- Company — Shyp
- Sector — Logistics / on-demand shipping
- Founded / Died — 2013 / March 2018
- Lifespan — ~5 years
- Capital raised — ~$62M (Kleiner Perkins, Homebrew, Slow Ventures); peak valuation ~$250M
- Peak scale — Four metros; headcount peaked around 300. Revenue never disclosed.
- What it built — An app where you photographed an item, a courier collected it within 20 minutes, and Shyp packed and shipped it for a flat $5 fee plus postage.
- Stated cause of death — CEO Kevin Gibbon's shutdown post and subsequent essays are direct: the company scaled to new cities before the unit economics worked, and "I let the fear of missing out drive our decisions." He has written explicitly that the flat $5 fee did not cover the labour it purchased (Gibbon's essays; Fast Company).
- Evidenced cause — Stated and evidenced causes agree closely, which makes this post-mortem unusually valuable. Reporting corroborates: consumer shipping is low-frequency (most people ship a few times a year), so acquisition cost could never be amortised; the 2017 pivot to small-business shipping was correct but came two years and roughly $40M too late.
- Warning signs visible earlier — Consumer shipping frequency was knowable from public data before launch. The four-city expansion in 2015 preceded any demonstrated positive contribution margin.
- Money outcome — Investors lost ~$62M. Employees laid off; Gibbon gave interviews taking personal responsibility. He later founded another logistics venture.
- Post-mortem quality — High. Gibbon has spoken and written repeatedly, including under the unflattering framing "from $250 million to 0." Minimal self-service; he names his own FOMO as a cause.
- Transferable lesson — Purchase frequency is a hard constraint on consumer CAC payback. If the average customer uses you three times a year, your acquisition cost must be recoverable over years, and almost no venture-funded growth plan can wait that long.
- Sources — Fast Company · Airhouse interview, "How I Failed" · Failory
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