Turns out the best pivot a failed startup can make is selling its own ghost to an AI company. According to a report by Forbes (via Fast Company), defunct businesses are cashing in on their digital remains - internal Slack chats, emails, Jira tickets and all - by packaging them up as AI training data. And the payouts are actually real money.
Shanna Johnson, the CEO of now-shuttered software company cielo24, told Forbes she pulled in "hundreds of thousands of dollars" by selling literally everything her company ever typed. Every passive-aggressive message in #general, every project update nobody read, every "per my last email" - all of it, monetised. Beautifully, tragically monetised.
Death of a startup, birth of a dataset
This isn't some isolated hustle. SimpleClosure, a startup that - in a delicious twist of fate - literally exists to help other startups wind down, is reportedly seeing a surge in founders asking about exactly this kind of data sale. So if you're shutting down a company right now, there's apparently a checklist item between "cancel the AWS subscription" and "cry into a glass of Bordeaux": sell your chat logs to a robot.
The logic, when you think about it, is almost poetic. AI companies are desperately hungry for authentic, real-world human communication data. And what's more authentically human than a startup's internal Slack? The panic threads before a product launch. The passive-aggressive back-and-forths in #engineering. The late-night messages from a founder who definitely needed to log off. That's the stuff.
But wait - did anyone ask the employees?
Here's where things get a little thorny. Those Slack messages and emails weren't written by the company - they were written by people. Employees who probably never signed anything consenting to their digital communications being fed into a large language model. The article doesn't address whether any of that consent was obtained, which is... a gap worth noticing.
It also raises a broader question about what we actually own when we type something inside a company's tools. Spoiler: probably less than we think.
The new startup exit strategy nobody saw coming
VCs used to talk about "acqui-hires" as a soft landing for failed startups. Now we can add "data liquidation" to the list. Your product didn't work, your runway ran out, your team disbanded - but your Jira backlog? That thing is apparently a goldmine.
The startup graveyard just got a lot more interesting. And a little bit weirder.
