alarm:clock euro

The alarm:clock euro takes a look at Intershop today in one of our periodic Where Are They Now? posts. We had been hearing one or two founders of Intershop, the former dotcom star, had left over the years, but we didn't realize until this week that all of them have now moved on to start new ventures.

The tipoff came from a paper published by Guido Buenstorf and Dirk Fronahl, two Max Planck Institute of Economics researchers. The two have examined the Intershop story and determined that some 27 startups can trace their roots to Intershop (many of them are located in the Intershop tower in Jena- image right). We have a link to it below and a list of Intership founders and their new ventures.

Intershop founders do the serial entrepreneur thing.

- Frank Gessner (open source mail order software founded in 2005)
- Wilfred Beeck (joined in 2002 bringing software product line for SMEs from Intershop) Update: URL and company name corrected. June 1, 2006.
- Karsten Schneider (operator of online photo processing sites for consumers acquired by HP in December 2005)
- Stephan Schambach (Woburn-based ecommerce on demand software company founded in 2004 backed by NorthBridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners)

Intershop was founded by a team of entrepreneurs in 1994 who had the smarts to sell their software in the US just as the online retail market started to take off. It became one of the top 3 vendors of ecommerce software with sales peaking at €123 M in 2000.

Much was made about the founders growing up behind the Iron Curtain and the fact that they had raised venture-capital. They became famous founders. The startup went public with a fantastic valuation. Then the stock market bubble burst. Demand for its software tanked and so did its share price.

In the meantime, it has been called one biggest annihilators of investor money (a dubious distinction granted it by a German investor protection association).

According to estimates made by the association, stock valued Euro 10,000 at the end of 2000 would have a value of Euro 27 at the end of 2005.

Despite all that, Intershop is still in business, serving high-end large-sized companies with its ecommerce software. Its latest annual sales figure is €17.8M and is calling for profits this year and has started to hire staff again. Employee numbers had shrunk from 1200 at its peak to 219 as of April. It also announced in 2005 that it had settled the shareholder lawsuit that had been hanging over the firm.

Read - B2C - BUBBLE TO CLUSTER? THE DOT.COM BOOM AND SOFTWARE ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AN EAST GERMAN REGION*

Posted on May 29, 2006 07:24 AM | Posted to Where are they now | Permalink

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