October 31, 2007
eCrush's Clark Benson: Where Is He Now?
The eCrush network comprises three major sites: eCRUSH.com, eSPINtheBottle.com and HighSchoolStyleBoard.com. The network was acquired by Hearst Media on December 31, 2006. The eCRUSH site was launched on Valentine's Day, 1999 in Chicago by Clark Benson making it one of the original social networking sites. eCrush did $1.4M in profit in 2006. Hearst Media paid a rumored $8-12M for the eCrush network.
Clark Benson
These days Benson is living in LA where he is launching two startups. The more mature is Almighty Institute of Music Retail.
Benson's other startup in formation is a pre-name venture also based in LA which says it has raised "$1M in seed financing with access to plenty more." Here's how they describe the stealth mode venture:
"Concept involves social networking but is NOT a "Myspace for
Benson has brought in Eleanor Blattel as a founding exec. She was Vice President, New Media and Digital Business Development at Sanctuary Records Group.
Read - Startup Review Post On eCrush
Posted at 07:09 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 17, 2007
Hollywood Media Founders Launch Title Insurance Startup
Where are they now:
Former Hollywood Media execs Anthony Farwell and Steven Katinsky are behind a new La Jolla-based startup called Closing Corp. The startup has launched TitleWizard, an online tool for real estate titles. The site currently works in California and the plan is to expand across the nation. Farwell and Katinsky are founding managing directors of Fruition Ventures and Farwell Capital.
Hollywood Media (NASDAQ: HOLL), which operates movietickets.com, sold to to The Times Mirror Company, and it later merged it into a public company.
Closing Corp. says on its web site that "ClosingCorp has made several unannounced acquisitions which will soon be released with the announcement of its new real estate information services."
View - site
Posted at 02:00 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 15, 2007
Limelight Founder Sets Up Next Act With Unicorn Media
Where Are They Now?
LimeLight Networks' Bill Rinehart made some enemies when he was VP of Sales at Critical Path. As Light Reading puts it: "The most glaring ethical lapse being the perpetration of "Round Trip" transactions in which CP would "sell" software & service to a partner software firm and in turn agree to "buy" a like amount of software/service from the same partner. Neither company had real business needs for the products transacted beyond their desperate requirement for ill-gotten revenues at the end of a quarter in order to meet Wall St. expectations."
The Critical Path hangover didn't seem to last long for Rinehard who started up Limelight Networks as its co-founder and CEO. Limelight has a sweet IPO and no doubt Reinhard was enriched but he did have to leave the company in December 2006 to company the company's name clean during the offering.
Now Rinehart is coming back with another startup, again in Tempe, AZ. This one is called Unicorn Media. Rinehart and company are tightlipped about Unicorn but clearly this is no infrastructure competitor to Limelight. Rather it appears to be more of an online video media vehicle.
View - stealth site
Posted at 05:29 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 27, 2007
Silicon Valley Fixture Mike Homer Has Rare Disease
Netscape alum and serial founder Mike Homer has a rare disease that has no known cure. 300 donor/friends have contributed $6M in the past 3 months to fund a program to save Homer's life (as well as others who suffer from the disease).
Homer is just 49 and is a father of 3 who resides in Atherton. In addition to running marketing at Netscape he also helped to launch Opsware, Tivo and Palm. Homer's last 2 videeo startups were KonTiki (sold to Verisign) and Open Media Network OMN, a non-profit "PBS of the Web" venture .
Ten months back, Homer started to lose short term memory but thought it was sleep apnia. His friend Marc Andreesen was concerned and intervened, urging him to visit Stanford Hospital, where Andreesen is on the board. Stanford gave him the bad news that he actually had Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, a neuro -degenarative disorder. Victims are born with it and by the time symptoms are apparent when people hit in their 30s or 40s, there is typically only a year or two left to live. Homer is currently being treated at UC San Francisco Medical Center which is home to the world's foremost experts in this disease.
Friends of Homer's including angel investor Ron Conway and former Intuit CEO Bill Campbell have stepped in to raise funding for Homer's cause.
If you want to help:
Homer Family Foundation for Brain Disease Research
PO Box 10195
Palo Alto, CA 94303
Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease Foundation
Read - The Fight of his Life (SF Business Times - password protected)
Posted at 02:42 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 23, 2007
John McAfee Update
We ran this Where Are They Now post some weeks ago on McAfee Software founder John McAfee. McAfee had sunk as much as $5M into upgrades to the houe after he bought it. The sucker is 10,000 square feet on 280 acres and is fully loaded.
