'90s Dot-Coms — Where Are They Now? 206
An anonymous reader writes "The Industry Standard has put together a list of 10 dot-com stars from the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, and tracked down what happened to the services and their founders. A lot of the services are still around, albeit under new ownership, including eToys, Garden.com, and DrKoop.com. Others have been completely reinvented — Boo.com, an online clothing retailer that burned through $125 million in funding in the late 1990s, is now an online travel community. Of the founders, many were able to cash out early and/or achieve later online success. Excite's Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer later started JotSpot, which was bought by Google, and Kraus now directs work on Google's OpenSocial initiative. Others did not fare as well, such as two of the co-founders of Garden.com, who declined to cash out at the height of the bubble, and are currently 'between business ventures.' The insiders' post-mortems of the failed dot-coms are interesting — several suggest the concepts were good but too early for their time, while others identify specific factors that led to the failures — ranging from a lack of advertising to 'intense' greed."
Re:Fundamental flaw (Score:5, Informative)
If you had put down $20M for 50% of a company that bubbled up to $1B, you made quite a cut as a VC company.
Luxury office furniture (Score:5, Informative)
no IPO until two years of profits (Score:5, Informative)
Re:lack of product? (Score:3, Informative)
Herman Miller made the Aeron Chairs. I'm sitting in one right now at a company that occupies the space of a .com that closed up.
I'm an ex Infonautics employee. They had people that went all over. Some went to cdnow.com. I knew the guys that started half.com (which was later bought by eBay). I was part of the spinoff bigchalk.com that took Infonautic's education division, and was merged with ProQuest's K-12 group. We blew throw 50+ million in VC and didn't have much to show for it. Three years after the bubble burst, we still had a nice reserve in the bank and were at the break even point. In the end, ProQuest bought out all the private shareholders and move everything to Ann Arbor, MI.
Re:100 dumbest dotcom moments (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fundamental flaw (Score:1, Informative)
Damn it! they suck quite giving them attention (Score:5, Informative)
hysteria? Hysteria? no, there was a real issue, and it was fixed throughout the industry with a lot of hard work and money.
AS someone who watched banking systems completly collapse in spectacular ways in testing environments during rollover simulations, I would not call it hysteria. Yes, some people went overboard but as a whole it certianly wasn't a blunder, it was an amazing success.
Most of the things they talk about made perfect sense at the time, or were great ideas but the people in charge of the money didn't know what they were doing. And some were just plain dumb.
The whole list is a failed attempt to try and make people thing they are smart.
Re:Business didn't work because... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Business didn't work because... (Score:5, Informative)
Newegg.com was founded in 2001, originally as a subsidiary of ABS Computer Technologies, Inc., a computer systems integrator that has operated from Whittier, California since 1991. Newegg was conceptualized when ABS executives recognized an increasing need to service the "do it yourself" customer. ABS was turning down numerous requests for upgrade components to their existing ABS PCs as an alternative to purchasing a new PC[citation needed]. Key players in Newegg's design and execution were CEO and Founder Fred Chang, and VCOB (Vice Chairman of the Board) Ken Lam. In time, ABS Computers became a subsidiary of Newegg.
--Wackypedia [wikipedia.org]
Egghead Software was founded in 1984 as a computer software retail company. It grew into a chain with over 200 stores in the United States, and a few in Canada, primarily located in shopping malls. Faced with declining revenues, in 1998, the company shifted its focus to online business, closing its retail locations and selling entirely through its egghead.com website. Egghead.com was purchased by OnSale.com in 1999 and assumed the name Egghead.com.
Egghead was hurt by a December of 2000 revelation that hackers had accessed its systems and potentially compromised customer credit card data. The company filed for bankruptcy in August of 2001. After a deal to sell the company to Fry's Electronics for $10 million fell through, its assets were acquired by Amazon.com for $6.1 million.
--Wiki-Wiki for the Quickie [wikipedia.org]
Heh. Did YOU read it? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, yes, I did. Once you get past the first 3 or 4 pages which actually had a product, you run even there into examples like TheGlobe.com who had _no_ business plan other than being a social site, and no way to monetize on the user base. Other than serving ads on their web pages, there was no other source of income. In Paternot's own words, and it's right in TFA, " way too little advertising revenues to support everyone ". So there you have exactly what I was saying, right from TFA, and from the horse's mouth.
Later in the list: DrKoop.com. From TFA: " DrKoop.com's business plan rested on advertising, and in 1999 there weren't enough healthcare advertisers to support it and the many other healthcare dot-coms trolling for ad buyers. "
Those are the only ones explicitly mentioning advertising as a factor, and they're both in the "we didn't get enough ad money" category I was describing. Neither of them says that they themselves didn't advertise enough.
But anyway, that's one list, and it just presents a debatable sample of it all. The "we'll get billions in ads" plan, although somewhat under-represented in that particular list, was actually the story of about 90% of the dot-coms back then. And as I was saying, I had the pleasure of actually working for one which had even less of a business plan.
Lack of their _own_ advertising? Heh. Where did you get that idea from TFA? The companies picked there are the ones which were maybe the best known back then, precisely because they advertised and built a lot of hype. The Pets.com sockpuppet from their ads is pretty much _the_ reason we all remember that one, out of the tens of thousands of dot-con flops.
So, heh, did _you_ read TFA? Doesn't sound like it.