Slashdot Mirror
.Com Millionaires: Where are they now?
Sivar writes "They came pitching gee-whiz business plans and painting visions of integrated platforms, enabling technologies, and wizardry beyond compare. They created billions in wealth that seemed built on--and that all too often evaporated into--thin air. More than thirty former .com millionaires, what they were, and what they are now are on Fortune.com. One on sabbatical, one awaiting a prison sentence, there are some interesting transitions some have had."
Would you like some McDonaldland cookies with that?
one awaiting a prison sentence
Guess he forgot to put the decimal point in the right place. Off to the federal "pound me in the ass" prision with you!
1: Make free-accessable .com site
2: ?
3: Profit!
3,000. Problem is their managers at Kinkos, Starbucks and Target would not give them the time-off for the interview.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
There is no "new economy", you must have a big enough revenue to pay for your expenses like salaries, bills and investments.
This has always been the case, always will. Just forget about the "new economy" there you don't have to charge for your products and services.
Every time I read this article I have a good chuckle. The market giveth, and the market taketh away. Hubris isn't a good quality.
This former .com millionaire is taking a few months off.
no Shawn Fanning?
Does anybody else find it disturbing that not only did they (FBI) let a pedophile off the hook but they also let him design their system for catching pedophiles. Not only is he free to rape children, but because he designed the system he knows how to avoid detction also. Great job FBI I feel really safe knowing you're there to protect my children.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
- Then: Kozmo.com
- Now: Harvard Business School
I never heard of Joe Park or kozmo.com, but It does sound like this person finally found out there was something he should have learned before starting his adventure.Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Just look at all the replies you've got stating that he didn't do anything wrong. Apologists are the scariest of people.
For anyone familiar with Internet before the dot-com stampede, it seemed a little odd that new companies were spending fortunes creating television commercials that rivaled long standing successful companies like Pepsi and Budweiser. The Internet companies that were (and remain) successful got there by word-of-mouth - on the Internet, for people savvy enough to be on the Internet. Companies like Yahoo and Amazon didn't branch into television ads until they had a strong foothold. Companies like Id software, still don't advertise (or very little) on TV, they don't need to. The e-Toys commercials were amazing, and when I first saw them I thought 'How can they do that? They must have spent a fortune on that.' Then there was the Super Bowl that was blanketed with dot-com advertising, the most expensive of ads. Years later now we know. They set up shop in cyber space, then marketed to brick and mortar consumers. They created an imaginary business model built on speculation and pipe dreams. Investors lost fortunes. They only legacy they left was a recipe for a fool-hardy business plan that we can learn NOT to follow.
It really shows you that sometimes you should just leave well enough alone.
I mean, even getting a job at a private equity firm, as a few of those on the list have, is fairly impressive, as is going back to business school with several million in the bank.
OK, so Joe Schmo gets a bunch of investors interested in a harebrained plan, scoops up millions of dollars from them, and then loses the money.
Where did it go? SOMEONE must have gotten rich off of the dot-com craze and subsequent bust... was it hardware manufacturers who provided all of the infrastructure for the failed-from-the start companies? Or was it the grocery store down the street, where all of the free (for employees) food and soda was bought? Who was the final filter point for all of the dot-com money?
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
kozmo.com (and the founding members) were the subject of a documentary called 'eDreams' which made a run on the independent film circuit. You might catch it every once in a blue moon on the Sundance channel or IFC.
.com going bust, there's another documentary called 'startup.com' about govworks.com and it's founding members. This one was really good at showing you what kind of people actually started these .com's. There is one scene where the two founders show up to sign a contract with a VC without bringing their lawyer, then spend an hour or so trying to get him on the phone long-distance and explain the contract to him. Real professional. Gee, I wonder why the company went under...
If you're interested in seeing a play-by-play of a
Dot-commers were always a diverse group, from the founders down to the mailroom these companies tended to attract folks with a wide range of interests & capabilities. That's one of the things that I found fun about working for a startup & one of the things I found scary about working for a startup.
