Building It Up and Then Knocking It Down

Something about human nature loves promoting something beyond its natural limits and then relishing bringing it down hard. I saw this firsthand in the late 90s Internet bubble. Flatiron Partners and our portfolio were never as good as everyone made us out to be in 1999. And we were never as bad as everyone made us out to be after the bubble burst.

So I have to shake my head at the resurrection of the dead pool, which was made popular last time around by Fucked Company. Do we really need to celebrate when companies fail? It's hard enough for everyone involved to deal with the dashed hopes and dreams of a failed startup. But now we are counting them like notches on a sword handle.

The whole thing, starting with overhyping young companies that are nothing more than a few people working their butts off to make something happen, to throwing them in the "dead pool" when they fail is not healthy. Just ask Britney Spears.

Comments

[kid mercury]

well said. michael jackson is another example, people get a big kick out of tearing him up after they made him the biggest celebrity ever.

IMO the silver lining is that as the internet brings us closer together it will have the cultural effect of increasing our collective empathy as well. so sooner or later we'll grow up and get some maturity.

[Preston]

I couldn't agree more. I'm not a frequent reader of Techcrunch, and after clicking over there to read the deadpool entries, I was not impressed. That first post on Browster is hard to read with the grammar mistakes. I just posted my first filmloop slideshow and I think it's awesome--but the know-it-alls at TechCrunch have all but pronounced it dead. You're right, it's not healthy.

[Alex Iskold]

Totally agree, we should celebrate the efforts, the sweat, the search and the passion!

Alex

[howard Lindzon]

Mike thrives on that crap. He should be celebrating these companies for that is what made him.

Too much hate from certain areas of the blogosphere, but it just begets more and than their audience leaves them in their own hate pool.

[Zoli Erdos]

TechCrunch Did Not Build it; It Can't Knock it Down Either.
Failures are part of business reality, and reporting on them only makes TechCrunch balanced. Without it Mike would be just a biased cheerleader (something he was accused of in the past).

[Satish]

I actually prefer to read about startup's that are dead because that makes it better for the ones still in the fray. Its the survival of the fittest, throw the dead to the wolves and the vultures.

[apseek]

Fred,

I think your example is analogous to our societal culture: we build people up, then knock them down. I think Martha Stewart is a good example of this, although some would argue she was a victim of her own doing.

[ouriel]

I don't understand why informing about a failure is something that is damaging an industry? I believe this is fair, as long this is not done respectfully of entrepreneurs. Failing in a venture is also part of the cycle of the new web.

[ming666]

i think i come down in the middle of your comment. while much of the sideline cheering is no doubt based on a large helping of schadenfreude, which left unanswered could be destructive - tends to be the meat and ale of those that choose not to do. but, at the same time i think we are getting a healthy reality check. death pools may not be fun and may not be nice but they are a reality in this industry. look to the positive - they don't so much predict a trend as give us a little warning before the wave or wavelet breaks. as a veteran of the bubble and its aftermath, i find alot (not all) the same bs that plagued the first web 1.0 go around. I'm not (that) cynical but, VCs and Entrepreneurs live in a world of immediate judgement - "elevator pitch"; "grab them in the first 60 seconds", "we only look for companies with no barriers to entry and a 500m exit potential" (my personal favorite), etc, etc. - given that to thrive in this industry one must have an incredibly thick skin, why a deadpool matter? maybe what it teaches us is that from time to time we need to take a hubris break.

[John Wehr]

Anyone who's had a product featured on TechCrunch knows that the comments are often ignorant and malicious. This chatter is the yin to Arrington's yang, and I look forward to it taking on a new dimension in the recently announced forums.

The "dead pool" is the realization of this vitriol. Of course he should report the failures. But they could remove the "dead pool" characterizations and it wouldn't change anything. People love to watch web companies fail. My question is, why?

[carl rahn griffith]

anyone who has been part of a failed venture would not enjoy partaking in a voeuristic delight regarding the demise of any start-up - there is also however something of a hubristic element to all this: those ventures that all too often are simply 'me too' yet somehow all-too-easily secure tens of millions of dollars largely as a result of networking-cliques do rather annoy those of us trying to achieve things on merit.

