Peter Gabriel-backed music startup goes titsup, takes £500k of your money with it A music licensing startup backed by Peter Gabriel has gone into receivership, Music Week reports. The notice was filed on June 20th. CueSongs promised “frictionless music licensing for online broadcast” and was run by Ed Averdieck, who had a stint at Nokia’s Comes With Music. CueSongs handled sync licensing, the burgeoning …
It also depends on what the taxpayer money was spent on.
I got tax payer money for a way to do early stage drug candidate screening on live cells - it failed to get enough VC funding to continue.
I now get tax payer money (or at least tax credits) to develop a guided surgical system that we are now using on patients.
The difference is that even the failures were developing new technology which still exists and can be used. They weren't just taking public money to pay for the rights to something to give away in the hope that one day somebody else will buy the company.
Once upon a time, Charlie Demerjian presented an interesting argument - that wasting money for perceivably good reasons is actually an important quality of the government.
"That in a nutshell is why we need governments who will occasionally waste money in our name. They play the odds that no rational person on their own would, and we all benefit as a group. If you throw that to the whims of the free market, for the same reason that they won't plan out more than a year, they won't do what it takes to protect you."
"Money is something that capitalism is really good at, and the free market is really good at optimising for it, but the government by and large sucks at this. They are pretty good at preserving life, sometimes above and beyond rational reasons to do so, something private enterprise is very bad at."
www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1037618/new-orleans-catastrophe-down-to-privatisation
Plan Brexit: Promise £50M/day for the NHS then change their minds because that would require cancelling all EU funded projects in the UK.
Plan Orlowski: Reduce taxes by £50M/day because all the money that came back from the EU was wasted by a bunch of MEPs.
Plan year ending 2016-04: Average revenue £1866M/day.
A few cancelled UK IT projects: Centralise NHS records £11400M. 9 Fire control centres instead of 46: £469M. ID Cards £257M. E-Borders: £118M.
Clearly British MPs are at least as good at throwing UK tax payers' money down the toilet as MEPs. Although I would like the idea of plan O, I am sure the new tax reduction IT system will cost at least £50M/day to scrap.
Public investment and loan guarantees often onlly enrich the backers of the project before it fails. The fact that a startup failed does not surprise me, most fail within a few years. When they fail all the investor money is lost since most startups fail for basic business reasons: poor marketing, under-capitalized, bad management, etc.
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