Is it any surprise that these same folks have movd on to varied new vocations & avocations?
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
..the answer is simple.
Most of the money went in salaries and advertising.
Salaries generally form a company's largest expense, other than stock, and most of these Internet companies had no stock (consultancies, design agencies, etc) or were drop shipping.
Dot com companies were also keen on advertising, so a lot of money went into the new media magazines of the time.. but even then, the money ended up in the pockets of the writers and editors.. so, really, it all went in salaries.
A lot of people were employed to do almost nothing during the dot com boom. This means that they added little to production, yet took a paycheck every month. That's where the money was 'wasted' and why we can see no remnant of it today.. effectively the wealth was used to buy a few years' 'free time' for a group of lazy bastards.
Nowadays the market is not so great, but is much more realistic. People who are productive earn their money, people who aren't don't.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Oh goodie, I see Fortune included that scumbag Marc Colon-Wrecker in their list. The former head of Digital Entertainment Network, Colon-Wrecker is currently awaiting extradition from Spain for transporting a minor across state lines with the intent of engaging in sex. There's a great Flash movie done in the South Park style that dramatizes the DEN story quite nicely.
Just don't play it at work, unless you work in a porn shop.
While I have absolutely no problem with wealth per se, I do object to the implication that they must have done something right, as the vast majority on that list simply did not create any wealth. In fact, most had a negative impact by causing money to be diverted from better investments (and from those that deserved it more). What's more, I believe that most of them learned very little from their experiences, unlike other failed entreprenuers. Compared to real entreprenuers they did not: work at the same intensity; put in the same kinds of hours; expose themselves to risk; invest their own money (by and large); have to make hard decisions (e.g., they had enough VC money to do EVERYTHING); live spartan; spend much time at it (2-3 years in many cases); face rejection; and so on...
That they work at private equity firms and are back at business school does not impress me either, because many of my peers are in much the same position and that, in and of itself, means little. About all that I can say for them is that they HAPPEN to be wealthier than the average MBA. Might some of them some day redeem themselves? Maybe. But I'd never hire them (well 99% of them) for their DotCom experience [in fact, I'd say that the naivety/stupidity would be a mark against their intelligence] or because they got lucky enough to walk away with someone else's money.
Just wondering, how are our own .com^H^H^Horg millionares doing? How about it, CmdrTaco|Hemos?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Ok, people lost money due to .coms triggering the stock market to crash. Does anyone have any stories about people actually recovering some or all of their losses? Did you reinvest the remnants?
Scroogle
The only change I'd make is the VC scene where the internet is being explained as a pyramid scheme.
"Do you want to get in at the top and take all the fucking money, or do you want to get in at the bottom and get fucked in the ass?"
You even got a moderator to fall for it!
Biff... now, did you put on two coats of wax like we talked about? Biff?
i spend my time eating macaroni-n-cheese and reading /.
Patrick Naughton was doing something wrong, but he did not 'rape children'. He was caught by a sting and made a plea bargain. It looks like he did serve some time in 'home detention'. In our great American system he has the right to do this. I bet he has leaned his lesson. I bet he also realizes what a loser he was to even think about the sort of crime he committed.
8 59 -1&q=%22Patrick+Naughton%22+java+crossing+arrested +state+lines
I am glad the FBI has someone smart working for them that can help catch the real pedophiles.
The sort of hysteria spouted by the original poster does not help.
For more details on the original case see Google.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
But I think the .com boom was characterized by extremes. I guess it was part of the 'irrational exuberance'.
Salaries were very high, but the thing that amazed me was that I knew of cases where people were joining .coms and trading their salaries to get a sweaty wad of options up front. Yes, they became millionaires, but only on paper. These were people in their late 20's and 30's which is supposedly the time where your salary accelerates and you are at your maximum earning potential.
Of course, they never actually got the chance to sell those options, and have been retrenched.
And as their previous salary was relatively low, they can't get a salary now for what they are really worth.In other words, it has also harmed their future earning potential significantly.
