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The Undertakers of Silicon Valley: How Failure Became Big Business

Submitted by jhartgen@abi.org on

The attorneys and consultants who have grown with the technology industry’s failures, from Pets.com to Pebble, are anything but harsh in assessing their “clients,” the Guardian reported. Martin Pichinson is a former music manager who came to Silicon Valley in the mid-1980s and his business partner is Michael Maidy. Maidy was recently the CEO of another failed tech company: Pebble Tech LLC, maker of smartwatches. Pichinson and Maidy co-founded Sherwood Partners, and their company is the premier specialist in “assignment for the benefit of creditors” (ABC). ABC was how smartwatch company Pebble Tech came into existence: it was, for its brief life, simply a collection of Pebble’s remaining assets, to be distributed among various creditors, employees and shareholders. This was also how Maidy briefly became the figurehead of a zombie version of the once-hip startup. It’s all part of the normal business churn in Silicon Valley, all built around the mantra of helping companies “fail better.”