You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to build a company around inventive technology. Beyond getting funding, great ideas need to be carefully fostered to succeed in the hyper-competitive marketplace. Fortunately, Silicon Valley culture has a healthy side of sharing stories of startup failures.
In 101 Startup Failure Post-Mortems, CB Insights has collected (and periodically updates) 101 informative summaries of startup failures by their CEOs (and a few investors), including from companies Twitpic and Turntable.fm. “Owning”, or even celebrating one’s failures in the tech startup world is not uncommon – as I’ve posted about before, the value of failure is better recognized among technologists and scientists who have the training and experience to appreciate how success is often a process of trial-and-error.