficiency that's never been seen before and that would really save you money in the operation side. So

this was an audacious plan from the get go. Just a bit about preparing pizzas in the back of a moving vehicle would prove to be really tricky. Zooms soon discovered that cooking pizzas in a moving vehicle isn't the best if you want predictable, consistent outcomes, because there are a lot of forces at play, Like there are bumps in the road, their stops, their starts, you know, acceleration, deceleration, all of that can have an effect on the construction

and cooking of a pizza. So while the pizzas would cook, Zoom discover that cheese would slide around and burn, and topping's distribution would be inconsistent due to this, and it just wasn't a very smooth production as was first envisioned, and it meant that consumers were disappointed, like they would get pizzas, and they would look terrible because it wasn't like a pizza that had been cooked in a stationary

kitchen and then shipped over to the customer. It was cooked in an oven that was moving all over the place. And sure, you might say that the founders should have anticipated this. That anyone who has ever ridden in a vehicle, especially if you've had to stand up in a moving vehicle like on a bus or a subway train or something, you know that even a boring, uneventful trip can cause some lurching and such. And perhaps that bit of the

plan was just a little too unrealistic. But as Jared Herrmann points out in the article I mentioned, a bigger problem might have been that the team was looking at multiple challenges all at the same time, rather than focusing on just one before incorporating or attacking another challenge. Herman argues that Zoom was quote trying to be three things all at once, a technology company, a pizza shop, and a sustainability play end quote. However, the pizza delivery service

was just part of this puzzle, right. The real goal of Zoom, according to the co founders, was to figure out how to leverage all these individual pieces, right, a fleet of delivery vehicles. Now the logistics of operating those vehicles, this message of sustainability, how to take all of that and to apply all the data that was being gathered for various purposes. The pizza delivery business was therefore just

a use case, sort of prototype test run. Now, the pizza delivery business did not go smoothly, it was not a success. But then the whole thought, or least is how it was communicated, was that the team would learn from their mistakes and their failures. They would correct those issues, try again, and keep going down that route toward a sustainable business that could run on proven technologies, and that this business could then be ported for all sorts of

different use cases, not just pizza delivery. That's not exactly what Zoom actually did, though, So while they might have communicated that this was their plan, their actions spoke differently. So first they tried to stick with the pizza delivery thing. They switched gears so to speak, not to use a pun, but rather than driving an oven around town, they would

park the truck's food truck style. They would cook the pizzas in their food trucks, and they would rely on delivery drivers to pick up finished pizzas at the trucks and then deliver them to customers. I assume they also depended on delivery drivers to bring the uncooked pizzas to the food trucks in the first place, unless the food trucks were just stocked with all the ingredients, because remember, originally the idea was that the initial assembly of the

pizzas happened in a stationary kitchen. Anyway, it was just that then the uncooked pizzas would be sent to the delivery trucks. So I don't know if that step still existed at this point where they went to the stationary food truck model. If it did, that adds unnecessary steps, right like why are you preparing a raw of pizza in one place, shipping the raw of pizza to a second location for cooking, and then shipping from that location

to the customer. That seems unnecessary. So I don't know for sure that that's what they were doing, but if it was, they definitely were not making it more efficient, and no surprise, this still did not work out. It did not make a successful business, so the company did a pivot to a more farm to table food truck approach, so again not just pizza but other stuff. This involved licensing the technology to other companies, but none of that seemed to really click right. It certainly wasn't becoming a

sustainable business. In twenty nineteen, zoo Zom shifted to something entirely different. So instead of preparing and delivering food, the company got into the business of producing food packaging. Not food itself, but the packaging that food goes into, which is wild like. That is a heck of a pivot. The boxes that Zoom produced were made from plant based material, so once again the goal of promoting sustainability was emphasized

as part of Zoom's mission statement. So rather than using single use plastic, you could have food packaged in plant based boxes. But there was one teeny tiny little problem. These boxes contained polyfluoroalkyl substances or pfas. So these are chemicals that have a long shelf life. They can be found in various organisms that have absorbed these chemicals, and they have potential links to quote harmful health effects in humans and animals end quote. That's according to the Environmental

