In case you’re worried about one of your plans turning into an epic fail, take heart, you’ll be in good company. Here are a bunch of epic fails.
- In 1899 Henry Ford started the Detroit Automobile Co. Unfortunately for Ford, its cars were too expensive and of low quality.
- Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express fame tried to introduce an electronic delivery service, Zapmail, in 1984 to compete with fax machines. Zapmail was a total failure and cost the company nearly $350 million over two years.
- Walt Disney suffered from a number of major financial setbacks in the late 1920s and 1930s and by the early 1930s his company was $4 million in debt.
- What list of epic fails is complete without Steve Jobs. Fired from Apple in 1985, he founded NeXT a company that made a computer workstation for educators. With a high price tag and reports of numerous bugs, sales never took off and NeXT burned through hundreds of millions of dollars.
- In the 1970s, Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Traf-O-Data, a computer business serving local governments that automatically read paper tapes from traffic counters. The business became a bust when the state of Washington offered to tabulate the tapes for cities for free.