dying, because Jibo the company was going
out of business.
Jibo’s sudden plunge into digital demen-
tia brought on an outpouring of grief and
consternation. People had shelled out $900
for this thing; could the company really just
shut off its servers after a few years? (Well,
yes. The $70 million in venture funding
had run out.) People had kept Jibo on their
tomers have to figure out how to extricate
themselves and their data from the wreck-
age; and society at large is often stuck with
a load of garbage—both literal and figu-
rative—to clean up. Consider the piles of
yellow bikes strewn across sidewalks and
railroad tracks in cities like London, where
three dockless bike companies shut down
operations this year.kitchen counters, where it had listened in
on all kinds of intimate conversations. What
would happen to all that voice data now?
Would the company delete it or sell it off to
another company? And what were you sup-
posed to do with the thing after its blue ring,
like a giant digital eyeball, blinked shut for
the very last time? This wasn’t a mere hunk
of e-waste. Jibo was, in the company’s par-
lance, “a member of the family.”
Surely no one expected the robot to live
forever. And yet, somehow, it seems no one
had fully considered that it wouldn’t.
Silicon Valley is obsessed with begin-
nings and growth. It has a million words to
describe them: Launch! Bootstrap! Startup!
Scale! But the industry lives in embarrassed
denial about endings. Companies “sunset”
their unsuccessful ideas, as if sending them
off on a Hawaiian vacation. Meanwhile,
behind the scenes, founders may devolve
into a last-minute fight over the scraps. And
customers may be left wondering what hap-
pened—like the users of Picturelife, a photo
storage service, who in 2016 temporarily
lost all of their images when the company
couldn’t afford to keep paying for server
space as it was collapsing.
Tech leaders know that their businesses
must grow or die. But given that 70 percent
of new startups go out of business within
five years, you might think that more of
them would have plans in place for the
“die” scenario. When they inevitably do
fade to black, employees and even man-
agers are often left totally unprepared; cus-
And it’s not just fledgling startups that are
caught by surprise when they begin to fal-
ter. This fall, after being valued at $47 bil-
lion, WeWork slid toward bankruptcy in a
span of six weeks. Analysts had raised their
eyebrows at the company’s business model
for years—WeWork takes on huge liabili-
ties with its long-term leases on commer-
cial buildings, which leaves it vulnerable to
fluctuations in market demand—and yet the
implosion came as a violent, sudden shock.
In Seattle, WeWork and a real estate partner
abruptly pulled out of WeWork’s multiyear
lease on a 36-story tower, just as the build-
ing neared completion. Then, in October,
the company announced it would lay off
thousands of employees, many of whom
had recently been expecting it to go public.
Who knows whether WeWork will pull its
act together, but the brush with death came
a bit too much out of the blue.
Even the largest companies will go away
someday, or at least fade into a ghost of
themselves. (Remember Kodak?) It’s hard to
imagine a world without Facebook or Goo-
gle, but it’s arguably important that Face-
book and Google imagine precisely that.
“Every consumer experience will have an
ending,” says Joe Macleod. “It seems bonkers
how I have to argue that point sometimes.”
An energetic Englishman, Macleod
advises companies on how to game out
their endgames. (His business card: “Head
of Endineering.”) He has worked with Ikea,
Intuit, Logitech, and Spotify, helping them
anticipate what he calls “closure experi-ences.” According to Macleod, every prod-
uct faces a cycle of endings, from breakage
to customer burnout to falling behind con-
sumption trends. It’s important to plan for
each of them, he says. Not all companies do.
But Macleod points out that regula-
tions are increasingly forcing businesses
to write at least some parts of their last will
and testament. In Europe, the new Gen-
eral Data Protection Regulation requires
firms to delete personal data at the end of
a service contract, so that customers retain
control of their data whenever they leave a
business—or when that business ceases to
exist. The California Consumer Privacy Act,
which goes into effect in January, makes
similar demands on how companies store,
or delete, customers’ data.
Those regulations might force even
broader conversation about endings—like
maybe there should be rules that make
companies responsible for their literal
waste, too. All too often, it’s the public that
ends up cleaning up the mess when firms
flame out without forethought.
Of course, the trouble for consumers—
and perhaps for Macleod’s consulting
business—is that companies may not see
much point in ensuring that they’ll be good
posthumous citizens; they’ve got growth to
fight for, bills to pay, and investors to charm.
If the worst happens, they’ll be gone and out
of money anyway.
Macleod argues that learning how to say
goodbye responsibly can actually help a
company stay healthy. No business keeps all
of its customers forever, and holding on to
them too tightly may backfire: People seem
to like when companies offer an easy way
out of subscriptions and services, he says.
Customer loss, of course, is not the final
farewell. But there is at least one incentive
to imagine that fateful end: A company that
sees its own death clearly also has a better
chance of seeing its next pivot.
Jibo didn’t see that far ahead, but it did
provide for a future at the 11th hour. As the
company’s last employees programmed the
robot’s goodbye speech, its founder report-
edly signed a license that would allow devel-
opers to continue working on the robot’s
source code for educational purposes. Jibo
itself was dying, but at least it might give life
to a new kind of robot someday.No one expected the robot to live for-
ever. And yet, no one seemed to have
fully considered that it wouldn’t.
ARIELLE PARDES (@pardesoteric) is a
senior writer at wired.