Which one of these will be the biggest “unicorn” failure ever?

The table really should include revenue, assets and debt columns, along with some notes about how any debt is structured. For instance, Nutanix has $1.6B in the bank, $1.2B in annual revenue, and their annual loss per share is trending down while sales trend up.<p>They also have a ton of debt. Hopefully there isn&#x27;t a balloon payment &#x2F; interest rate adjustment coming soon. Assuming they&#x27;re not heading to some financing cliff, then borrowing at less than inflation rates, and using the money to buy market share was probably the right move.

For those of you confused as to how these companies are running at all given that they have never turned a profit the answer is:<p>1 - they pretty much all raised a ton of capital by going public,<p>2 - they have all taken on significant amounts of debt. This was previously considered a good move because of low interest rates.<p>3 - some of these companies actually could be profitable, but only if they cut expenses, I.e. Layoff overpaid employees.<p>Now to be clear, some of these companies are hopelessly screwed.

With all the unspoken but obvious disdain for the ridiculous cryptocurrency schemes, I wonder if the HN crowd will recognize the elephant in the room here.<p>TFA illustrates that the venture capital&#x2F;startup tech scene is arguably the biggest Ponzi scheme in the last 20+ years.<p>Even ignoring the financial losses, most of these companies have operated in a gray or fully illegal manner. So imagine that the financials don&#x27;t work and the legalities don&#x27;t work... and yet this is our HN universe.<p>Edit: (added) sorry to offend those of you who work for Uber or other companies which operate on fantasy funding with no actual profitable business model; sometimes I forget the illusion is so strong and people immersed don&#x27;t know better.

The tide is going out: higher interest rates mean the economic decisions of the last 15 years will need to be recomputed. Cheap money is no more. Easier to earn a good return with a CD or bank account even.

How come they can lose more money than they raised?<p>If that&#x27;s because of revenue, why is that being accounted as a loss?<p>Is it because they spend it all? No real profits?

Teladoc Health 2002 $0.17 billion $11.2 billion<p>..how is this possible? Doesn&#x27;t this suggest that Teladoc can cover their expenses pretty well via revenue (because how else are they in business?)

Depends a bit on what failure means. &quot;Sold for less than raise&quot; perhaps counts?<p>My guess is one of the first two, Uber or WeWork. Uber doesn&#x27;t seem like it&#x27;s cheap anymore as a customer. How is that going to compete? And WeWork is already competing with standard rent-an-office businesses that are worth a lot less.

Not sure about Robinhood being on this list. They actually have billions in cash on hand right now.<p>They also have some valuable IP that a lot of people don&#x27;t give them much credit for. One example being a brand new, in-house trade clearing system. This is similar to rewriting an IBM core banking system from scratch.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;robinhood-launches-its-own-trade-clearing-system-as-customer-growth-surges.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;robinhood-launches-its-own-t...</a>

&quot;Cumulative losses&quot; is meaningless in the way they are using the term. You need many, many more datapoints to judge the overall health and value of a company. And even after that you are likely going to be wrong in your prediction.<p>Uber raised $25 billion and is worth $60 billion in public markets today. By what criteria is it a bigger failure (or a failure at all) over Theranos, FTX and thousands of other companies that raised a significant amount of money and are worth exactly $0?

Surprising Magic Leap is not in the list which was a failed &quot;unicorn&quot;.

Having worked with Nutanix, I would bet on them failing. Their products are consistently medium good. Not great, not terrible, just… “okay”.<p>The problem is that the competition is getting very good very fast. Nutanix competes with the cloud, which means that as Azure and Amazon get better they get less compelling.<p>Most of our customers that choose Nutanix previously are on Azure now.

WeWork already failed so I guess it&#x27;s them, for now

Need to add a column with the IPO valuation to answer this properly. I&#x27;m guessing when you add that column all of these were massive successes except WeWork which went public via SPAC and their IPO imploded.

Would be interesting to see cash flow, which is probably more relevant when comparing against capital raised. If this is EBITDA, then included in those losses for these companies is a ton of stock based compensation which really has zero effect on cash flow.<p>Also, if we are talking EBITDA, Snap did hit a positive GAAP net income for a single quarter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;snap-finally-did-it-yall&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;03&#x2F;snap-finally-did-it-yall&#x2F;</a>

&gt; &quot;...the business plan of some of these companies was to become so useful to the decision-making class (business executives, government officials, and rich people) that they’d ultimately get some sort of government support.&quot;<p>This! The speculative investors have tasted blood during the 2008 financial crisis and the general public has already been conditioned to accept the idea of &quot;too big to fail&quot;. So this music chair game is going to be played for a long time.

Twitter has entered the chat.

NetScape ~$8Billion, cumulative losses ~$8Billion

I&#x27;ve alluded to this in other comments, but these fundraising numbers have to be incomplete. Rivian raised 10.7B, lost 11.1B, and yet they have close to 14B in cash on hand? They&#x27;ve overlooked a lot of fundraising. I&#x27;m guessing others have similar mistakes.

People love to joke about Tesla and claim that &#x27;they just threw cash at it&#x27; and the company was &#x27;burning cash&#x27;.<p>Compare history of Tesla to that of Rivian and what kind financing and cash they operate with.

Unless it shows the nature of the losses (opex losses? taking on low-interest debt? huge write-off of acquisitions made with stock?), this chart is somewhat unhelpful.

I wonder how Stripe will do. HN is full of bitter stories.

For sites like airbnb it&#x27;s not possible for the story to be &quot;not real&quot;. It&#x27;s just a website guys, there is no per-unit costs that makes the economics not work out.

This is FTX style accounting

I propose a new term for these volatile times instead of unicorns: Wily Coyotes.

uber and door dash

Brex

Palantir is not going anywhere anytime soon. They are about to sleaze their way into the british healthcare system. Uber is likely to go under, sold for their rider and driver base at a discount value. Airbnb’s bubble has burst. Door dash? Why is even door dash such a popular thing. And why do these companies need so many people to maintain their apps? Should be max 100 devs and everyone else in sales and support.