At the time, we found photos of McAfee's Xanadu home in the hills of Colorado out by Pikes Peak. We now learn that Patrick Wu a 29 year old bond trader from Chicago picked up this home for what seems like a steal - just $5.2M.
Read - Real estate blog
Posted at 05:57 PM | Permalink
April 22, 2007
Every Founder's Dream: Living Large Like John McAfee
The WSJ profiles the fun that John McAfee (McAfee Software) is having in his golden years. The 61-year-old McAfee apparently has a hot young girlfriend, and he does his best to look younger with pierced ears, and spiked hair with bleached blond tips and a goatee.
McAfee is looking to pocket more walking-around-money through the sale of his 280-acre Colorado estate, which will be auctioned on May 10th for an expected $20M. The land sports a 10K-square-foot mansion on a hillside. The home has all the normal mansion crap but also has three guest homes, two guest apartments and nine guest cabins for a total of 19 bedrooms. Plus it has four trout lakes.
These days, McAfee has become addicted to an ultra-light flight sport that they call aerotreking. From his home base in Rodeo, NM, McAfee and a band of "sky gypsies" take flight around the Southwest.
McAfee say: "Money does a really strange thing. It gives you this sense of omnipotence. But eventually you're just one person, you look around at all this stuff you've acquired and you wonder how you're ever going to use it."
No matter what he says it doesn't seem that McAfee's new sky gypsy life-style is spartan. He built a villa in the center of a chain of airstrips on his New Mexico property, he bought a fleet of trailers for himself and his crew (including a trailer once owned by Howard Hughes) as well as some vintage autos including a 1936 Boattail Speedster worth $400K, plus he's building a coffee shop and movie theater for the gang.
Read - McAfee's Mansion, Estate of the Day (Luxist)
Read - Come Fly With Me Under Desert Skies In Very High Style (WSJ)
Posted at 06:13 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 24, 2006
Jim Barnett Takes His Turn.com
AltaVista's turnaround jumper man Jim Barnett is back in the news. Silicon Beat has the scoop that Barnett has founded Turn.com a stealth-mode ad network that has raised $20M over 2 rounds, while BusinessWeek says its $10M + 16 PhDs.
Barnett is currently on the board of travel search engine SideStep as well as ValueVision (Nasdaq: VVTV). From the few details that we have seen, it appears that Turn will target ads based on tagging.
Read - Former Altavista CEO to launch new ad network (BusinessWeek)
Read - Turn raises more cash (SiliconBeat)
Posted at 03:10 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 12, 2006
Star of Startup.com Resurfaces
Readers of the a:c may be familiar with the documentary film Startup.com, which follows a couple of entrepreneurs as they launch a company called GovWorks. The star of the movie was Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, who we now learn has founded a new company - JumpTV, which we cover below.
Posted at 11:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
March 01, 2006
Software Billionaire Champions Anti-Crystal Meth Movement
Tom Siebel , exec Oracle exec and founder of Siebel Systems, is notorious for being hard to work with. Some attribute it to short man's syndrome. Who know where the truth lies. We do know that Siebel has been a catalyst for good in the State of Montana where Siebel and many other tech luminaries have built vacation villas.
Siebel funded the Montana Meth Project's huge advertising campaign - the project is the largest advertiser in Montana. Siebel learned of the meth problem from a buddy who is a Montana sherif who explained that meth is the state's biggest problem and is decimating the state's youth. Credit Siebel for taking action. Now politicans from the state of Montana want to take the project nationwide.
Read - Burns plans to spread meth project nationwide (Great Falls Tribune
Posted at 11:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
December 22, 2005
NeXT Computer Dead-Enders Give Up
Once upon a time, NeXT computer was the toast of Silicon Valley. This year, the start-up founded by Steve Jobs as retribution for his early retirement at Apple, was finally abandoned by the faithful - the Bay Area NeXT Users Group. Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 with an out-of-pocket investment of $7M. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT for $400M and it became the bedrock of OSX.
Read - NeXT Fans Give Up The Ghost (OS News)
Posted at 05:02 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 03, 2005
Networking Kingpin Gives Something Back
We remember Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande, from his days at Cascade, which he sold to Ascend Communications for a cool $3.7 billion in 1997. He is now the co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks, another company that's been a blistering success.
