How Shyp Sunk: The Rise And Fall Of An On-Demand Startup

“It’s quite crazy, in my opinion, how a lot of these companies, they don’t really make money. And they’re able to raises gobs of venture-capital money, to fund these businesses that may not work out in the long term.” That was Shyp cofounder and CEO Kevin Gibbon back in early 2016, chastising some of his fellow entrepreneurs. At the time, he was scrambling to chart a different sort of future for his own venture-backed startup. But that quest ends today. A half-decade after its founding, San Francisco-based Shyp is ending operations and laying off all its employees. Gibbon declines to state how many staffers are impacted by the company’s closure. He is, however, willing to share the hard-earned lessons he’s learned from his experience at Shyp, which started out as a service that let you take a photo of something (or several somethings) you wanted to ship with the company’s smartphone app, whereupon a courier would come to you and whisk your stuff away to a warehouse where employees would pack it up and hand it off to a major shipping company for delivery. Initially, that was a way for individuals to avoid the drudgery of boxing up items themselves and lugging them to the post office. More recently, the company had shifted much of its attention to business owners, who also find shipping to be drudgery–just on a grander scale. Read more at Fast Company.