The Rankings — Avoidable Death Score, all 30 startups
Click to explore the full interactive tier list
Not by money lost — by how preventable the failure was. 30 startups. Five tiers. One formula that separates genuine tragedy from pure avoidable stupidity.
WeWork is the most-discussed startup failure of the 2010s — but it had $1.8 billion in real annual revenue and operated in a genuine market. Its failure was governance, not product. Theranos was a 15-year fraud, but blood diagnostics is a real, enormous market. Juicero invented its own problem, built a $699 machine to solve it, and a reporter exposed the entire concept by squeezing a bag with their hands. That is a different category of avoidable.
Click to explore the full interactive tier list
Failures so preventable that any honest weekend of user research would have caught them. The problem was imaginary, the fraud was obvious, or the founder was untethered from physical reality.
| Rank | Startup | ADS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Juicero | 8.25 |
| 2 | Lily Robotics | 8.10 |
| 3 | Color Labs | 8.00 |
| 4 | Theranos | 7.95 |
| 5 | Segway | 7.95 |
| 6 | Clinkle | 7.75 |
| 7 | Quibi | 7.55 |
Had real advantages — working tech, real markets, or serious founders — and still died in ways that required sustained willful blindness to the obvious.
| Rank | Startup | ADS |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | Fire Phone | 7.30 |
| 10 | Zume Pizza | 7.30 |
| 9 | Google+ | 7.25 |
| 11 | Better Place | 7.15 |
| 13 | Webvan | 6.20 |
| 16 | Jawbone | 6.00 |
You can trace a plausible path from reasonable idea to catastrophic outcome. Real products, real markets — failure required a chain of bad decisions, not a single obvious miss.
| Rank | Startup | ADS |
|---|---|---|
| 17 | WeWork | 5.70 |
| 18 | Pets.com | 5.55 |
| 19 | Brandless | 5.45 |
| 20 | Beepi | 5.35 |
| 21 | Yik Yak | 5.15 |
| 22 | Doppler Labs | 5.15 |
Market forces, legal rulings, or corporate indifference did most of the damage. The lowest two tiers include a Supreme Court ruling, Chinese manufacturing cost curves, and one corporate murder.
| Rank | Startup | ADS |
|---|---|---|
| 23 | Solyndra | 4.90 |
| 24 | MySpace | 4.85 |
| 28 | Aereo | 3.55 |
| 29 | Rdio | 2.95 |
| 30 | Vine | 2.15 |
Select a startup to see where it lands in the Graveyard.
| # | Startup | ADS | Delusion | PMF Gap | Burn | Warnings | Hype | Tier |
|---|
Index name: Startup Graveyard Index — Avoidable Death Score (ADS)
Formula: ADS = (Delusion × 0.30) + (PMF_Gap × 0.25) + (Burn × 0.20) + (Warnings × 0.15) + (Hype × 0.10)
Sample: 30 startups spanning dot-com collapse (1999–2001) through 2020s unicorn era. Selection criteria: companies with documented post-mortem coverage in major tech press.
Scoring: All five sub-metrics scored 1–10 using defined 4-anchor rubrics. Full rubric published in plan.md. Scoring is qualitative and reflects editorial judgment.
Data sources:
Collection date: March 2026
Weighting rationale: Delusion (30%) and PMF_Gap (25%) are primary drivers because they measure structural preventability. BurnRecklessness (20%) normalizes capital destruction against output (not absolute losses). IgnoredWarnings (15%) captures time-to-act after public red flags. HypeMultiplier (10%) adds valuation-to-reality ratio context.