Primary Data, an enterprise storage startup which employed Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, appears to have shut down. At time of writing, the company’s Twitter and Facebook appear to be down, although its webpage is still working. Its operating status is described as “closed.”
“Primary Data collapsed and got shut down over the weekend,” an anonymous source told the website The Register. “All employees got laid off. Management wanted to buy off all investors and convert preferred shares to common. Investors said no. $100m of investor money is all burnt up and gone, with nothing to show.”
Primary Data secured $50 million of funding in 2013, before securing an additional $13 million B-round in 2014, and a $20 million C-round in August 2017. Altogether that added up to $83 million of funding, with an extra $20 million line of credit.
As The Register points out, since the last round of funding was concluded in late summer last year that would represent rapid spending for a company with only around 100 employees.
A source told TechCrunch that the problem was that Primary Data’s technology was not as “compelling” as it needed to be, causing problems with manageability, usability, data quality and performance.
Woz has been involved in a number of startups over the years after leaving full-time employment at Apple in the 1980s (he returned briefly in the 1990s to work as an advisor, before Steve Jobs ditched him in this role.) Confusingly, last year he was reported as being an adviser for a new augmented reality chap app launched by New England Patriots tight end Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski — although he later said this was not the case.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
11 responses to “Woz’s job goes up in smoke after startup burns through $100 million”
there are way too many options for Storage Solutions, not to mention a few good ones.. this would of been a bad idea from the start.
I understand that the majority of startups fail. It happens.
true, but the majority dont get a tenth of a billion dollars to fail with. its a lot of capital for something that seems pretty vague — “machine learning enterprise data management”. shoulda tossed in some more jargon
I dunno about you, but I’m starting to think that Jobs may have been the brains of that Apple outfit…
Debatable unless “brains” is defined. Wozniak built the Apple 1. Jobs didn’t know what a transistor was if it was thrown at him.
“Brains” was just shorthand. Couldn’t come up with a good, pithy way to put this.
Essentially what I was trying to say was that we’ve done the experiment and we know that Jobs without Woz was still wildly successful. And Woz without Jobs continues to fail.
You’d probably much rather hang out with Woz than Jobs (especially since Woz is actually still alive!), but Woz hasn’t shown any ability to do anything technically that successful since his early days at Apple.
I can’t not agree. :)
Woz was a brilliant engineer in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Let’s not discount that. However, someone like Jobs was going to be successful with or without him. For Jobs, Woz happened to be the brilliant engineer that was at the right place and at the right time.
Today, it’s rather sad how the media goes out and seeks quotes from Woz as if it is somehow meaningful or relevant today. Sadly, Woz hasn’t learned when to keep his mouth shut and doesn’t realize that he’s just embarrassing himself. Worse are the startups that bring him in effectively just for the name recognition.
Apple was Woz’ one-hit-wonder.
Brilliant statement… was it your one hit wonder?
reading their product page, it doesnt seem very compelling: