Any good .com stories??

[motion]

Now that memories of depleted mutual funds and lost Aereon charis are fading memory... anyone have any good stories?

I have a good one.

In November of 1999 I was on a domain name buying craze. Bought over two hundred names, mostly really dumb ones, that I hoped would be worth huge money someday. A few examples:

flomp.com
buylinuxnow.com
ipostoday.com
blah, blah, blah

One Sunday morning in November I was typing in names in Network Solution's search box. I happened to type in shopbot.com, which was a well-know shopping comparison site owned by Excite. Similar to MySimon and Dealtime.

It was available.

I bought it for $35.

The next morning I received a telephone call from a guy back east who was willing to pay me a million bucks for it... no $hit. I told him I'd think about it.

I sat on the name for a couple of months, then one morning I read that MySimon had been sold for $780 million. Being that I owned the generic name for shopping 'bot' sites, sort of the Kleenex or Velcro equivalent, I figured it was time to start asking around and do something with it.

I contacted a business associate in Newport Beach and we entered into an agreement: I was to receive $4.5 million for a 75% stake in the name and future business! I was a millionaire! But there was just one catch.... the payments to me wouldn't start until he secured VC money to make it all happen.

Well, we did the dog and pony show for 3 months, all while the dot com bubble began to burst. In the end, he received a few hundred thousand, and I was paid some money, but it all crashed and burned. Luckily I didn't buy that $800k home I was looking at back then.

I still own a bunch of the domain names, but nobody has ever tried to buy them from me.

No harm done, I guess, but it was a great rollercoaster ride while it lasted

For you SF people... have the art and music groups reclaimed the art district studio spaces from the failed dotcoms yet??

[RickM]

I also bought Domain names...virtual real estate as it was coined. I sold one name to a UK consulting firm for $10k US, wired to an escrow attorney who helped keep the deal an honest one. Worked out nice.

I had another that Viacom was interested in and when I rounded up my high powered business buddies to help negotiate it fell through.

I still search every once in a while as many very good names become available.

[lendaddy]

I'm in the process of buying/registering one now. We have a couple options that are not taken and our first choice is taken but unused. Hmmm

[RickM]

You can always go on a waiting list for the name. Don't know how well it works but you never know.

[widebody911]

New Media Business Math

1. Company A has 100 employees, and 20 are upper management. Company B is composed of the same proportions of management and general workforce. Company A assimilates Company B, and the combined company lays off 40 percent of the rank and file, but keeps all of Company B's management. The two most important things to Company A are keeping the stock price at a certain level, which only remains at that level through the purchase and assimilation of other companies, and keeping the total number of employees the same. Since the job market is so tight, none of these managers are willing to leave except at gunpoint, and all of the new assimilations have contracts guaranteeing them employment for life in exchange for selling out their underlings. Given that every subsequent merger and staff reduction follows the same pattern, how many companies can Company A consume before its entire workforce consists of upper management?

2. You just laid off a staff of 2000 programmers and other IT employees today. In a given 6-day, 72-hour work week, said employees each consumed one large pizza per day at $20 per pizza, drank 7 cans of soda per day at 60 cents per can, purchased an additional 5 bags of chips and other snacks per day at 75 cents per bag, and purchased an average of $300 in action figures and Nerf guns from the local Toys 'r' Us at each biweekly payday. How many minimum-wage food service positions with discretionary income of $20 per month will need to be created to replace the revenue to local businesses when your staff discovers that Unemployment can pay for rent or utilities, but not both?

3. Company A was a dotcom that provided "content" to the Web, usually involving the latest bands or comic books. All of its content providers went from lively careers writing about the latest rumors about "Star Wars: Episode Two" to unemployment when the VCs financing it realized that the cost of the content was higher than the advertising revenue that came to the site, and that paying $50,000 a year to staffers was unnecessary when dozens of other nerds were willing to provide the same content for free. Considering that Unemployment insurance in Company A's state pays approximately 30 percent of their old salaries, how many fruitless interviews for tech positions will each of these content providers endure before that "Help Wanted" sign at the corner 7-11 starts to look tempting?

4. You are the new head of a Yahoo! regional branch, and you've been told to improve profitability at all costs. You start by laying off all of the developers and replacing them with fresh college grads who cost half as much as the original developers. However, since all of the new hires are otherwise unemployable MBAs whose parents are in upper management and whose skills consist of surfing porn sites all day and masturbating like caged apes, 10 new hires do the work of one original developer, and this if they can find the "Perl For Dummies" books at the local bookstore. How many new hires can you take on before you resign "to spend more time with your family" and let Yahoo! shut down that regional branch and fold its staff into another office?

5. You are a young, dashing New Media veteran. Out of the ten companies you managed in the last five years, three imploded before their IPO went through, four imploded right after the IPO went through but before you and your board could cash in their stock options, and three were shut down by the FBI as fronts for money laundering for the mob shortly after you left for greener pastures. How many more companies can you head before News.com stops prefacing your name in its reports with "wunderkind" and replaces that preface with "pathological liar" or "dog-felching weasel"?

6. You have worked as a Senior Manager for several prestigious companies, half of which still operate. Unfortunately, you have a habit of walking up to female co-workers, exposing yourself, pulling your Dockers' pockets inside out and yelling "I'M AN ELEPHANT! GET IT?" One third of the subsequent sexual harassment suits have been settled out of court, one third are still pending, and one third were "settled" by threatening to firebomb the plaintiff's house or "destroy her career". Considering the standard jury award in similar cases, especially since one of the plaintiffs took a photo for evidence, how much money should the company pay you to get you to leave the country and never darken the company's door again?

