About

Why They Died is a forensic cemetery of failed startups. Every profile is multi-source, confidence-scored, and tagged with a cause-of-death taxonomy so you can browse, filter, and learn.

The space already has Failory and startups.rip. The difference here is structure — every death is categorized the same way, so you can ask questions like which fintech companies died from regulatory pressure between 2010 and 2020 and get an answer.

Who's behind this

Built and edited by Vojtech Sykora. It's a portfolio piece that doubles as a research project. There is no analytics tracking and no advertising. The site is open source.

Submissions

Submissions aren't open in v1. If you spot an error or want to suggest a company, open an issue on the repo. Once a public submission flow lands, it'll be linked here.

Other work

See the colophon for methodology, the cause-of-death taxonomy, and the sources policy.