With all of his cash in hand, we are pleased to see that Desh is the kind of guy who likes to give something back. In 2001, he donated $20 million to MIT to create The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT -- and the Center just handed out its latest round of grants. These most recent grants bring total funding to $5.5 million; the funds have been distrbuted to 47 research teams.
Nice work, Desh.
Read: Deshpande Center awards $500,000 in grants - [rediff.com]
Posted at 05:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
October 23, 2005
Where Are They Now - Internet Travel Network Founder Dan Whaley
The Wall Street Journal carries the story about the sale, on eBay, of a waterfront San Mateo home for $1.2M (great bargain!). For the uninitiated, San Mateo is a lame Silicon Valley suburb. The home sale got 152 bids in 10 days. Not only did the seller save on sales commissions, but he says local brokers priced the home at just $1M.
The seller is Dan Whaley, 36, who founded the Internet Travel Network, among the first travel services on the Net way, way back in 1995. The company became GetThere.com and then Sabre, owner of Travelocity, bought it out in 2000 for $757M. We suspect that Sabre regrets the purchase, but Whaley does not.
Whaley is no longer part of the venture. He plans to get a life and get out of the Peninsula by moving to San Francisco.
Read - Real-estate briefs of the rich and famous (Wall Street Journal via the Pittsburgh Post Gazette)
Posted at 08:25 PM | Permalink
October 17, 2005
eBay Founder Jeff Skoll Goes To Hollywood
Even though he has $4B of his own, eBay original Jeff Skoll has not been in the news the way that his co-founder Pierre Omidyar has been with his varied investments. But now Skoll has emerged with a slate of 3 big-time Hollywood films that he has produced through his company Participant Productions. They include:
- Good Night, and Good Luck is about broadcaster Edward R. Murrow's battle with Sen. Joseph McCarthy
- North Country stars Charlize Theron as a Minnesota miner confronting sexual harassment in the workplace
- Syriana in which George Clooney and Matt Damon play operatives in the global oil trade.
Skoll's take on Hollywood must infuriate industry moguls. He is astonished at how small Hollywood is - just $100B in revenue per year - given that how big an impact it has globally. So he's looking at Hollywood as a philanthropic endeavor: "We've actually had cases where we looked at the risk profile of a film and said, `The way this looks, chances are we're going to lose a million, $2M, even $5M. But maybe we'll get $10M or $20M worth of social value from it."
Read - EBay founder looks to direct reel change (SJ Mercury)
Posted at 01:19 PM | Permalink
August 31, 2005
Old Ideas for New Businesses
Silicon Beat (via VentureWire) mentions that Reply, a start-up "which gives you a form to fill out online and then goes out and tries to find what you're looking for," just snared $17 million from BA Venture Partners.
Talk about Web 2.0! We've seen this concept before and it even had a strikingly similar name: Respond. Respond.com came on the scene circa 1999 and had an all-star cast of backers including former Netscape chief Jim Barksdale, Benchmark's Bill Gurley, and John Hummer of Hummer Winblad. AOL and Morgan Stanley were also involved. Web users could submit a query -- "Could you please find me a first edition of Huckleberry Finn?" -- and Respond would connect them with sellers of that book.
Battered and bruised by the tech bust, however, Respond was eventually sold for parts to TEOCO, a company run by Atul Jain, the brother of InfoSpace's controversial founder Naveen Jain. Respond still exists, though it is now more explicitly positioned as a lead-generation engine for local businesses.
As we've said before, one of the more striking aspects of the Web 2.0 is the familiarity of its business models - we've seen many of them before. Some of the early models died off with good reason, but others needed time to ripen.
This time around, we'll see if a more fortuitous combination of market timing, resources, and execution can actually result in success for the Respond/Reply model. $17 million from BA looks like a step in the right direction.
Posted at 11:56 AM | Comments (3) | Permalink
August 08, 2005
a:c on M.I.T. Tech Review - Leonid Khachiyan, RIP
Leonid Khachiyan, a Russian mathematician and a professor at Rutgers University who published a groundbreaking theorem in 1979 that helped advance the field of linear programming, died at the age of 52.
Khachiyan's breakthrough, applying an approach known as the ellipsoid method to linear programming, continues to aid computer scientists in their efforts to tackle the enormously complex challenges of scheduling and resource allocation in fields ranging from finance to telecommunications to the airline industry.
