alarm:clock

Social Networking - Tuesday, January 29, 2008

While E*Trade Sucks Wind, Former CEO Raises $29.6M For SocNet MOLI

Former E*Trade CEO Christos Cotsakos left the company under a cloud but he's living large in West Palm Beach, FL and his latest startup has raised $29.6M. Mainstream Holdings did the deal with Home Depot co-founders Bernard Marcus and Kenneth Langone, and Vantis Capital Management's Steven Holzman. A local paper reports that the startup raised an initial $20M from Cotsakos and $6M from other investors.

Opening the kimono today at the Demo event, Mainstream Holdings was conceived in 2004 but is just now launching a social network called MOLI. MOLI is led by some E*Trade refugees including COO Judy Balint who was Chief International Officer at E*trade. At launch, the firm already employees 50 heads in Palm Beach, plus others off-shore.

GigaOm has a long, thoughtful review but in our summary judgment, Moli has whiffed at launch. Maybe they will get their act together later on. The site needs to be more clear about who should use it (creative types who want to make money) and why this would be time well spent (something about creating multiple profiles for your professional and personal selves.)

It's going to be painful for the E*Trade gang to justify their valuation to investors if they can't get a handful more people to check it out soon. Call us jaded, but this is an obvious failure in the making that the rich dudes hanging out on the golf links in Palm Beach think will work just by throwing money at a trend.

Moli explains it this way.

View - site