- Company — Loopt
- Sector — Mobile social / location
- Founded / Died — 2005 / sold March 2012
- Lifespan — ~7 years
- Capital raised — ~$39.1M (Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Y Combinator S05)
- Peak scale — Reported ~5 million registered users at peak; engagement and revenue were persistently weak. This is a company that raised at scale and never found a business.
- What it built — Location-sharing among friends on mobile phones, years before smartphones made it practical and before carriers' data pricing made it affordable.
- Stated cause of death — Loopt was sold to Green Dot for $43.4M. CEO Sam Altman framed it as a good outcome and a chance to work on payments. He has since been consistent in describing Loopt as a failure — he has said publicly that it was not a successful company and that he learned more from it than from anything else.
- Evidenced cause — Loopt depended on carrier distribution deals that were slow, expensive and non-exclusive, and on a behaviour (broadcasting your location) that users did not want at the scale required. The 2008 arrival of the App Store removed the carrier bottleneck and simultaneously let Foursquare, Facebook and Google in.
- Warning signs visible earlier — Flat engagement across multiple relaunches from 2009.
- Money outcome — $43.4M returned on $39.1M raised: investors were made approximately whole and no more. Altman has said the founders' personal proceeds were modest. He became president of Y Combinator the following year.
- Post-mortem quality — Moderate but honest in retrospect. Altman does not claim Loopt succeeded, which distinguishes him from most founders of similarly sized exits.
- Transferable lesson — An exit at roughly the capital raised is a failure with good manners.
- Sources — AllThingsD · Green Dot investor release · Y Combinator blog
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