Blockbuster (retailer)
Blockbuster didn’t lose to streaming — it lost to its own debt, its own late fees, and its own refusal to buy Netflix.
Failure
The outcome most is learned from and least is written about honestly.
- 7
- in business
- 9:54
- average
- 69 min
- in total
- 37
- across the network
All briefs
Sears
Sears didn’t fall to Amazon — it was dismantled by its own owner.
Theranos
Theranos was not a startup that failed — it was a fraud that scaled.
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
WeWork Companies Inc. · 2021
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn is a 2021 documentary film. It follows Adam Neumann, founder and leader of the real estate company WeWork, who was forced out after a failed IPO. The film centres the collapse on that removal — not on debt, defaults, or unit economics.
Blockbuster (retailer)
David Cook · 1985
Blockbuster’s story is not about disruption — it is about refusal. It controlled distribution, not demand. It priced convenience as punishment. Its collapse was mechanical, not mystical.
Hiroshi Yamauchi
Yamauchi didn’t build Nintendo — he repeatedly rebuilt it after near-failures, using distribution, licensing, and factory-floor prototypes as his only reliable tools.
WeWork
Adam Neumann · 2010
WeWork was a shared-workspace provider founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, operating physical and virtual coworking spaces in ~600 buildings across 125 cities. It made money by leasing commercial real estate long-term, then subleasing it short-term to members — a classic mismatch of lease duration and revenue risk. The brand resonated and the format met demand for flexible office space — but only at small scale, with tight lease control and disciplined expansion. The business model failed under scale: fixed long-term lease liabilities could not be offset by volatile, short-term membership revenue — especially when growth relied on subsidising occupancy with investor capital. Neumann’s practice of buying buildings and leasing them back to WeWork exposed a governance vacuum — incompatible with public markets. Bankruptcy in 2023 and restructuring in 2024 confirmed the model collapsed under its own lease obligations — not market timing. A company can raise $12.8 billion and peak at a $47 billion valuation without ever proving unit economics — because investors funded narrative, not margins. Yes — as a case study in how governance failures, misaligned incentives, and financial engineering can override operational reality.