Essential Phone
Valued at $1 billion before it shipped one phone.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Sold an estimated 5,000 phones through Sprint in its first month.
Andy Rubin co-founded Android, so in 2015 investors assumed he could do it twice. By August 2017 his company was valued at over a billion dollars, or as one headline put it, "without shipping a single phone." First-month sales through Sprint were estimated at around 5,000 units. The price dropped from $699 to $499. Its lasting contribution to technology is the notch, which it put on a mainstream phone first, so you know who to blame. The next phone was cancelled in 2018. A follow-up called Gem was announced in October 2019 and cancelled four months later because there was "no clear way to deliver" it. A company called Nothing bought the brand. That is its real name.