10 Brilliant Startups That Failed Because They Were Ahead Of Their Time

webvan

There’s an old saying in startups: “being early is the same as being wrong.”

And it’s true.

For every huge successful startup you can name, there’s someone who tried to do it before and failed. Sometimes they failed on their own, but often they failed because they were just too early. They had everything but the market just wasn’t ready.

It must be the worst thing ever for these entrepreneurs to watch others make billions thanks to an idea and product they had. But that’s life.

SixDegrees.com was the original online social network

SixDegrees.com was the original online social network, based on the game “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” and the idea that we’re all six degrees away from everyone on Earth. It had high growth from its start in 1997 but people probably weren’t ready for a full fledged social network.

AskJeeves actually had many things that made Google huge

Remember AskJeeves? We loved it. For about a year.

It actually included many of the techniques that later made their way into Google, like semantic search (understanding natural language queries) and even ranking web pages by hyperlinks, which is Google’s secret sauce.

The only problem? The technology just wasn’t that good in those days.

Believe it or not, Webvan was NOT doomed

Webvan’s home groceries delivery service is eponymous for many of the doomed-to-fail startup. You may be doomed to fail if you spend $1 billion on warehouses and SUN servers before you launch. But home groceries deliveries online is a great business for latecomers like FreshDirect.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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