xAutoDMThe honest side of building — founders on failing, learning, and trying again.
45 tweets · Collected July 2026
Pro-tip: buy an office chair used. The graves of hundreds of companies are littered with old office supplies that they must get rid of. I got my Herman Miller Aeron from a failed crypto startup in Boulder for like 200$.
i failed pretty hard at my first startup--it sucked!--and am doing pretty well on my second. the thing i wish someone told me during the first one is that no one else thinks about your failures as much as you do, and that as long as don't psych yourself out you can try again.
A failed startup is not a failed entrepreneur.
I'm 45. At 36, I had $11 left in the bank after my first startup failed (I lost my life savings). Then, I discovered Joe Dispenza's work on reprogramming your brain, and made my first million at 40. 9 of his insights that transformed my life (and will do the same for you):
Taking over a failed startup has gotta be easier than taking over Reliance
Hi, I’m Adesua a 300l student of Microbiology in Ui. I started a business during the lockdown to make ends meet but because I didn’t have startup capital it failed😪. So I started cooking instead, cooking brings me joy. Please patronize and retweet my tweets when you see them🥺🙏🏽
Waiting room for tomorrow's Going Under stream! It's like a dungeon crawler, except with different, failed startup companies lmfao https://t.co/8PfsKDDv7s Thumbnail Art / ltlydiavart #UkiVioleta #UkiLive #NOCTYX
Billion-dollar ideas, List of best Subreddits, and a Failed Startup (lessons) My 10 favorite tweets of the week:
Studied Electronics Engineering, worked in a company, didn't like the job, took a master's degree on Videogames Development, got a job at EA, worked for some years, enjoyed it, got fired, got some other jobs on smaller startups, quit, created my own, failed, worked as a teacher, created raylib, created another startup, failed again, kept working on raylib, quit teaching, started creating and selling tools, didn't make enough money, teach again, keep working on raylib and tools, got some fundings last year, still deciding what to do with my life...
Nobody actually buys new Aeron chairs in SF. Every Aeron chair was created in a one-time Big Bang event during the first dotcom boom in 1999, and has been passed along from failed to new startup in an uninterrupted 30 year chain. It’s the Law of Conservation of Aeron.
"How My Startup Failed Because My Developers Spent All Day Using Giphy Reactions On Slack" - An honest Medium post no-one has written.
1/ Here’s something we need to normalize: talking about failure. My @ycombinator startup failed 6 years ago. I stayed silent. And because of that silence, other startup founders—going through the exact same thing as me—felt alone in their shame too. I want to break that trend.
each failed startup just makes my inevitable success sweater back to coding 💪
JUST IN: Founder of failed Indian startup Byju’s sentenced to six months in jail for contempt of court.
So, we are shutting down our startup, Remote Clan. We worked on it for a good 2 years, got 2000+ members & made many friends! While the startup failed, I learnt a LOT about: - Marketing - Community building - Newsletters and more! Will bounce back soon with another startup :)
What's your favorite failed startup and why?
I am 34 right now and - failed multiple times. - failed to grow my startup. - still figuring out my life purpose. - failed in 200+ interviews. But I never stop ✋ My fellow young developers Just relax, take a deep breathe. Just like I am figuring out life at 34 you'll too🙌
A failed startup everyone quickly forgot about is an integral part of the United States’s national mythology because Buffalo Bill put it in his show twenty five years later. This will happen to Juicero in the 2040s.
A failed philly startup cooked pizzas in a van and delivered them in 7 minutes 🍕
I'd rather invest in a founder of a failed startup who is trying again than a founder who worked at Google for 5 years, ate the free snacks, and was never faced with a terribly hard day.
2013: Rejected by YC 2014: First startup → FAILED 2017: Second startup → FAILED 2018: Another app → FAILED 2019: Launched tiiny (solo, bootstrapped) 2020: First customer - $10 2021: $1k MRR 2023: $10k MRR 2024: $20k MRR Today: $500k+ ARR Success is never linear.
odd, i’ve never seen a failed startup get this treatment from the media
Number of times I crushed 20 hour days for a startup that failed and got sold for parts: many. Number of times I worked 20 hour days for a startup that sold for $7.5B: zero. Stop perpetuating this exploitative bullshit. It’s always VCs and founders tweeting it, too.
Most of my startup ideas failed. Which is fine.