Well, you role your dice, and it's probably a good story to tell, the grand-kids...
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
It looks like the time may draw near. Having said that, I bloody well hope not: I hope Slashdot spending is in line and they're a lean machine that won't be next on the block.
Control yourself a bit. He admitted to have the INTENT TO HAVE SEX WITH A MINOR.
I will be adamant on this position: Intending to have (willful) sex with a 17-year-old woman is NOT the same thing as raping children, which you imply quite harshly.
I remember one of the founders of eLance.com was arrested about a year for some reason. Anyone has more details about it? Anyone know where he is now?
All your favorite sites in one place!
According to the Merc:
Pavni Diwanji made a small fortune starting and selling a tech company for $120 million during the boom years. Then she had a child.
Now she's going back to work -- to start a new company. But this time, she's doing it at one of the most depressing times in Silicon Valley technology start-up history.
Let's just work in general terms, so as to not disclose anything proprietary.
.COM which claimed that their burn rate was $100,000 a business day.
I worked at a
That works out to $100K * 52 * 5 = $26M a year, which was in line with their published data for their funding rounds.
There were ~100 people at the company. The average of the salary of all employees, from CEO to engineers to the person at the front desk was $70,000 a year; this is also par for the course for every startup I've every worked at.
That works out to ~1/4 (27%) of the supposed per day costs, leaving 73% unaccounted.
The company brought in lunch and dinner very day at a cost of ~$300 per meal per day (things like KFC, Boston Market, etc.). Let's inflate that by a ridiculous 75% by "free" peanuts/sodas/etc.; that still puts us at just barely 1% of the burn... that's nothing... it's almost "noise".
Let's take rent. The facility was 15,000 square feet at (we'll round up) $10 per square foot per month. That's another $1.8M/year, or 7% of the burn rate.
So now we have accounted for 28%.
The equipment I had to use was typical. Because of the large amount of RAM I needed to do testing and development to be similar to the platform, and the time, let's call that $6,000 per engineer and $3,000 per non-engineer. Being generous, that's $450,000 in capital costs, when I know for a fact that the equipment was actually on lease. Add to that the "Cisco tax" for the corporate infrastructure (we paid it because we had a lot of ex-Cisco people, not because it was really necessary), and the labs, and even being really generous, and including the Internet connection setup costs, etc., we barely top out another 2%.
Throw in office supplies, etc.. Throw in power costs, which we'll agree with the television news, and say they are double the costs of your engineer's salaries, and then double that again for "things I didn't think of".
Now a successful company spends double in sales and marketing what they spend in engineering; this wasn't that successful a company, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt, and say they did (this would include plane fares, etc.).
So now we are sitting at 70%.
Where did the other 7 million a year go?
IMO, it went to executive compensation, in one for or another, on top of salary. Stock grants. Company loans that were forgiven, etc..
Don't be fooled: most of these guys made out fairly well, but not excessively well, unless they were able to string the burn on for a couple of years.
As I remember it these were both viably on the way to profitability and in both cases their founders hadn't wanted to expand so fast. They knew perfectly well that they should figure things out in suitable cities like New York and San Fran first.
It was the VCs who imposed the condition that they start in so many cities at once to make the revenue numbers *look* good even though the founders made no bones about the fact that the profits would suffer.
Blame the VCs, folks. The founders certainly get their share but primarily I blame a VC culture that was out to scam people from the very beginning.
Here in New York especially, UF had all the characteristics of a good startup. Customers loved the service and they provided it well. They were considered good to work for but weren't too heavy on the money-wasting blowouts. Their customers were increasingly willing to pay premium prices for what they realized was a premium service. If they hadn't been pushed into starting in ridiculous cities like Houston they'ld still be with us today and we'ld all be better off.
Let's face it, folks. The dot com boom was a product of changing pension regulations and a herd of bankers looking for places to park billions of dollars of other people's money. The VCs invested in people they'ld enjoy hanging out with at a bar and left the rest to junior staff. And, AND, the same assholes still control most of the money that is supposed to go to starting businesses in America.