Leonid Khachiyan
Read - Obituary: Mystery Man (Technology Review)
Posted at 12:52 AM | Comments (2) | Permalink
May 31, 2005
Alberto Vilar: Internet Con Man?
Just when we'd thought we'd seen the last of the Internet scoundrels, a recent news item jolted us from our beer and hotdogs over the long weekend.
We are referring to the story of the arrest of Alberto Vilar, a dot-com gazillionaire if ever there was one. His Amerindo Funds were highly sought after investment vehicles for anyone wanting to reap double digit returns during the boom. According to the NYT, last Thursday, "federal agents arrested him on fraud charges, accusing him of stealing $5 million from a client - and using the money to make good on charitable pledges. As he was led away in handcuffs, there was no doubt that the Vilar bubble had burst once more - perhaps irreparably."
Philanthropist or Fraudster?
Vilar first got some negative publicity a few years ago when he was unable to make good on some pledges he'd made to various philanthropic causes. But despite creating the appearance that he was back in the fast lane, Vilar wasn't even able to post his $10 million bail last week.
If these charges stand - and the prosecutors are already using some pretty tough talk about this being only the "tip of the iceberg" - then Vilar will join the ignominious (and already bloated) roster of Internet scoundrels. How did this happen? Mr. Vilar will have his day in court to explain that.
We recall interviewing Mr. Vilar back when he was on top and were taken aback by his investment strategy, which was simply to buy technology stocks such as Intel, Cisco, Broadvision and others and to hold on to them through thick and thin. This approach has served Warren Buffett well, but Buffett would never invest in tech. To play in tech, you have to be prepared to sell when valuations become extreme. Buying and selling also provides you with work to do day and night which will keep you out of expensive opera seats and philanthrophic obligations that apparently brought down Mr. Vilar.
Read: The Double Ups and Downs of a Philanthropist - [nytimes.com]
Read: Amerindo's Vilar Charged With Stealing From Client - [bloomberg.com]
Posted at 10:53 PM | Permalink
May 23, 2005
Chris Hassett - PointCast Founder
Given the rise of RSS as the 'new push' technology, old-timers are reminiscing about the origins of push and its most notable startup - the Pointcast Network. Pointcast at one point was so wildly heralded that Wired Magazine ran a cover story proclaiming the death of the Web - it would be all push.
Word on the street is that the founder of PointCast, Chris Hassett, is living lavishly here at Trump Tower in New York. Hassett was the young founder who said nah to Ruport Murdoch's offer to buy Pointcast for a full $450M in 1997. Hassett passed because, given the level of venture money invested in Pointcast, he didn't think he would make enough. The company lost its luster and was eventually sold for a mere $7M.
Hassett did have one more venture in him. He founded Prizepoint which was sold to Uproar for $40M in 1999. Since then, the tech world has not heard a peep from Hassett.
Thanks Uproar!
Posted at 10:26 AM | Comments (1) | Permalink
May 11, 2005
The Exhortations of Fast Company
Is Fast Company, the purveyor of New Economy/post-corporate hype, still around? Every time we think the magazine has quietly gone away, it lunges from the local newsstand with one of its monthly exhortations. DO THIS! BE THAT!
This month's exhortation - Change or Die - got us to thinking... how many other things has Fast Company urged us to do over the years. Herewith, a sampling... READ IT NOW!
May 2005 - Change or Die
October 2004 - Balance is Bunk!
November 2003 - Listen Up!
August 2003 - How To Lead Now
April 2001 - Betrayed!
March 2001 - Get Well Now!
February 2001 - Over? (Sez Who!)
October 2000 - Your Job Is Change
August 2000 - Ideas Rule!
June 2000 - Enough Talk!
May 2000 - Speed Wins
June:July 1998 - Get A Life
February:March 1998 - You Decide
August:September 1997 - The Brand Called You (a personal favorite of ours)
Read: Fast Company archives - [fastcompany.com]
Posted at 12:56 PM | Comments (3) | Permalink
Jim Barksdale - Son of Mississippi
Driving through rural Mississippi - don't ask - the crackling airwaves brought news from a name more associated with Sand Hill Road. Former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale provoked Mississippi legislators by offering $50M in college scholarships, with strings attached. Barksdale requires that the state meet federal guidelines for its state education funding. The state of Mississippi raises very little revenue from taxes and as a result has trouble funding school budget increases. Some legislators complained that Barksdale was meddling in their business.
