Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021:

• Hype (fka Pico) sold to an MMA-themed holdco earlier this year. Raised a $4.5m seed from Stripe and Bloomberg Beta and a $10m Series A; crossed the finish line at $200K ARR after eight years.
• Stir (which raised $16M from a16z at a $100M valuation) informally shuttered some time last year. As far as I can tell, they never GA'd a product.

These two examples are arbitrary: it only takes a few years for any venture capital-subsidized gold rush to be littered with thesis-driven investment memos for companies that never found product-market fit, in no small part because they were never forced to.

As I wrote in Befriending the Goon Squad:

This is an important message for independent developers to internalize: especially in crowded markets, survival, not victory, is the success condition.

(Lest this sound too censorious: I think venture capital is a useful financial instrument. I think there are many really ambitious, gnarly problems that simply require a lot of capital to solve! But it requires a certain level of luck, grit, and patience to land your tenterhooks in a competitive niche, and venture capital provides none of those things to founders who do not already have it.)