They transferred billions of dollars from (mostly blue collar) pensions to a legion of frat boys and their professionally blonde bar pals. Much of the rest was just window dressing.
Disgusted to admit that I'm shopping my own business plan soon,
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
The list seems to contain artist, actors, pedophiles and assorted other misplaced souls that were trying to run businesses. Classic cases of people doing something for which they had no talent. The difference was that any wild idea at the time could generate a considerable initial return but without any business savvy could not be sustained. Most of the .coms were never viable in the first place and were staffed with people who had no real talent or experience in technology areas. Additionally many if not most didn't have the academic credentials to foster a sound technological base for business.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
A fact: In business, there are always more failures than success (80/20 rule). The dot-bust is simply a more spectacular example of that. It seems however, this article "about millionaires" seems to want to spin the Fortune story in the favor of the failures and not the success. Bezos comes to mind even though I love to poke fun at him (not to mention his employment practices are damn shady). Despite being ventured capitaled to the hilt he is still alive and kicking. There are others too. I know bitching and moaning about the dot-bust is popular, but even it's had it's moments.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
That's how much I walked away with in the summer of 2000. I never scammed investors and we were a profitable company. When we sold out, I listened to the advice of the most successful people I knew and placed almost everything into the stock market. Now 2 years and 3 major SEC investigations later, it's all gone. Three different companies who I was too heavily invested into, all lied about their financials.
$8.6 Million
It can all be over in an instant.
Wouldn't it be more like:
Customers leveraging the SuperSize platform will have the ability to seamlessly integrate real-time product expansion into their enterprise hunger environment. Architected to provide tighter integration and deeper collaboration, the SuperSize Solution will enable global customers to recognize greater results from collaboration, streamline efficiencies in the supply chain, and reduce costs.
From the Archivesp l?sid=99/1 2/10/0821224&mode=nested&tid=98
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.
I would be very interested to know how Mr Open Source himself, Guns not Gnu's, Eric S. Raymond is doing.
What of the paper millionares created by VA Software, formerly VA Linux, it is still parent company of Slashdot right?
Surely Slashdot could source some insights from their parent company, or perhaps an interview from ESR himself.
The chairman of the dot com I worked for died of a drug overdose after he lost $400m on paper.
Would you like some McDonaldland cookies with that?
Don't laugh, a lot of good techies are facing this situation today.
I agree with this post.
It would be one thing if they'd walked away from these ventures actually having accomplished something, or having created something of lasting value. The most ironic part of all is that they even have this money in the first place - money they supposedly earned while participating in a failed venture. I hope I'm not the only one who can see that this is back-assward.
How is that any different from the 'pound me in the ass' Slashdot Compound?
You're a blazing idiot.
It was sheer dumb luck on your part that by only the grace of God you got any kind of money much less $8.6m.
I tossed the dice a few times and never got anything like that but I sure as hell didn't reinvest 100% of what I did get back into the market. That's called greedy and stupid.
You got what you deserved, nothing.
In case it wasn't already clear I have no sympathy for you. You deserve none. There's nothing insightful going on here unless "don't be greedy and stupid" is suddenly a deep thought.
I watched this with an assoiate a few months ago, and I have to say that it really changed my impression of the .com gold rush. Mainly, it left me with a sense of hope that there were actually people out there with good ideas, reasonable business models, and the potential to make some honest money. What really impressed me is that the three guys who ran the startup to its final day didn't walk away with a pile of cash - they walked away with next to NOTHING. They didn't pay themselves exorbitant salaries to "play" CEO like those in most of these startups, they invested the money building the infrastructure that, if sustainable on its own merits, would provide the means for reward down the road - at which point they'd have actually earned it
"Then why bother?" you may ask. Well, there are a few concepts that don't seem to get much attention these days: integrity, humility, and reality. The guys that ran this company may not have walked away with money, but they despite their disagreements, they did their best. Above all, they earned my respect.