It is refreshing to see philanthropists like Barksdale and Bill Gates pay attention to high school education. Too often, donations are made so that Harvard Business School can build a gym fit for kings or to endow an pricey chair at the University of Chicago Business School.
Read - Mississippi latest state to end legislative session without a budget (Duluth News Tribune)
Posted at 09:18 AM | Comments (3) | Permalink
January 25, 2005
Henry Nicholas - The Prince of the O.C.
We first encountered Broadcom, a maker of broadband chips, about 8 years ago. At the time, the company had very quietly established itself as a leading supplier of chips to cable set-top box manufacturers. Founded in 1991, Broadcom was diminutive, privately-held, and located in Irvine, an unremarkable city in the heart of California's Orange County.
But how things eventually changed for the company and its musclebound and wildly energetic CEO, Henry Nicholas. He and co-founder Henry Samueli were catapulted into the rarefied heights of extreme of tech wealth. The company became a stock market darling. The hallways were littered with millionaires.
No Pain. No Gain
We went down to Irvine in 1999 to visit Henry Nicholas for a memorable afternoon. He was all showmanship, but he had the goods to back it up. Having just suffered a rib injury at a skiing/investment banking confab, he subsisted on a diet of protein bars and painkillers. "Nick," as his devotees called him, urged us to join him for an iron-pumping session at the gym. We could hardly say "no." He also took us for a spin in his new Ferrari (Editor's note: to my knowledge, I was the first reporter to ever ride in one of Nick's many sports cars - because I suggested it to his PR man, Bill Blanning. We've since noticed that countless profiles of the former Broadcom CEO culminate in an adrenaline-jolting ride). "Faster! Go faster," he yelled over the sweet growl of the engine.
Back in the office, we recall Nick making appointments with teams of hapless engineers for 10PM that night. Didn't these people have lives? Didn't Henry Nicholas have a life? As it turned out, he really didn't. In early 2003, he abruptly resigned from Broadcom citing marital difficulties and an eroded family life.
Nick has been pretty quiet since his departure from Broadcom, but we hear he's using his $2 billion fortune to improve education and contribute to other philanthropic causes. His hometown rag, The O.C. Weekly, sat down with Nick this summer for an update. It would appear that his fortune, family, and physique have not suffered terribly.
In any event, we remember Nick fondly and suspect he'll move back into the spotlight at some point. He was eccentric, overbearing, cocksure, and bordered on the self-indulgent. But he also possessed a refreshing level of candor that is absent in most CEOs. He was best-suited to building Broadcom, but not ultimately to running it.
Read: Broadcom Without Nicholas [Forbes.com]
Read: Henry Nicholas, Superhero [O.C. Weekly]
Posted at 05:06 PM | Permalink
December 03, 2004
Tony Perkins - Open Source Media Mogul?
A story from the AP profiles our old Red Herring boss, Tony Perkins, and his attempt to merge the magazine and blog worlds. Tony's AlwaysOn, a high-end business blog site, plans to launch a print component early next year.
Our other old boss, Jason Pontin, weighs in with some well-placed skepticism: "If you believe there are enough people interested in reading a magazine devoted to bunch of insiders writing with great jubilation about the importance of their own community, then Tony's approach could be quite effective."
And no profile of Tony Perkins would be complete without a cloying, boosterish comment from the Tim Draper, the world's most improbably successful VC and an old pal of Tony's: "It's a great idea," said Draper, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park. "Tony has a really good feel for this market. He always seems to 'get it' before the rest of us get it."
If Tony is great at antyhing, it's the ability to turn a deaf ear to his critics - and to forge ahead with his ideas. We'll see if he "gets it" this time around.
Read: High-Tech Publisher Tries 'Blogozine' [AP via Yahoo]
Posted at 10:49 AM | Permalink
December 01, 2004
Eric Benhamou - Living the American Dream
We first encountered Eric Benhamou some years ago when he was still CEO of 3Com, the perrenial second-fiddler to Cisco in the networking market. Interviewing CEOs is always a stodgy affair, with PR handlers keeping the execs "on message" and leaving little room for the kind of light-hearted banter that can actually give you a feel for someone's character. That said, you almost always come away from such meetings with some sense of the person's underlying qualities. Gordon Moore is gentle and grandfatherly, Jim Barksdale is a country gentleman, and Michael Dell plays the self-effacing Texas hayseed who possesses uncanny business sense.
