The Segment crew tried a couple of ideas without any success. Segment was an open source project that they wrote for one of the startup ideas and it had much more success. They weren't in agreement but the partners didn't have any better ideas, they were down to the last of their capital so they launched a commercial version of their open source.
Also Slack was a MMORPG for something like 3-4 years before they gave up on it and pivoted to being a chat app.