Well, as with Theranos, good ol’ Slope predicted the demise of a well-funded, but very stupid, startup. Here is the post from two months ago:
In typical Tim fashion, I spent the post bitching and pissing and moaning about how a goddamned dog-walking app would merit over a third of a billion dollar investment. Jesus H. Christ, all these Fed Bux sloshing around are going into some seriously retarded ventures. Near the end of the post, I wrote this:
Seriously, this is insanity. Wag isn’t going public. Wag isn’t going to get sold to someone with even more money and less intelligence than the original investors. I strongly suspect they’re going to collapse in a heap.
In any case, this news came off the wire:
So they mention “layoffs” to “streamline” the business. Streamline. You know, just a little polish here and there. Except that it’s eighty fucking percent of the entire workforce there. Eighty. Percent. That sounds to me like they’re looking at going out of business in a big hurry unless suddenly everyone in the United States needs their dog walked.
As God is my witness, I cannot wait until this insanity is over. I’m not just talking about Wag in particular. I’m talking about the grotesque and vomit-inducing amount of cash out there trying to find a home and, thus, funding idiotic, never-going-to-succeed autistic ventures such as this.
Indeed, just last weekend, at the Options Symposium, a young man came up to me who had moved from Paris and excitedly told me about his new startup, declaring with absolute seriousness that “there are so many VCs out there looking for ideas, you can give them any stupid idea, and they’ll write you a million dollar check.“
I bet they would.