If you want a sense of Eric Benhamou, check out the website for his recently established venture fund. He offers the following preamble: "I will put my own money at risk, not others. I will coach, but will not be a consultant. I will invest my time and experience at the service of the CEO and the company first, and its investors second. I will teach, but will learn as well. I will insist on upholding the highest standards of governance and the best management principles and techniques, but will take myself seriously only some of the time."
We remember liking Benhamou the first time around - and now we like him even more. Sure, his message is a bit earnest, but who cares - it's better than most of the corporate piffle you read. The site also includes a timeline of his life, a feature that would be self-indulgent were it not so interesting. Benhamou is a naturalized American citizen who left his home in Algeria to eventually strike it rich in Silicon Valley.
Posted at 12:04 PM | Permalink
November 16, 2004
Accel Partners' Problems
Prestigious VC firms with big wins to their name don't often get second-guessed, but that's just what's happing to Accel Partners. Venture Wire and the San Jose Mercury News have recently pondered Accel's poor rate of return on its last fund raised in 2000, coupled with the raising of its most recent $400M fund, which has a greedy 30% carry rate.
Jim Breyer: In a rough patch
The a:c's take on Accel is that it has a solid reputation on the shoulders of face-man Jim Breyer. Breyer was the young golden-boy who single-handedly built Accel on the backs of Macromedia, UUNet, and Real Networks investments. We used to see a lot of him in the early days of the boom. He's affable, intelligent, and polished. But Breyer has been lousy at recruiting and maintaining VCs who are as good and smart as he is (in fact, Breyer recently lost a seasoned lieutenant to another VC firm). Look at Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates: they have benches like the NY Yankees - stars up and down the lineup.
Plunging the dagger a bit deeper: Jim, what have you done for us lately? His last homer was Real Networks. Sure Walmart.com is a great deal win, but it's hardly a traditional startup success story. We hear that now that Jim has the keys to a Gulfstream, he's constantly jetting around and hard for entrepreneurs to reach. With a 30% carry on $400M there's no reason for him to settle down and work hard.
Read - Too Much Money in Silicon Valley (Silicon Beat)
Read - PBS Interview with Jim Breyer about the Dot-Com Bubble [PBS.com]
Posted at 10:03 AM | Permalink
November 12, 2004
Marc Andreessen
BusinessWeek updates Andreessen's rise/fall/rise/fall story with a rise. His current company Opsware is a phoenix from the ashes of his failed Loudcloud. Unfortunately for BusinessWeek, Opsware is a dull, back-office geek shop, but the numbers are nice. Opsware has been cash-flow-positive for five quarters, revenues are expected to double to $35 million this year.
Fat Boy Slims
On the catty side, those who have seen Andreessen say he he looks old, but that could just be a grudging realization that the Netscape revolution was ages ago. Don't shed a tear for Marc - he'll be just fine. He has smartly left Silicon Valley and moved to Los Angeles where a mansion is indeed a mansion. And like Shatner at a Star Trek convention, he will always be mobbed by adoring geeks.
Read - Andreessen - The Right Spot Again (BusinessWeek)
Posted at 07:39 PM | Permalink
November 08, 2004
Jake Winebaum - Internet Stoic
Until you've worked at a start-up, you can't appreciate just how dispiriting life in the entrepreneurial trenches can be. Business models falter, customers go away (or they never show up in the first place), yet you still have some cash on hand and you try to go through the wrenching process of reinvention before the money dries up. It's a bitch and, most of the time, companies wisely close their doors without much of a fight.
No Pain, No Gain
With these realities in mind, we look at Business.com's recent fund-raising announcement with awe and respect. This venture has always been a URL in search of a business model - and we get the sense that CEO Jake Winebaum, an accomplished entrepreneur, has been back to the drawing board with uncomfortable regularity. But the fact that he's pulling in $10MM from Benchmark Capital suggests that Winebaum may finally be turning the corner. Business.com has experienced compounded annual revenue growth rate of over 150% over the past 4 years coupled with profitability and positive cash flow for the past 18 months.
Posted at 11:37 AM | Permalink
October 12, 2004
Where Are They Now - Rick Schwartz (Domain Name Kingpin)
His Highness
Back in the Summer of 1999, NY Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee put a name to the murky business of domain names - the name was Rick Schwartz. At the time, Schwartz's most valuable properties were porno.com and men.com, for which he paid only $42K and $15K, respectively, in 1997. Today Schwartz arguably retains his title as the king of "domainers" and recently hosted a domainers conference near his home in Boca Raton, Florida.