I'd encourage those who haven't seen this to do so.
Then how do you explain Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates?!
The founder of broadcast.com which was purchased by Yahoo! for 2.5 Billion. Went on to buy the Dallas Maverics. He's still rich, still obnoxious, and still broadcasting. Its strange that we didn't see him. Oh wait he's old :p
Fortune could have dwelt on Wall Street. They made billions off the dotcom craze!
And since jwz is on Slashdot: Howdy, I just moved cross country to a semi reasonable distance from the Bay area - I'm planning on hitting your place fairly soon - still poking around the local area.
--
Evan (no references)
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
"It would be one thing if they'd walked away from these ventures actually having accomplished something, or having created something of lasting value."
:)
Actually, the Razorfish 'fishfry' event will be something I will remember for the rest of my life!
Never again will a firm i work for spend somewhere between $2m and $4m flying the whole company to Las Vegas for 5 days of conferences and parties! Amazing really...
ExFish.
I'm looking for pictures of homes of CEOs of failed companies, for Downside. I'd especially like pictures of the homes of executives of any of the companies listed on Downside's Deathwatch. Thanks.
maybe that was a little be for .com
We're not all idiots on skid row.
8.6 could have been a retirement fund now matter how old you were. What was your motivation for making it even bigger?
A dot com millionaire? Hell, I'm not even a hundredaire.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
It was an interesting documentary.
It was started along with the company, so they didn't originally know that most dot.coms would crash and burn.
What struck me in this and the plethora of dot.bomb books is how naive people were about business and technology. It was like the gold rush- people expected to get rich be just showing up.
Hmm, I do kind of agree with this sentiment. For anyone working in the industry with any common sense it was not IF the bubble would burst it was WHEN. To my mind it happened much too late. A lot of Sheep/Investors got badly burned and are still staying away from tech stocks because of this. 'The new econimy' still has some merit, take a look at This story on the BBC. Internet company don't have to have many employees to have (potentially) millions of users. If you keep your overheads down and don't piss off the user base you can make money. Problem is people didn't they spent like mad employed far to many people, payed them far too much money, spend WAY too much on ineffective advertising & thought the money would keep coming. There are some more fundamental issues to do with the current short sighted-Ness of the stock market but this isn't the place to go into them.
It's wrong to group all dot coms into the same bunch.. There are those dot coms that had whimsical business plans (or none at all) and never made a dime, spending too much money on sales and marketing and HR, and there are still TONS of smaller/non-public dot coms that are making $250k-$5M a year in profit that have ridden out the storm. They're perhaps smaller, but smarter, and wiser having seen how things can come and go. Not all dot coms are shitty - the internet still offers business opportunities that cannot be had in "the real world". As for dot com millionaires, perhaps those who sold sites to larger companies, - who are you to tell someone whether or not they "deserved" it? Do you get to define what "deserved" means? There will always be the haves and the have nots and the have nots will always be bitter and disgruntled at the haves, so get over it. Someone that builds a business and gets richer than you deserves it. If they make bad investment decisions and lose their money etc, you shouldn't disparage them to make yourself feel better - lots of petty, bitter people here!
So what happens if you get a 16yr and a 14yr, 18 and 16yr etc.
When I was 19 was it illegal for me to be involved with a 17yr?
When I was 16 I was a young perv and downloaded pics of girls near my own age 15-18yr, how does that fall into the law.
Just a random dump of semi-related questions...
One thing to keep in mind is that the documenters had hundreds of hours of digital footage from the entire history of govWorks.com. What you viewed in the documentary is but one part of the complete story, which the the documenters thought would be appealing to a wide audience. Having been a part of that company I can tell you that it played out almost indentical to every other dot-bomb crash and burn. If you want someone to respect, look to their competitors, EzGov who managed to invest their shareholders money wisely in infrastructure and managable roleouts based on their customers needs.
I was one of those "bright entrepreneurs" who built an online business (7am.com)with great traffic and an even better future.
