Fail Week: When Mark Suster Believed His Own Startup's Hype, And Everything Came Crashing Down

To very loosely paraphrase Tolstoy, all successes are alike, but each epic failure fails in its own unique way. But here in the tech industry, we don't discuss failure stories nearly as much as success stories — and that's a shame, because even the biggest winners in the world of entrepreneurship have had their fair share of missteps.

So we at TechCrunch created Fail Week, five day long video series that shines some light on the dark days that even the most lucky of entrepreneurs go through.

Today we're featuring Marc Suster, who famously had success on "both sides of the table" as a repeat entrepreneur turned investor over nearly two decades in the industry.

But not all of his efforts have been winners. Watch the video embedded above to hear about how he got caught up in believing his own hype and proceeded to make "every single mistake you can make" in building a startup — he bit off much more than he could chew in terms of funding, press coverage, product development, investor expectations, hiring, you name it, and eventually it all came crashing down.

You can find all our Fail Week stories here.

• MARK SUSTER

Companies: Launchpad LA, Upfront Ventures, Cendana Capital, GumGum, Ad.ly, Bedrock, ExpenseCloud, awe.sm, Dealmaker Media, RingRevenue, Qualys, Burstly, DonorsChoose.org, MyTime

Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM) following its acquisition of Koral,where Mark was Founder and CEO. Prior to Koral, Mark was Founder and CEO of BuildOnline, the largest independent global content collaboration company focused on the engineering and construction sectors, which was acquired by SWORD Group (PARIS: SWP). Earlier in his career, Mark spent...

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