The summer of 2014 was a heady time in Silicon Valley. Cash was flowing as freely as Soylent as every Stanford graduate with a half-baked idea about a “pinch point” and a semi-plausible pitch book was lining up checks from venture capital firms. Into this mix came Washboard, a startup so utterly absurd that most of the news outlets that wrote about it (and boy did they write about it) took the trouble to clarify that it was, in fact, “real”.

Washboard was designed to solve a real, if insubstantial, problem: it can be difficult for those who rely on coin-operated laundry machines to acquire enough quarters to run a load. Banks have limited hours, small businesses are not always obliging, and most apartment buildings don’t have change machines. Washboard offered a solution: $20 in quarters, sent to you by mail each month, for the totally normal and understandable price of $27.

I’ve been thinking about Washboard this week amid the latest spate of headlines about WeWork and its co-founder Adam Neumann, who is walking away from the rubble of his startup with a $1.7bn windfall while thousands of his former employees are left to file for unemployment. (The co-CEOs who took over for Neumann last month have reportedly already negotiated multimillion-dollar exit deals of their own; about 1,000 janitors will lose their jobs to an outsourcing firm, according to the Financial Times.)

WeWork’s business model always made about as much sense as Washboard’s. A charismatic CEO, Instagram-ready aesthetic and on-tap kombucha only go so far in papering over the cracks that arise when your company has no assets, tons of long-term obligations, and a customer base that only commits to short-term agreements in a highly cyclical market. That’s all before you factor in Neumann’s dilettantish side projects, penchant for extravagance and general mismanagement. The goose was cooked before anyone took an ill-advised tequila shot.

Washboard was similarly, fatally flawed, though when I spoke to one of its co-founders, Caleb Brown, this week, he pointed out that his company did achieve something over its six-day lifespan that WeWork will probably never do.

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“We did make a profit,” Brown told me by phone from Pittsburgh, where he now works as a technical recruiter. “We did better than WeWork.”

Brown, 32, said that Washboard had, to the best of his recollection, 41 paying customers before it shut down due to problems with its payment processor. Most of the markup on the $20 worth of quarters actually went to cover the cost of postage – “shipping quarters is expensive because they’re heavy,” Brown said – but about $1.50 was pure profit, leading to a total operating income of $60. Add in a $1,300 windfall when Washboard sold its domain name to another startup, and you have a company that performed about 10 million times better than WeWork has so far.

Brown has a sense of humor about his moment of internet infamy, and he didn’t seem to mind when I asked him to compare his company with WeWork.

“The parallels are that they started out as flawed business models,” he said. “I think the difference is that, for whatever reason, WeWork and Adam Neumann were delusional enough to keep pushing forward, whereas when someone asked me if I was thinking about raising money for Washboard, I said absolutely not.”

“I think it’s important to know, even if it’s really early, that it’s OK to shut something down,” he added. “If it’s not working, you shouldn’t WeWork it.”

Technical difficulties

When an Amazon warehouse worker put a product in the wrong bin, management saw it on camera and came to reprimand him within two minutes, but when the same worker collapsed from a heart attack, it took 20 minutes for anyone to respond, according to this new Guardian report on workplace fatalities at Amazon by Michael Sainato.

More than 100 companies are using a system that claims to leverage artificial intelligence to analyze job applicants’ face movements and generate an “employability” score, the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell reports.

Millions of students around the US are being subjected to constant digital surveillance, the Guardian’s Lois Beckett reports.

Sarah Emerson digs into the Menlo Park police department’s “Facebook Unit” in a fascinating report for Vice.

Dispatches from Silicon Valley is a weekly column of reporting and analysis from the epicenter of the tech industry. If you have ideas or comments for future dispatches, email me at julia.wong@theguardian.com.