When money dries up, the vision needs to be crystal clear, memes can melt - in the excellent paper Manias and Mimesis by Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart, they outlined how the meme (here a startup, but it applies broadly) dies: The cycle of a startup might look like this: - Someone has an obviously insane idea, like selling Basic to computer hobbyists in 1975 or selling books on the Internet in 1994.