Why Mailbox died

But Slack’s struggle to succeed as an independent company sadly mirrors that of many one-time innovators in enterprise productivity. Mailbox died and Acompli sold to Microsoft, where it became the mobile Outlook app. Evernote is a pale shadow of its former self. Of that early cohort, only Box and Dropbox became — and still remain — public companies... See more

Other apps just hope to be bought before their money runs out. For instance, a free email app called Mailbox hit the market in 2013, and soon it was delivering 60 million messages a day.[334] Then, within a month of launch, Dropbox bought the app and the team behind it[335] for $100 million.[336] There’s a slightly tragic ending, though: Dropbox ki

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To me, the clearest example is Dropbox. I’ve used Dropbox since the earliest days, and I love it. Nothing has ever come close to providing the speed, reliability, and cross-platform compatibility for file synching of Dropbox. Even though I technically get iCloud File Storage “for free” as part of some broader package, I still pay for Dropbox with a... See more

Nobody talks about failure in Silicon Valley, yet 90% of startups fail. Why? 3 yrs ago, @neerajberry and I shut down @Sprig, which raised $60M from @GreylockVC + @socialcapital & grew to $20m revenue. Then, it all fell apart. For an honest story about failure, **Read on**