Our old buddy Mike Arrington (founder of Techcrunch, among other things), made a lovely point on Twitter:
“One of the first lessons I learned in Silicon Valley is that overfunded startups almost never work. Webvan was my first experience of this. Partners at my law firm took a bath, they had all invested.”
He was talking about Quibi, the short video content startup that spent $1.5 billion with little to show for it.
At best, money doesn’t make ideas less likely to fail… and at worst, it only makes certain mistakes less likely to be corrected. It certainly makes weaknesses easier to hide.
The Wright Brothers made flight history by tinkering around in the back of a bicycle repair shop. Whereas their rival, Samuel Langley had all the support and resources of the US Government (including the Smithsonian Institution) behind him and utterly failed. It’s a story as old as time.