According to the Domain Name Journal, Schwartz started with a total investment of $1,800 and wound up earning $20M over the next 8 years. Schwartz's biggest coup was the sale last year of Men.com for $1.3M. He is currently sitting on 6,000 domains. In addition to profiting from the sale of domains, Schwartz makes steady income from advertising that he earns from free traffic that comes his way from domains he owns, such as candy.com. In fact, Schwartz has been called the Warren Buffet of domains for his strategy of sitting on domains for the long term and only selling when prices are ridiculous.
View - Traffic2004 (Conference Web site)
View - eRealEstate.com (Schwartz's site)
Posted at 06:15 PM | Permalink
October 08, 2004
After the Goldrush
The results of a study by the Sphere Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan California think tank,(as reported in today's WSJ) aren't totally novel - but they still got us to thinking about the good ole days.
"More than half of the people working at technology companies in California in early 2000 had left the technology field or the state by the end of 2003, and more than 40% experienced declining incomes over that period, according to a study on the impact of the tech bust," reports the WSJ. No big surprise here, but still an interesting reminder of a moment in Internet time.
Circa 2000, the a:c's edit squad used to take the occasional lunch at San Francisco's South Park, the epicenter of dot-com chic. Here, we'd observe information architects, Flash programmers (back when that meant something), and newly-minted MBA's lounging about on verdant stretches, pecking away at their handhelds and dreaming of a bright tomorrow. We'd have to wait in line for 20 minutes just to get our overpriced panini.
But the whole thing was illusory. When the market began to tank, you could feel these people leaking out of the Bay Area like air from a balloon. The hissing sound was created by people who had no interest in technology or the Internet to begin with. According to Michael Dardia, a VP at Sphere and primary author of the study, "A lot of people came in from outside the state and nontech industries, participated in the boom, and then went back whence they came."
Again, there's nothing novel in these findings, but we look back with some fondness on the absurdity of that period - and we are reminded just how much we now relish our more moderately priced panini.
Read: Toll of Tech Bust in California Has Been Severe, Survey Shows - [WSJ - reg. req.]
Posted at 12:00 PM | Permalink
October 05, 2004
Halsey Minor and the Entrepreneurial Disposition
Yesterday's NYT takes a look at Halsey Minor's latest foray into the venture capital arena. Say what you will about Minor, the guy is still sitting on a pile of cash. His reputation and fortune were cemented at CNET, a company he built from the ground up in 1993. Halsey has never been known for his subtlety - and while brash behavior may have made him rich - it has also earned him a reputation for bull-headedness and self-indulgent hubris.
Minor: I did it MY WAY
We suspect Minor could care less - and with good reason. Think of Larry Ellison. Think of Steve Jobs. It's nice to think that all wildly successful entrepreneurs have the quiet disposition of someone like Gordon Moore or Halsey's old partner Shelby Bonnie, but more often than not they're, well... ego-centric assholes. They pound the table. They stamp their feet.
Minor's last attempt at VC financing was a disaster because it relied on the consensus and approval of limited partners. There wasn't a board room in Silicon Valley that could accomodate all the inflated egos that put up cash for the whole miserable affair. Halsey Minor's latest move - going it alone - is the right one. But take his money at your own peril. Your idea could become his idea - are you ready to pound the table and stamp your feet?
Read: Is It Still Called a Venture Fund When You Use Your Own Money? [NYT - reg. req.]
Posted at 11:49 AM | Permalink
September 10, 2004
Where is Infospace Founder Naveen Jain?
Naveen Jain is back at work in a Bellevue, WA startup that is locked in stealth-mode. We first met Jain when he arrived unannounced at the offices of the Red Herring to demand that the publication pay attention to Infospace - the next big company. The stunt should have backfired but Jain's manic energy and drive ingratiated him with the editorial staff. It also helped that Jain's predictions proved to be true. Infospace, the company he founded and ran, had a successful IPO and its stock at one point exceeded $200 a share. His predictive powers famously went to his head as Jain predicted at one point that Infospace would become the planet's first $1 trillion company. It may take a while to achieve that size - but Infospace continues to operate and is profitable, though Jain is no longer at the helm.
A mole who recently visited Jain's new venture reports that Jain's aggressive personality permeates the office culture. "You see all these workers," Jain explained to our mole, "I made them all multi-millionaires. They don't have to work but they want to work for me."
Jain On Top Of The Bubble
