GE Capital plowed into commercial real estate near the top of the market. And it bought WMC Mortgage, a subprime lender, in the midst of the mortgage crisis. GE’s stock price crashed during the 2008 meltdown in large part because Wall Street treated it as a bank instead of an industrial company.
Disney acquired the Angels in 1996 after creating the NHL expansion team, The Mighty Ducks, in 1992. Disney later sold both teams as they realized it was outside their core competency to operate sports teams. Disney unsuccessfully introduced cheerleaders at Angels games.
In 2016, Beepi, a used-car marketplace, shut down after having raised $149 million. It’s challenges included burning too much money ($7 million a month) before they were at product/market fit, slowness in getting buyers the title and registration for their newly-purchased cars, and consumers’ unwillingness to rely on a third party for the entire car buying process without seeing the car themselves.
In 2011, Salesforce expanded into the HR software space after it’s acquisition of Rypple (renamed Work.com). Salesforce has successfully built best of breed front office software applications, and wasn’t able to successfully expand into back office applications where other competitors are well entrenched.
After acquiring Pure Digital, maker of the Flip camera, for $590 million in 2009, Cisco shut it down in 2011. A new generation of smartphones with built-in-video recording made the Flip camera obsolete.
In 1995, Mattel released Barbie’s baby sister Kelly. She was retired in 2010 and replaced by Chelsea in 2011. Kelly and Chelsea are the same character, only with a new name.
In 1987, Ishtar was an adventure-comedy film based in Morocco was one of the most expensive box-office flops of all time. Ebert wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times that “Ishtar is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy” and Siskel called it “shockingly dull” and “dim-witted.” The movie director never worked again in the industry.
Disney regretted acquiring Maker Studios, a YouTube network, for $675 million in 2014. Maker Studios had internal dysfunction, an inability to meet admittedly aggressive growth targets and difficulties in creating original content. Disney also failed to do sufficient diligence on the talent. Its downfall was accelerated by Maker Studio’s star YouTuber, PewDePie, making racist remarks.
Launched in 1995 with an IPO in 1999 that valued the company at $2 billion, iVillage was a female-focused community since women were seen as late adopters of the internet. NBC Universal acquired the company, but missed the impending change of social media and move to deep vertical sites. The old online media model was not sustainable and traffic decreased over time. They shut down iVillage as Facebook exploded.
SmileDirectClub, who went public at an $8.9B valuation in 2019, promised to straighten teeth for under $1,850 — about a third the cost of traditional braces — in as little as six months and all from the comfort of home. However, the aligners commonly damaged teeth and caused severe pain requiring some consumers to have expensive dental procedures. Thus, they dealt with legal fights from dissatisfied customers who accused it of false advertising and of violating Food and Drug Administration regulations. Saddled with $900M in debt the company shut down in 2023.