[Farhan Lalji]

I think there is room to show which companies have not been successful, but I'm left shaking my head at the pitch things like the dead pool and fucked company take. Surely, they could slightly more positive tones - howabout something like "the Learning Curve" rather than fucked or dead?

[Mark Evans]

It does seem kind of strange to see TechCrunch seemingly celebrating the failure of start-ups but everyone likes drama, and that is more dramatic than a company shutting its doors and laying off employees. Like any good chameleon, I guess you've got to adopt with the times.

[Jason Drohn]

What better way to crush entrepreneurship and development than to have would be founders read about a companies demise in such a way..

[Nik Cubrilovic]

Fred, I somewhat agree. I noticed with the latest set of posts on Techcrunch that it seemed that many people commenting take pleasure in the failure of others. It is the same group of pessimists who criticize almost everything with a broad brush, and for them the deadpool is validation of their cynicism on entrepreneurs,startups, venture capital etc.

However, I still do believe that the deadpool does serve a purpose – but it should be more of a reference as opposed to a scoreboard.

[bijan]

I agree with fred completely here.

it's one thing to report good news and bad news. but dead pools are really cynical at best.

[Toby Murdock]

great post and great point.

celebrating failure is lame. and those who choose to generate negativity will simply find more negativity in their own lives. it would be in their best interests--and the world's--to avoid it.

[steve]

stipulated: celebrating failure is ghoulish cynical and nasty

but let me give two reasons why i think this "dead pool" and its ilk are net benefits to the startup community

1) without alternative views -- including especially the downsides of things -- we are left only with the sunny side of the street. but despite what garisson keillor says, there is no place where "everyone is above average". yet you wouldnt know it from the giddy euphoria which passes as calm news emanating from startups and VCs. this relentless plugging distorts and confuses and maddens those of us who are trying to rationally weigh work and investment risks, and strategies and opportunities.

in short, the good news is, things are never as fabulous or tragic as they seem, and we need both bears and bulls to help us make informed opinions

2) similar to #1, having sane perspective on who is succeeding and failing helps maintain personal, and staff, morale. i compare life at a startup to combat -- long periods of tedium interrupted by moments of sheer terror. reading the news and seeing (falsely) that, hell, we're all working our butts off for every inch of gain but everyone else is on a bobsled ride and partying like its 1999 destroys morale and erodes unity, etc.

[JayR]

I agree with Howard that balanced coverage would dictate that reporting on failed startups is necessary. What would be more helpful, however, is if there were less rumor-mongering and more analysis of why these companies failed (or at least why the authors think they failed).

[Preston]

It seems that people are missing the point. While it is good to learn from the failures of others, the deadpool is not that kind of reporting.

Deadpool is taking companies and speculating on their failure. TechCrunch isn't reporting on companies that are dead, it is reporting on companies that are down--the TechCrunch report could be considered a fatal kick, especially with all the readers it gets. It's irresponsible. It's disingenuous.

Also, one ought to consider whether TechCrunch's deadpool has any correlation to their alignments of interest. Just a thought.

[Andy Swan]

The world has always held the "fall from grace" as its favorite storyline--and it always will.

[David B.]

I have no problem with deadpools. During the Web 1.0 bubble and the current 2.0 bubble, it can be irritating to watch the irrational exuberance of investors ignoring fundamentals to join in a ponzi orgy. When they get spanked, as they always will, it's like a breath of fresh air.

[Jamie]

I actually think the opposite. While, they may be a bit crass, they are also taking public information and feeding it into some aggregate system to come up with some social outcome. A better way of handling this would be electronic markets, like the Iowa electronic markets, where individuals can buy and sell options on if they think a company will fail by some x-date.

[mike]

Agree 100%. Seems like a cheap ploy to generate more page views. I'd rather see TC be more picky about which companies they cover. If they hadn't covered so many flakey start-up's in the first place there would be no need to mention them when they failed.

[Noel McKinney]

Constructive analysis of what went south in these companies would great, and if that could happen in one place, all the better. I'd like to see a site where such analysis could take place without attracting (or creating) a celebration of failure. Choosing a less confrontational name for such a site might be a good start.