I am 23, recently failed in my first startup. What should I do?
Met with a young founder He’s in college and wants to build a startup Told him that Zuck, Gates, and Jobs all dropped out of college He needs to do the same if he’s serious about being successful Dropped out that day 6 months later, his startup failed, his parents disowned him, and he still has $60k in student loans with no degree He called me crying that he’s now homeless with -$500 in his bank account I deleted his contact info Lesson: not everyone is destined for greatness!
A failed startup is not a failed founder.
Why My Startup Failed It’s been nearly a year since we shut down @Upside_AI. Given that I’ve had enough time and space from it, the end of the year seems like a good time for reflection and closure. Its a long thread, bear with me :) (1/n)
every failed startup founder reincarnates as an investor
Whenever you see a post from this salty fellow, just remember that he was CTO of a failed private blockchain startup. 🤡
“You’ve lived a tough life.”- said to me recently. I view it differently. My experiences of infertility, miscarriage, a failed startup, divorce, etc give me a unique opportunity to connect with women / help them feel less alone in their journey. My DMs are always open ❤️
Quit JP Morgan. Failed a startup. Tried again. Failed again. Worked a full-time job, built at night. And now TinyHost is a $400K ARR SaaS. Keep shipping.
👕16: 1st business 🙅♂️17: Business failed 🏫18: Graduated High School 📈19: UC San Diego + 1st startup 🥲20: 1st startup and 2nd startup failed 💸21: Dropped out + 3rd startup 💰22: 3rd + 4th startup failed 🏔️23: Jenni AI 😊 👨💻 24: Jenni AI 😵💫 ✍️ 25: Jenni AI 😭 🥂 26: Jenni AI 🎉
I'd much rather hire a 3x failed startup founder than a candidate with a diploma and 10 years of experience from a cubicle. Don't be afraid of trying and failing. It won't make you look as bad as you think.
Pehle engineering lunga... phir koi company join karke ek saal baadh resign just to build a failed startup... and phir.. gyan pelunga har time twitter pe... 😎 Life sorted
writing for a company full of failed startup founders sounds like hell
He is not broke. His failed startup company just hasn’t pivoted to becoming a GPU as a Service AI business yet
Max Levchin on how Peter Thiel reacted to losing his entire investment in Luke Nosek’s failed startup When assembling the found team for PayPal, Max Levchin wanted to recruit Luke Nosek. But he was worried at how Peter Thiel would react given that Peter lost his entire investment in Luke’s failed startup SmartCal: “I was certain that Luke and Peter would not get along because Luke had just lost all the money Peter invested in his startup… I never had investors up until this point, so I was really not familiar with the relationship you have” With trepidation he told Peter that Luke was really bright and worth trying to work with again. And he was surprised at Peter’s response: “Oh of course. I should’ve thought of that myself.” So you’re not mad it him? Max asked. “No, he’s brilliant.” Then Peter recruited Luke while Max recruited the rest of the PayPal founding team. After PayPal, Luke went on to work at Peter Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund. I think there’s a really important lesson here. Statistically, the vast majority of startups fail, and the best investors know how hard it is to build something brand new and innovative. Very few people succeed on the first go-around, and it’s not necessarily a reflection on you if your startup fails. Obviously you don’t want to fail, but as Vinod Khosla puts it: to do something exceptional, you have to be willing to fail.
how to start a failed startup: 1) attend every conference 2) rent a fancy office space 3) hire faang engineers 4) hire bd/sales before pmf 5) glorify headcount 6) enter infinite partnerships 7) listen to vc product suggestions 8) make everybody happy 9) chase narratives 10) sacrifice sleep/exercise/nutrition
Nearby Deals was a failed startup of mine. Spent 18 months trying to find PMF & ran out of time/money. I just rebuilt the app with @Replit in under 10 mins 🤯 I’ve got 10 more failed startups to try! #replit #replitagent
pitch chatgpt your failed startup idea watch it glaze you
Every failed startup has the same story: → Too much planning → Too little execution → No customer in sight
Don’t fall for “hustle culture”. All work and no play doesn’t just make for an unhealthy founder – it also makes for a failed startup. Create balance in your life.
Every failed startup I’ve seen had one thing in common: They built a product people liked. But they never built something people needed.
"Almost every failed startup had a product. What failed startups don't have are enough customers." ~ Gabriel Weinberg
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