After years of venture-backed euphoria, a new era of seriousness has descended on Silicon Valley. Investors are becoming more cautious about their bets, and where burn rates used to go unfettered, founders are now focused on metrics like profitability. Start-ups that have failed to button up and get serious are paying the price. “As we move forward, it is important for all players in the ecosystem to realize that the game has changed,” Benchmark’s Bill Gurley, a well-known venture capitalist who has talked of doomsday coming to Silicon Valley, said this week. “We’re coming out of an era now where they all were chasing the same deals, trying to collect the same logos for their résumés, and marking up and encouraging the markup of their own investments for the sake of ego,” Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca told Vanity Fair. “There will definitely be a time of reckoning.” The time of reckoning seems to be upon us now.

Even outside the Valley, tech companies are feeling the crunch. Powa Technologies, a British start-up valued at $2.7 billion, shut down in February. But new details have emerged about Powa; Business Insider reports that the start-up struggled with a failed flagship product, a C.E.O. who couldn’t accept criticism, a business that leaned entirely on the strength of its sales team and not on the quality of its services, and a culture that permitted booze-filled holiday parties with topless dancers. Powa, which raised more than $176 million in funding from investors including Wellington Management, which led its Series A and Series C rounds, had just $250,000 in the bank at the beginning of February, and $16.4 million in debt.

The company’s product, PowaTag, was, in C.E.O. Dan Wagner’s words, going to help Powa become “the greatest technology company of all time.” PowaTag let people scan QR codes, ads, and iBeacons to buy products quickly, using their stored credit-card information. Powa’s products gained traction, but they’ve been described as “smoke and mirrors” and a “basket case” by former employees. Wagner, too, faces criticism. Merrill Lynch tech analyst Keith Woolcock told the Independent: “People view him as a marketing guy, a motor mouth. . . . He's a born salesman. His way is to hype his company and talk it up.” The founder of a start-up Wagner tried to acquire through Powa said, “He didn’t really understand, I think, what he wanted to do. It didn’t feel like he had any sense of product or tech even, he just wanted to be selling things. I think he had aspirations that he didn’t understand technically, I don’t think.” The Telegraph compared him to a character on The Office. Former employees express anger at Wagner. They say if he had stepped away from his leadership role, Wellington Management would have found a replacement to keep the company going. Instead, the company’s remaining employees were laid off when the company shut down in February.

Wagner, who refused to comment on the story about Powa aside from telling Business Insider it was “a load of rubbish,” spoke at a forum for entrepreneurs in London this week. Addressing the audience, he talked about the downfall of Powa. He suggested he’s not done with tech quite yet. “You just need to get on with it, pick yourself up, have another go, which is exactly what I’m going to do,” he said. “And I will continue to do probably forever.”