99% of AI Startups Will Be Dead by 2026 — Here’s Why | by Srinivas Rao | May, 2025 | Medium
During my internship at Sun Microsystems in ’99, I’d drive down 101 past office buildings wrapped in billboards for AltaVista, Excite, and other names destined for extinction. By 2001, those buildings stood empty. The following summer, I went to a launch party where a startup dropped what must have been half a million dollars just to announce they were going to start charging for a product they had been giving away for free. The room was filled with VCs — and no one blinked. By the time I graduated in December 2000, the party was over. From Berkeley, I had the perfect view — just across the bay from the collapse. And now, 25 years later, we’re back. The labels have changed, but the logic hasn’t. “AI-powered” is the new “.com.” Startups pitch wrappers. But this time, many don’t even pretend to own the tech they’re built on. Look closer, and it’s a house of cards: No one’s in charge. Everyone’s exposed. And no one’s acting like that’s a problem. Most so-called “AI-powered” tools are just
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