- Company — One Kings Lane
- Sector — E-commerce / home furnishings
- Founded / Died — 2009 / sold June 2016
- Lifespan — ~7 years
- Capital raised — ~$225M (Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners); peak valuation ~$912M (2014)
- Peak scale — Reported revenue around $300M annualised at peak (2014, company-stated); several million registered members.
- What it built — Flash sales of home furnishings and décor, curated daily.
- Stated cause of death — The company did not fail; it was acquired by Bed Bath & Beyond. The price was undisclosed at the time.
- Evidenced cause — Reported at under $30M against ~$225M raised and a ~$912M peak valuation — roughly 3% of peak. The same structural problem as Fab (entry 29): flash sales in a low-frequency, high-consideration category produce weak repeat purchase, and the fix — full-line retail with inventory — destroys the capital-light economics. Bed Bath & Beyond resold the brand in 2020 for less, before its own bankruptcy.
- Warning signs visible earlier — Layoffs and executive departures from 2015; a failed attempt to raise at or above the 2014 mark.
- Money outcome — This is a preference-stack case. With ~$225M of preferred stock outstanding and a sub-$30M price, common shareholders — founders and employees with options — received essentially nothing, while late preferred holders recovered a fraction. Employees who had exercised options and paid tax on them lost that money outright.
- Post-mortem quality — None. Acquisitions do not generate post-mortems, which is why this failure mode is the least documented and among the most common.
- Transferable lesson — Liquidation preference arithmetic determines founder and employee outcomes more often than exit price does. A $30M exit on $225M of preferred is a zero for common regardless of headline framing. Every founder should be able to state, from memory, the exit price at which their own common stock becomes worth something.
- Sources — Recode · Inc./Business Insider · Business of Home on the 2020 resale
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