5 Remarkably Stupid Ideas Silicon Valley Keeps Falling For

Then there was car sale site, Beepi, which would hire mechanics to check and detail your car, sell the service for a small commission, and deliver it to the buyer with a bow on the front. They threw $150 million at this (must have been some fancy-ass bows) before going out of business.

But the king of "burning through investor cash without a clear idea of how to make it back" is music streaming. Market leader Spotify pays 70 percent of its revenue to music labels before trying to cover its own overhead. Tidal pays even more, and has been struggling to do so. At some point you have to wonder whether these guys might be better off shoveling cash into some lotto scratchers.

For every Uber or Amazon success story, there are 99 MoviePasses, Beepis, or Kozmos. Not that this is bad ... from a consumer perspective. If a bunch of investors want to foot the bill for your rideshare to a cheap movie while streaming Jay-Z's entire catalog, then great! Just don't expect it to last forever.

Look, presumably, there are people who want DARPA-caliber tech to detect every time a single hair breaks, but they're all aging countesses who want an excuse to be cruel to their stepdaughters, and that's not a growth market.

Then there's the Griffin Connected Toaster ($99), which sends a notification to your smartphone when your toast is done. Perfect for those who can't hear the sound of the toaster while swimming in their giant money bin. For some real Star Trek meets Idiocracy shit, the toaster can also pair with the upcoming Griffin Connected Mirror (estimated at $1,000), which displays the weather, news headlines, and toast readiness while you brush your teeth. So much more convenient than glancing at your phone.

Hands typically cost $0. The company is no longer with us.

Meanwhile, Teforia, the "Keurig for tea," raised millions to market an "internet-connected tea infuser," which used "machine learning" and "advanced algorithms" to produce the perfect cup of tea. It originally cost $400, then $649, then $1,000, and then went out of business in late 2017, because it turns out people can make a good enough cup of tea without taking out a bank loan.

But the best/worst example has to be Kuvee, the $179 WiFi-enabled wine bottle. Instead of using a corkscrew like some sort of savage, you would slot "proprietary wine cartridges" into your Kuvee. A touchscreen would let you access information about the wine (normally accomplished by reading a label) and show you an estimate of how much was left (normally accomplished by looking at the bottle). As a bonus, battery life was awful, and you had to awkwardly remove and insert various cartridges if your guests wanted white and red wine. It was in no way an improvement over not paying $179 to only buy wine from one company.

Like Juicero and Teforia, Kuvee soon went kaput. But don't worry, we're sure the "Keurig for horchata" will be along shortly to fill the gap.

Then there's the trend for untreated and unfiltered "raw water," which is currently flying off the shelves around Silicon Valley, presumably accompanied by an increase in toilet paper sales. Entrepreneurs include Mukhande Singh (real name Christopher Sanborn), who buys spring water for 2.5 cents a jug and sells it for $38.49. His "Live Water" supposedly expires after a month, but is free of "mind control drugs." So keep that in mind -- that is, if the powerful psychics at Aquafina let you.

Another raw water seller is Juicero founder Doug Evans, who says he sneaks across private property in the dead of night to collect spring water. Again, Silicon Valley gave that guy 120 million U.S. dollars. We fully predict that these people will be selling you fresh, nutritious urine by 2025.

The dumbest part? The definition of a blockchain is so fuzzy that nobody seems to agree on what it is, or how it works, or what practical use they could possibly get out of it. The first blockchains were (to oversimplify it for those skimming this in the subway) strings of information that everyone could see, and were updated for everyone with every transaction. So if you paid your friendly dark web dealer for a duffel bag full of meth and AK-47s, they didn't have to trust that you sent the money; you could both check the blockchain. Nice and easy!

But many famous "blockchains" don't fit that definition. MasterCard's highly publicized blockchain can only be viewed by invitation, so that's out. The World Food Program loudly touted their adoption of groundbreaking blockchain technology, even though it only had one user (the WFP itself), making it indistinguishable from a regular backed-up database.

And investors keep falling for it. "Uber for buses" company Skedaddle raked in millions after announcing a blockchain project to "completely eliminate tipping" in some unclear way. Wearable tech company Loomia also sucked up new investment after promising to give each user a blockchain profile, as did P2P marketplace Listia ... even though neither project seems to have any advantages over their existing payment tech. It's really only a matter of time before that one surviving Blockbuster store unveils a blockchain-based lending system and instantly becomes worth more than Nestle.

On the upside, we just said "blockchain" like a hundred times, so we'll be drowning in VC money by the time you read this. So long, suckers.

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