Protection Agent here in the United States. As such, some places do not allow food to be packaged in boxes that have pfas in them. One of those places happens to be San Francisco, which is obviously where most tech companies in the United States incubate and grow. So that was a huge setback for Zoom, and it turned out that all that data that Zoom was touting as being like the key to their business strategy could not make this business work despite more than two billion dollars raised

in various funding cycles over the lifespan of Zoom. So in June twenty twenty three, Zoom shut down. If you want to dive deeper into the various factors that led to this sad end I recommend you check out that article on how they grow, the one that's written by Jared Herman. But way up among those reasons is an argument that ultimately Zoom was a hammer in search of a nail. It was a solution to a problem that

didn't really seem to exist. So just because an idea is interesting doesn't mean it's going to be a practical business in the real world. That is a pretty tough lesson to learn, particularly if you're an investor who has sunk millions of dollars into that idea. Okay, we've got a few more stories to get through. There's two in one, and there's also a story I found incredibly unsettling. But before we get into all that, let's take another quick

break to thank our sponsors. We're back with startups that failed in twenty twenty three, and this is a two for two different companies offering very similar services. And both of these companies would fail in twenty twenty three, and both are located or we're located in Europe. So first up. In twenty twenty one, a group of German entrepreneurs founded a same day grocery delivery service that catered primarily to Berlin,

Germany's population of Turkish and Arabic residents. This business was called Yababa and secured more than fifteen million dollars in seed funding. Initially, things seemed to be going pretty well, and the co founders had aggressive plans to scale up the company and launch services in other European cities, including ones outside of Germany. Now that sounds to me like those plans were perhaps a bit too aggressive. It actually kind of reminds me of stories I would hear during

the dot com rush here in the United States. In the late nineties, you had these companies that pushed to scale super fast and rapidly reached a point where the cost of operation was so great that it was outpacing the amount of investment coming into the company, or the investment plus revenue. Usually if the company had a way of generating revenue in the first place. In the dot

com days, that was never a guarantee. There were companies that had no business plan to speak of that still got huge amounts of investment in those dot com gold rush days. So providing same day grocery delivery services in a single city is already a huge undertaking. There are so many operations you have to take care of for that to work, laying the groundwork to do the same in other cities, and scaling up operations to support that kind of work. That's a gargantuan task. It's hard to

stress how difficult that is, particularly for a startup. It's not something that I think you should rush into. Yubaba, however, embraced the challenge and in early twenty twenty three, despite burning through investor cash at a heck of a rate, the company launched a pr campaign to raise awareness of the service in Berlin, and the hope was this would help encourage another round of investors who, again, due to global economics, we're being a little more conservative with their

cash than they might have been previously. Like, it's hard to get excited and think you're going to get rich quick if you're taking out a loan to invest in a company and the interest rates are out of control. When interest rates are low, It's amazing how willing people are to spend money that isn't technically their own. I mean, I guess that's generally true, right, It's amazing how how quick some people are to spend other people's money. This is, by the way, something I genuinely do not grow on

a personal level because I find it. I find myself growing anxious if I am in charge of handling anything that involves other people's money, like that includes using a corporate credit card. I'm like, like, I have to be one thousand percent certain that what I'm using it for is in fact totally appropriate and approved before I use it, because I have this sense of responsibility. It's not fear,

it's accountability. But some people they're really cool with using things like corporate credit cards to buy all sorts of stuff and then maybe they deal with the consequences later,

and that just blows my mind. Anyway, for whatever reason, these investors were discouraged from putting more money into Yebaba, and so this funding round failed to coalesce in early twenty twenty three, and unfortunately Yebaba was at a point where they needed that influx of investment money because buying the stuff so that they could then sell it to their customers, and it reached a point where they couldn't afford to pay partners anymore, they couldn't purchase the stuff

they would need in order to meet their customer and demands, and they had no real option other than to file for insolvency. Now that being said, I did find that the website still appears to work, or at least the website still exists. I didn't make an account. I don't live in Berlin, Germany, so I'm not sure that I

