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Failure. All startups fear it. Many, at one point or another, encounter it. There's no denying that failure is a big part of startup culture. Some of the best and brightest preach the "fail fast" methodology, wherein quickly launching and fixing small failures can help avoid "the big one."

Whether you subscribe to this practice or not, the reality is that startups fail all the time, and luckily many entrepreneurs share their experiences "post-mortem" with the community. We've covered a handful of these posts from startups, but now ChubbyBrain has put together a hefty collection of these essays for your education.

There is a lot of competition out there in startup land, and often times similar companies launch around the same time and are pitted against one another in head-to-head competition. This was the case in 2007 when personal finance startup Mint launched less than a year after competitor Wesabe. Over time, it would be Mint that would win over the hearts and minds of the Web, leading to a hefty acquisition by Intuit, and the shuttering of Wesabe. So what was it that helped Mint emerge victorious?

Wesabe is closing its doors. In an announcement on its site today, Marc Hedlund, the company's CEO said the personal finance site can't take care of its obligations to assistance and security.

Almost two years ago, we wrote a survey of the 10 leading personal finance sites. In the intervening months, three have shut down, one has been folded into another and a fifth, Mint, has been acquired. That's quite a grisly faceplant for a sector in which we could find 10 companies to profile.

Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint, moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before.

Wesabe and the UK Telegraph Think You Might

Online money management service Wesabe and the UK newspaper giant The Telegraph have entered a partnership to offer co-branded tools on the Telegraph website. It's a daring move, we can't help but admire it. We can't help but wonder how users will feel about it too, though.