Unlike so many of the flash-in-the-pan wondersites that no longer exist, it wasn't built on millions of dollars in VC funding and didn't have large offices filled with geeks on scooters or a carpark filled with Porsches and BMWs.
Started in 1997, it was very much a "one-man band" for two years, during which time it grew from a good idea into one of the most widely syndicated web-based news services on the Net.
Getting it from zero to two million hits a day by 1999 meant working 18-19 hours per day, every day for two straight years and living on the smell of an oily rag.
Suffice to say that I recall quite vividly the day my eardrum burst while I was typing up a breaking news story. I'd gotten an inner ear infection but was too busy to go to the doctor.
I should also point out that 7am.com didn't have the benefit of being US-based. Instead, it was located in rural New Zealand -- half a world away from its target marketplace.
This meant that my workday started at around 11pm and finished at 6pm-7pm the next day.
It also meant that I had to use sweat-equity and innovation to replace a large workforce and lots of capital. 7am.com was a real groundbreaker in the area of syndicated news content on the Web and to this day continues to deliver content through a network of over 200,000 websites.
In 1999 I was approached by a group of local (NZ) "suits" who wanted to buy in and take 7am.com to the NASDAQ.
Remember that by this time the webserver was tracking over 2 million hits per day, the syndication network was about 125,000 third-party websites in size, I had regular advertisers, and Nielsens/NetRatings had rated 7am.com as being more popular than news.bbc.co.uk, CNNfn, Playboy.com and a raft of others.
So, at the peak of the dot-com boom, what would you pay for a site with these respectible figures?
Unfortunately I didn't have a whole lot of other suitors banging down my door and I knew that in order to maintain or improve my position in the market I had to pour more capital into the operation -- so beggars can't be choosers. (The lack of other investors was/is a sad indictment on the state of the VC industry in New Zealand).
I ended up accepting a figure that was (in US$ terms) just in the six-figure bracket.
After paying back the money I'd borrowed to start up the business, some tax, and catching up on the mortgage I was left with just over $10,000 in cash.
I was also left with 34% of the company but I was promised that that I could now slow down my own pace of work, take weekends off and maybe even enjoy a vacation.
Most importantly to me was the promise that the investors would bring skilled business management to the enterprise.
Now I'm the first person to put up my hand and admit that I'm not, and don't aspire to be, a great business manager. I'm an "ideas guy" and I'm also quite competent at marketing -- but crunching numbers and brokering multi-million dollar deals just doesn't spin my wheels I'm afraid.
So here I was -- my bills were up to date, I had a few thousand in my back pocket, I had 34% of (at the time) the world's most widely syndicated web-based news service, and the future looked rosey!
What's more, an independent valuation of the business (made in 1999/2000) suggested that it was worth at least US$40 million
Unfortunately I soon learned that the promises of the new investors were pretty hollow and that they figured they knew the online news business better than me -- despite the fact that none of them had any experience in this field whatsoever.
I was working harder than ever and while everyone else was partying, I had to do 36-hours straight during the millennium eve/day celebrations so as to provide the site with around-the-clock coverage. That promised vacation never eventuated either.
I also gave up trying to provide input and direction because what had been a dynamic, exciting, innovative operation with ultra-low overheads became just another corporate monolith.
By mid-2000 I resigned my positions as director, board-member and news director -- it was simply too frustrating.
To cut a long story short -- I still have a 34% interest in 7am.com, the company continues to trade and remains a significant player in the syndicated news-content market -- but I've never seen another penny.
This annoys the snot out of me because I have since had a number of
good ideas but can't afford to fund them.
So, if anyone wants to buy my 34% of 7am.com for a song -- just drop me a line and we'll talk. I've got better things to do with the money than leave it tied up in a large, slow-moving corporate beast.
customer:"Excuse me but you promised to super-size this order"
Marketing Type: "It is super sized"
customer: "No it's not. I checked."
MT: "Oh, We found we could not supersize it in the limited timeframe you needed. "
customer: "But I paid for supersize!"