could make an account. I couldn't find any official reports about whether ya Baba sold its assets to some other entity which is then continuing its operations, or if the website is just a holdover from before filing for insolvency, and maybe the website is still active but doesn't actually work. I don't know. Maybe ya Baba itself even rose from the ashes, maybe it's operating as its own business again. But again I'm not seeing any news articles that actually

say that. All the news articles reference ya Baba shutting down, not a new ya Baba rising up, and sites like Pitchbook list Yobaba as being officially out of business. So in lack of any other information, that's what I'm going with anyway. Over in the United Kingdom, there was a similar company called Ojah Oja. It was founded in twenty twenty, so it actually pre dates Yababa by a year. It was founded by a woman named Mariam Jamo, a British

Nigerian citizen and a former banker. Like Yababa, Oja focused on grocery delivery services in the UK, catering to a niche market. In Oja's case, it was African and Caribbean grocery items. Oja received a little modest two point nine million pounds in initial seed funding. You know, ya Baba had fifteen point five million, so it got much more at its origin and later on Oja got an investment from a noteworthy individual Raheem Sterling, a soccer or football

player of some renown. I don't know who Sterling is, but I don't follow football, so that's that's on me. Jamo was really boasting about Sterling's investment in twenty twenty three. In May of twenty twenty three, and that's pretty brazen because it was literally just weeks before for Oja, the

company that Sterling invested in, got shut down. In fact, according to the Standard, Jimo was boasting about Sterling's involvement in an interview with the Sun while simultaneously her company was facing the second of what would become several legal claims regarding unpaid bills. And it turned out that Oja had run through its investment funds and had failed to pay produce suppliers and other partners. So there were these

bills that were just not getting paid by Oja. Some said it even looked that like Oja was selling produce for less than what it cost the company to buy that produce. That's clearly unsustainable, right, So maybe the idea was to try and attract a customer base that this was going to be a lost leader. But if you're dependent upon investment to keep you afloat. Then you need to have a pretty big cushion there for this to work.

And maybe the idea was that gradually OJA would increase prices so that it would become a more realistic business. But you know, if you're buying stuff for five pounds and you're selling that same stuff for three pounds, you're clearly only in the business of losing money. That's what your business is. On top of all that, employees were in a tight spot because the company had failed to

pay them as well. Some said it felt almost like they were unemployed, but they still had to come in to work a job, which is a big ol' yikes. The standard also cited an internal Slack communication thread in which Jimo responded to employees asking about their pay with quote, there is nothing to pay you with Stop talking to me about this end quote. Further complaints would result in Jamo telling employees to take it up with HR. Here's

the rub with that. The head of HR was Jimo's own mother, which I mean, come on, like nepotism right there. That's that's rough. Customers felt the effects as well the cump, and he began to miss deliveries, so customers found themselves in a stalemate while seeking refunds for goods that were never delivered to them. By the end of July twenty twenty three, the company was done for and it stopped delivering on July thirtieth and was handed off to administrators

for liquidations. That these two businesses failed isn't really that big of a shock. While they provided services that their customers likely really wanted. The margins for grocery delivery services they're razor thin. They're so thin, and in the early years of these businesses, a regular flow of investor cash is often necessary to keep things going while you build

scale that ends up being sustainable. But both Yababa and Oja launched just when factors were discouraging investors in general, let alone people who might invest in a delivery service that isn't likely to make them tons of money like it might be a good return on investment down the line, but it's not the sort of business that typically gets you rich unless some other massive company acquires it for

a ridiculous amount of money. So the fact Ya Baba and Oja both shut down in twenty twenty three isn't so much a comment on how well they handled things, because even if economic factors had been more favorable, it still would have been a really challenging business to run, just because of the nature of that business. So I don't want to suggest that either Yobaba or Oja were run poorly. Other people might have more insight into that, but even if they had been run perfectly, there was

no guarantee of success in that climate. Okay, our final entry is in my opinion, a real bummer, So apologies ahead of time. This is also a story that has allegations about the CEO that makes that CEO seem like potentially one of the worst bus is to work for in the tech space. And y'all know my opinions about Elon Musk. That is, this is not Elon Musk I'm

