Reactrix took 75MM (!) to project video games on the floors of malls, with an ad-supported (!) business model. 'twas ever thus.

Music startup Fuzz Artists couldn't get enough traffic to sustain a business model. So the founder blames the market, which in "better" times would have afforded him access to $10MM in capital to put his reckoning off by a couple of years. Shouldn't he instead be happy to have his life and his career back?

Or how about nTag Interactive, which sold RFID nametags for conferences. Not a crazy idea at all. But they hadn't had a news update since July '08, well before the market crash. What does this have to do with the current climate?

This is an incredible easy, lazy story for any journalist to write. There are always a collection of companies with a sob story to write about. When that collection includes Facebook, LinkedIn, or (hell) Twitter, maybe the story will have teeth.

Unrelated question why do you put "MM" instead of "M" I've seen this before but don't know why it's done like that.

It's because M is the roman numeral for a thousand and a million is a thousand thousand. (Although it wouldn't actually be expressed that way with the real roman numeral system; MM would be two thousand).

Probably because M is already an abbreviation for thousand, e.g. CPM.

That's true, but the AP Stylebook says $...M means million; I too have only seen this used among the MBA types.

I don't know, I cargo-culted it from the m-team types in my last couple companies. ;)

M&Ms.

They were working for "peanuts".

I suspect History won't look favorably on the last decade.

Yeah but playing on the floor of the mall is a fookin' blast!

More tech start-ups funded (and controlled) by VCs are shutting down as VCs try to get their money out. Startups started by people who have a business plan to actually make money ,sell real product to real customers, rather than just attract VCs and cash in are doing rather nicely thank you.

Our business model couldn't be much simpler: build machines that save people and utilities energy and money, sell them at a profit. But it's still tough raising money.

We've had troubles raising money, too. Our core business is making real things, we have technology no one else has, it fits a under-served and well-defined market niche, and there's tons of customer interest. The deals that were available before just aren't there.

It's harder to sell real product to real customers now, as real customers don't have as much money to buy things with as they did a few months ago.

It's certainly possible, but recessions are all about averages, and it's a lot tougher for the average business right now.