20 worst VC investments: What went wrong?

After analyzing the list of the worst VC investments, it seemed important to summarize the common mistakes:

• Grow slowly: Webvan, the online grocery shopping site seems to have grown way too fast. Although I blamed Gmail earlier for allowing registrations only via invitation, it seems clear that their model allows for slow, educated growth. Why let lot of people join, only to find that you cannot handle the load and need to close shop? Joost followed up with similar strategies.
  
• Research your market (a.k.a. Understand human mentality): Amp'd Mobile targetted risky customers (who didn't do a good job of paying their phone bills), and allowed them 90 days (instead of 30) to pay their bills. Well, people who couldn't pay in 30 days, didn't pay in 90 days either. Making offers lucrative to customers is one thing, but is that your only selling point? Whatever happened to better service? On similar lines, I do not understand why Comcast is getting so gung-ho about its All-in-one-bill offerings. What would stop Verizon and gang from following suit? Is that a good enough reason for people to switch to another provider?
  
• Understand technical limitations: Pointcast, a pioneer web company with a lot of technical excellence in terms of first use of load balancing using IP virtualization techniques and massive data-centers, failed because of the dial-up internet era of the 90's. What's the point is pushing a lot of advertisements over slow connections? This is another example of Google's win over Altavista by creating a simple page devoid of ads (and ofcourse cool search results ;)). Is it's business model still great for the broadband era?
• Be a startup, don't act rich (already): No need to spend 1.2 million on a single Super-bowl ad (Pets.com), or lavish celebrity Las Vegas Parties, or super-expensive office furniture, or super-cool offices. Wouldn't you want to boast in the end that you started off in a garage? with used computers and dusty offices? (Well, this one only for .com startups, who will work with a management consulting firm in a garage ;) )
  

Seems like a good start to a startup-checklist. Will be adding more soon.