talking about. So it's saying something if I think this guy merit's mention in that space, if the allegations are true, I need to say that because it could be that the allegations aren't true. It's also very sad to talk about this next one during Pride Month because we're going to dive into the strange story of Daylight. So Daylight was a neo bank platform with a focus on the LGBTQ plus communities, and it sounds to me like this startup had the terrible burden of a CEO who was,

at best the wrong person for the job. At worst, he was allegedly a toxic influence who was very good at making his staff feel incredibly unwelcome and uncomfortable. All right, So a ton of the information I'm relying upon here comes from an amazing article in New York Magazine by Jen Weissner and Jen, if I am butchering your name, and undoubtedly I am, I apologize, could be Weisner, but the article is titled the Meltdown of a Gay Bank and then what went wrong with an LGBTQ plus startup

set out to disrupt finance. So in that piece, Jen and I apologize for the familiarity, but I feel like I can pronounce your first name. Jen reveals that Daylight was initially the idea of a Slovak entrepreneur named Mattege Fatacnik. Talk about butchering names, I'm just going to keep doing this, but it was Ftacnic who brought in Rob Curtis. Rob Curtis is an Australian entrepreneur whose CV has so many

different companies listed. Then it begins to beggar belief. Although you would later find out, or at least if you read this article, you would find out that Rob Curtis allegedly has been shown the door in more than one of his experiences as an employed person. That's a polite way to say he's been fired a lot. But Curtis had worked at various companies and organizations with mission statements that related to the LGBTQ plus communities over his career.

Not all of them do, but a lot of them do, especially toward the more recent career choices he made, and so he was very much in that world and had made various connections. Curtis was brought in to this venture, and he then brought in two other UK based business partners, Billy Simmons and Paul Barnes Hoget. So these three, Curtis, Simmons and Barnes Hoget would become known as the co founders. As to what happened to Mattege, he would serve as

the chairman of the board. Some said that this was essentially his project and then Curtis ran away with it. I don't know the truth of that. I just know that it's mentioned in the various articles, so that with a grain of salt, but the concept of Daylight was that this new bank would be a welcoming service for folks who were in the LGBTQ plus space. People would

be treated fairly, They would not be discriminated against. People would be able to secure credit and bank cards that had their chosen name on them, not whatever legal name had been assigned to them, but their chosen name, so they didn't have to be dead named every single time they used a card. Presumably, queer customers would encounter fewer roadblocks for major transactions such as securing a mortgage or

other loan. The company hired extensively from the LGBTQ plus communities, many of the staff identifying as queer or trans et cetera. The New York magazine piece paints a rather unflattering portrait of CEO Rob Curtis, which is to put it lightly so.

According to the article, Curtis had said that he had been fired from jobs before due to being something of a troublemaker, and the implication appeared to be that Curtis was kind of saying he spoke his mind and he stood up for his community, like he would stand up for LGBTQ plus folks, and that this kind of behavior where he was unapologetically standing up for his community was seen as unacceptable in the very stuffy established English banking industry.

That appeared to be the implication. However, Staff told New York Magazine that upon interacting with him on a professional level, it seemed like Curtis wasn't so much a punk rock kind of leader. He was more of just a punk like someone who behaved poorly and showed little regard for

other people in his organization. There's a description of a huge party that Curtis threw in his home that sounds like something that came out of an over the top nineties comedy, mixed in with a bit of the cluelessly inappropriate behavior you would expect from Michael Scott in episodes of The Office The US Office. I'm not going to repeat the stories about that party here because I think everyone should actually go read the article for themselves in

