On August 7th of last year, Crain_’s ran an article about SketchFactor, an app that was set to launch the next day. It would allow users to report having seen or experienced something “sketchy” in a particular location; these reports would then be geotagged and overlaid on a Google map, creating a sketchiness heat map of a neighborhood or city. The idea was to help urban walkers be more street-smart, but the implications seemed insensitive at best, racist at worst. Allison McGuire, the app’s co-creator, had recently moved from Washington, D.C., to the West Village. Both she and her co-founder, Daniel Herrington, were white and in their twenties. At one point, the Crain’_s reporter asked McGuire whether her company “could be vulnerable to criticisms regarding the degree to which race is used to profile a neighborhood.”

“We understand that people will see this issue,” she said. Still, she argued, “sketchy” can mean many things. “As far as we’re concerned, racial profiling is ‘sketchy.’ ” She was confident that the app would reflect her good intentions.

A few hours later, Gothamist published a more pointed piece, under the headline “Tone-Deaf App Helps Naive Travelers Avoid ‘Sketchy’ Neighborhoods.” McGuire didn’t mind. “We were just excited to be mentioned somewhere else,” she told me recently. “Then I started getting texts and e-mails saying, ‘Have you seen the front page of Gawker?’ ” The headline there was more blunt: “Smiling Young White People Make App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods.” There was a photograph of McGuire and Herrington, back to back, grinning. It probably didn’t help that the app’s icon was a black bubble with googly eyes.

The writer Jamelle Bouie tweeted, “Are you afraid of black people? Latinos? The poors? Then this app is just for you!” Maxwell Strachan, writing for the Huffington Post, pointed out some of the problems with establishing a “rating system based on the personal views of Americans, a people historically known to mask the occasional racist view behind words like ‘dangerous’ ”—or, for that matter, “sketchy.” Many people pointed out that the app, which was ostensibly designed to “empower everyone,” would, in practice, empower only people who owned smartphones. SketchFactor’s Twitter feed was inundated with such hashtags as #racist, #classist, and #gentrification. The next day, the same journalist at Crain’s wrote an article about the Internet’s “full-throated condemnation” of the company. “I was in shock,” McGuire said. “And the app wasn’t even live yet.”

SketchFactor never fully recovered. Businesses are path-dependent—what happens early has a disproportionately strong effect on what comes later—and this is especially true of businesses that rely on user-generated content. Unlike, say, a Web publication, whose tone can be set by its writers and commenters, the tenor of a social platform is largely determined by who is doing the socializing. SketchFactor was unexpectedly popular—it was, for a time, the third-most downloaded navigation app, behind Google Maps and Waze—but many of its first users were drawn in by the controversy. Some early “sketch reports” were actually pleas for the app to be taken down. Others were jokes (116th and Broadway: “pretentious undergrads”) or incomprehensible clutter (Atlanta: “This’s guy just kicked his dog ahhhhhhhhhhh”); still others were puerile outbursts or racist screeds. McGuire and her team encouraged users to downvote or report offensive posts, but they couldn’t remove them fast enough. Whether the idea was inherently racist or not, the app began to seem irredeemably toxic. The company released an update the following week and another one in October, but by winter they had stopped working on the app. In February of this year, they acknowledged that SketchFactor was not going to succeed. They decided to pivot.

Like “disrupt” and “10x” and “culture fit,” “pivot” is an overused bit of tech-world jargon; but it’s also a useful word with a simple definition. Let’s say you try to start a company and the idea doesn’t take hold, as most ideas don’t. You can disband the company. Or you can keep your staff and some key part of your idea, jettison everything else, and rebuild. This is a pivot (though a better term might be “flatworm,” after the invertebrates that can be cut in half and then regenerate themselves). In 2005, Noah Glass and Evan Williams launched Odeo, a podcasting platform. The next year, they pivoted—Glass and Williams stayed on, but they worked on new platforms that had nothing to do with podcasting. Eventually, they changed their name to Twitter.

Most companies pivot when they receive too little attention; SketchFactor’s pivot came after receiving too much negative attention. In February, McGuire changed her company’s name. (Had SketchFactor been named more innocuously in the first place, it might have attracted a different kind of audience; then again, it might have attracted no audience at all.) She and Herrington hired new staff and rebuilt around what she claims was always her core proposition: making city streets more walkable.

As of today, SketchFactor is gone. The new app will be called Walc. It recently closed a half-million-dollar round of seed funding, and it will launch in the fall. In the new app, users will not be asked to submit reports, and sketchiness will not be mentioned.

Tech entrepreneurs like to talk about failure, but they usually do so in the gauzy, uplifting tone of teleological hubris. Successful entrepreneurs fail up. They fail better. They move fast and break things. Starting a company is difficult, but the travails that befall a founder—the “trough of sorrow,” for example—are mere way stations on the path to glory.

McGuire bristled at the suggestion that her company’s pivot was a concession to public criticism. “We realized that we had built a social platform, and what we wanted to build was more of a utility,” she told me. “So we corrected. It’s that simple.” She did not express any self-doubt, and she gave little credence to the notion that SketchFactor was racist. “I’ve only ever been about helping people,” she said. “The fact that we were misconstrued was really painful for me.” I asked whether she had ever considered moving out of the West Village—say, to Brooklyn, where “sketch reports” were more plentiful—to field-test the app, or to see how locals responded to it. She said that she hadn’t.

When we spoke, in June, she referred to SketchFactor in the past tense; but it was still live in the Apple, Google, and Amazon app stores. Hundreds of people had downloaded it since February, and sketch reports continued to trickle in, like graffiti in a ghost town. I asked her why she hadn’t removed the app. After all, it was not generating income—it cost nothing to download and contained no ads—and she did not plan to transfer SketchFactor’s user data to Walc. Ed Smith, an entrepreneur who has launched a handful of major apps including the ride-sharing service Sidecar, told me that, if he were in a similar situation, he would take down any dormant app that had the potential to “hurt my brand.” This is a “very simple” process, he said. “It can take just a few moments.”

McGuire’s explanation, essentially, was carelessness. “As soon as we decided we were pivoting, we just didn’t touch SketchFactor at all. It takes time and energy and resources to do anything—editing it, pulling it, whatever. Our focus was on Walc.” In general, entrepreneurs who are moving fast and breaking things are not always equally concerned about cleaning up after themselves.