MT:"Come back next week and it will be supersized"
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
If Gates had hubris, he would think his company good enough to stomp the competition without needing underhanded tactics.
salaries for ~250 employees, with some VP's making upwards of 500k/year
new Dells for everyone! Laptops! Carrying cases! Docking stations!
SOMA office space in SF, custom built out with nifty wires and some palm trees outside, 2 gourmet kitchens with top of line appliances
50k to have a scrolling ticker (think Times Square) outside our building, plus legal costs to get the permit for it, plus mucho developer time to make it work/fix it when it wasn't working. Oh, and you couldn't see it from the freeway, which was the whole point.
Catered lunch for all employees every week. Fridge full of Odwallas on every floor. Fridge full of "goodies" (sodas, fruit, snacks), plus cabinet full of more treats (candy bars, microwave popcorn).
Liquor - lots of it. Always had beer stocked in the fridge, plus hard liquor and mixers laying around. The local liquor store would deliver a shopping cart full of hooch every Friday around 4pm.
Toys: pool table, foosball table, Dig Dug arcade game, pinball, poker table, VW bus for employees to borrow (wrapped with company logo)
Did I mention salaries already? I mean, we had a lot of people playing foosball, Dig Dug, pool... and paid a lot more to recruiters to bring them in - like 20% of the person's first year's salary, which for a developer making 70k isn't exactly chump change.
TV Commercials that no one ever saw because they aired at 6am on CNBC - several million dollars right there
Paid a lot of money to a design company to give us The Squiggle
Opened office in London and dropped a lot on plane tickets for people flying back and forth between offices.
I think we just gave our advertising agency a blank check at one point. :-)
Lots of swag - I have preprinted mints (in little metal Altoids-like boxes), playing cards, t-shirts, hats, jacket, fleece, pens, business card holders... there were nicer things like rolling suitcases, but we didn't get those.
Held conferences in NYC and SF which were well attended but didn't generate a whole bunch of business, yet cost us millions to put on (actual cost + manpower)
We sent out a mass mailing once but had a bad mailing list so about 3/4 came back "return to sender". Boxes and boxes full of mistakes; cost: materials + postage + manpower.
Yes, many companies have these kinds of costs. But the difference is, they had revenue that exceeded those costs and we didn't. I think that was probably the biggest part of it...
Whatever - I had a good time and put my salary into savings and my 401(k), so I know where at least part of it went. :-)
I saw it too but it doesn't sound like the same show you saw. I saw a few guys burn through a tremendous amount of money, still didn't have a saleable product or any clue on how to make it viable. At the same time the VC's were up to their usual predatory practices and their idea was stolen out from under them by another company that was only slightly less clueless. I pegged them for a bunch of losers after 10 minutes. The only guy with any brains was the one that took his cash and bailed when trouble became obvious (to them). I was with him 100%.
.com, I wouldn't want them running my local Walgreens.
While they may have had a "vision" and you may admire them for that, they didn't have a "sound business model." What they had was poorly thought out, badly implemented and was only possible because of wads of available cash. This bunch didn't belong running a
Could you please contact me at sornord@hotmail.com? Have a few questions re your earlier telecommunting posts.
(Sometimes applies to boys as well, but usually the law is only enforced on men who have sex with girls.) This is also the legal age of majority, which applies to voting, making enforceable contracts, and similar civil rights.
Some other states have more respect for the girl's opinion; I think Delaware raised their age of consent from 12 to 14. Some states have laws that depend on the difference in ages - in New Jersey, if the two people are within three years of the same age, there's no crime, but if one person is less than 15.5 years old, and there's more than three years age difference, it's illegal for the older person.
However, the laws about child pornography are fairly consistent about the age being 18. It may be legal to have sex with your girlfriend but not to take her picture naked - even if you're also under 18.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I was very much hoping that someone in the know would set me straight if my perception was skewed. I guess I wouldn't call this much of a documentary then, but more a 'recollection' or 'selective account' of what happened in the life of one company. Boy...I feel like I was misled.