Business student who built a free startup failure database (would love to meet other makers)
Hi everyone, I'm Kashika, a business student at Northeastern University studying marketing.
I just launched Ledger & Lore, a free, sourced database documenting why 194 startups actually failed, spanning 22+ countries and industries from fintech to biotech to retail. Each entry includes funding history, investors, a sourced explanation of what actually went wrong, a timeline, and a plain-language lesson, built to be a genuine alternative to expensive tools like Crunchbase that treat failure as a footnote rather than the actual subject.
Every entry is manually researched and verified against public reporting, not scraped, and where a figure was never publicly disclosed, it's marked "Undisclosed" rather than estimated. There's also a compare tool to look at two companies side by side, and a research article pulling patterns across the whole dataset.
Looking to connect with other makers building in the content, research, or data space, and open to genuine feedback on the product.
Replies
Marking figures as Undisclosed instead of estimating is the choice that gives this credibility. I listed my own studio on Crunchbase recently and failure there is a footnote at best, a Closed tag with no story attached. How do you decide what actually went wrong when the founder post mortem and the press coverage disagree? Founders tend to blame the market and reporters tend to blame the founders, so the sourcing call seems like the hardest part of each entry.