New York Magazine. It's free to read, there's no paywall. I highly recommend it. But the party definitely doesn't come across as remotely appropriate or at all respectful of employees. And their feelings. You know, there's being disruptive, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but then there's also being downright disrespectful and in my opinion, cruel, and I feel the descriptions of that event fall more in the second

category than the first. But that's my opinion. Curtis would actually deny a lot of the allegations that various employees brought against him in a federal lawsuit where they made these claims and others, And I certainly don't have any firsthand information as to what was going on behind the scenes at Daylight. I do not know if the numerous allegations against Curtis actually have merit. There are a lot of them, and there seem to be a lot of

people corroborating them, but I don't have direct knowledge. If they are true allegations, then I do think he'd be in the running for worst boss to work for in my book. But maybe those allegations aren't true. I try and maintain a level of objective fairness, but boy howdy, it sounds bad. The New York magazine piece also mentioned some questionable and shady stuff on the business side, including manipulating numbers to make Daylight look better to investors, like

inflating the number of customers that the company had. In some cases, it just means making stuff up. For example, there are allegations that management invented a fake study to make it seem like Daylight had a much broader reach than it really did. And I guess really it's more than allegations, because apparently the company owned up to fabricating the study, and that's crazy. Fast company actually wrote a piece that was based off the findings of this study,

and the study ended up being bogus. The day after the piece came out, Curtis allegedly revealed that Daylight had managed a revenue of just one dollar forty seven cents, not one point four to seven million dollars, but a dollar forty seven at least, assuming I'm reading the article correctly, that is abysmal. Daylight launched new features, including tools meant to help customers with family planning, including tools meant to help secure financing for fertility treatments or to help queer

couples pursue an adoption. But it was either too little, too late, or it was the nail that sealed the coffin. In May twenty twenty three, Rob Curtis posted on Medium that quote, I'm incredibly sad to announce that today we are closing Daylight, the first and only LGBTQ plus banking platform in the USA end quote. He would also write quote I feel now is the right time to exit this market end quote, which I bet is true. I bet he felt that that was the time to exit.

In fact, he probably felt it was a little late. He laid much of the blame for the company's failure on larger economic factors, things like interest rates, primarily which admittedly that is a huge issue. He claimed the company had quote opened thousands of trans inclusive debit accounts, supported thousands of prospective LGBTQ plus parents' plans for their families end quote, which might be true, But the various articles I've read have suggested that the customer base was much

smaller than that. However, again, those are from articles. They're not from like internal documents from the company itself, so maybe the articles got it wrong. As for that federal lawsuit that was filed against Daylight and its co founders that ended up getting settled out of court in the summer of twenty twenty three, the settlement was filed like in late July. I do not know the details of

that settlement. I don't have access to that document. But the settlement would mean that the matter would be dismissed. So you could say that the court case was dismissed. But to me, that sounds like the court found that there were no merits brought to the court, like that the plaintiffs had no real basis for the lawsuit. The fact that it was a settlement changes that narrative, right.

But Rob Curtis would go on to found a tequila company, so that's why he went to next I think that's interesting because one of his earlier jobs was working for a company or an organization called drink Aware, which is dedicated to helping customers quote develop a personal strategy to reduce harmful drinking end quote. So now Curtis runs a

company that pairs influencers with booze. The mind boggles, right, Like to go from a company that's meant to help people manage their drinking in a way that's responsible to promoting a tequila brand by bringing influencers in. It's just wild, Like it's given me whiplash, y'all. And this particular story stings a lot for me. I get particularly upset when people who are coming from disadvantaged or vulnerable communities encounters

setbacks like this. I have no doubt that many of the people who worked for Daylight truly believed in the company's mission and to know that they found themselves out of work in the spring of twenty twenty three, as well as the company supposedly dedicated to supporting these communities had failed so spectacularly that must have been really hard. I hope they all found gainful employment with organizations that

value and respect them. Because dang, y'all. Okay, that's a look at some more startups that failed in twenty twenty three. There are more than just those, Unfortunately, you know. I wish that I could say, like we covered them all, but no. Lots of other startups also met their untimely end last year. Maybe I'll do another episode to kind of wrangle up some of the stragglers, because there's some good stories in there too, some good lessons to be learned.

I think. In the meantime, I hope all of you are well. We're coming to the end of it. But happy Pride Month, everybody. I really hope you take care of each other, show compassion toward one another. It's the only life we have. Let's make it a good one if we can. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.