7. You have been the head of Promotions for your tech company for the last six months. How many more months will you have before otherwise credulous News.com and ZDNet reporters realize that your company has not shipped a working product in its entire existence and stop reprinting your ecstatic press releases verbatim?

[widebody911]

8. Your company uses a considerable number of permatemps to deal with such annoying problems such as having to pay for benefits or sharing profits. You currently need 100 permatemps to make sure that your new software gets out the door. As each permatemp reaches his or her third month with the company, s/he realizes that you will never ever hire him/her, and has a 20 percent chance of leaving at the end of any given week without advance notice. Recruiting companies constantly call to offer you more permatemps, but each one can only supply 4 contractors before you throw a hissy fit and cancel the contract because the company is no longer a "preferred vendor". Considering that the software life cycle is two years, how long can you continue to choose new "preferred" vendors until the number of recruiting companies that have dealt with your company exceeds the number of stars in the known universe?

9. After your last layoff, your company was bought by Microsoft, but Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer demand to see full documentation of your new, ready-to-ship product before the deal is finalized, and said documentation must be understandable by a general audience. Sadly for you, the technical writers were the first people you laid off, and your head programmer offers to write the documentation himself because "I've been a writer for years." Also sadly for you, your head programmer's sole experience with writing consists of writing "Star Trek: The Next Generation" fan fiction featuring the erotic exploits of Wesley and Worf for a GeoCities site, and he spells individual words correctly in these stories about 15 percent of the time, with proper punctuation and syntax being deemed "unnecessary". How many rim jobs will you have to give Bill and Steve in a 24-hour period before they decide that their own tech writers can handle the assignment?

10. You have managed to run eight companies in the last eight years, successfully driving each of them into the ground and receiving a job offer from another just before the previous company suddenly had no money to cover the payroll of your former employees left behind. How many more can you gut-and-flip before someone outside of ****ed Company notes your track record and decides to challenge the PR gibberish being printed about you in the "Wall Street Journal"?

11. You inherited a once-profitable media company with one large paper and several TV stations about twenty years ago, and you saw the Internet boom and subsequent stock market speculation as the perfect way to make a fortune off what many of your underlings thought was nothing but a fad. Unfortunately, you made some truly asinine decisions, such as investing $38 million in the CueCat and taking your company public, where the stock price dropped from $30 a share to $10 and stayed there. Your company's only hope is tied to advertising revenue on both Web sites and standard media. Out of the few advertisers remaining after the dotcom crash, 15 percent will declare bankruptcy and never pay their ad bill, 23 percent will require the services of very high-priced lawyers before they finally pay their bills, and 18 percent took advertising because their CEO was a fraternity brother of one of the board members, and calls about payment are answered with "You don't understand. Ray and I have an _understanding_ about those ads." How many of these flakes can your company withstand in a six-month period before you have to consider kidnapping cameramen and reporters and selling their body parts on the black market to keep the company solvent?

12. While going over your company's books, you realize that your company is doomed to bankruptcy next week, and you have no way of covering employee payroll. You currently have 500 kilograms of "essential office supplies" such as titanium golf clubs in your office, that must be cleared out before either they are confiscated by the bankruptcy court or before the employees discover your deception, put a gasoline-filled car tire around your neck, and set you afire in the parking lot. You can carry out 10 kilograms of "office supplies" per trip to your Lexus without your employees becoming suspicious, but your Lexus can only hold 75 kilograms of cargo at a time. How many trips can you make before the staff gets wise and starts ripping out the copper pipes from the walls as "compensation"?

13. You just shut down your dotcom after telling employees for months that the financial situation was "wonderful" and that they should make longterm financial decisions that they'd never make if the company was foundering, leaving 5000 hard-working employees on the street with no warning whatsoever. Since you invested every penny of their 401(k) funds in Enron stock, they are now penniless. You, however, are not penniless, having cashed in your stock at the first sign of trouble, and while you publicly empathize with your poor suffering ex-employees for the TV cameras, you have no intention of sharing a penny of your $30 million windfall with them, not including the $2 million you awarded yourself as an "executive retention bonus" while the bankruptcy goes through the courts. About three weeks later, as you and two $2000 ladies of the night are out celebrating your grand luck and fortune, fifteen of your former employees greet you at your SUV parked on a dark street. 20 percent of them have riot clubs or lead-filled pipes, 15 percent of them have steel-toed boots, and five percent of them have dental picks to help remove your gold fillings. How many months will you spend in the Intensive Care Unit after your much-deserved beating and gang-rape before you relearn such advanced skills as color vision and bowel control?

[lendaddy]

Oh yea, your the union rep.

[dd74]

I worked as a QA technician/test writer for one the most infamous dot.com scandals of its time: Den.com, which was to provide online entertainment/programming. It was started by a bunch of H'wood execs, who had no concept of entertainment nor managing a business. The shows sucked and money leaked out of the place faster than a misaligned 2.7.

As things went on, the place was sighted for money laundering and this and that sex scandal.

The whole thing fell apart in less than a year.

What was fun was Pepsi, Pennzoil and a whole bunch of other sponsors buying into what obviously was a company whose technology and so-called programming ability never paralleled what a multi-national sponsors want their names attached to.

Pepsi, et al bought into a plan that had no content - which was commonplace with many of the dot.com ventures. Or, at least in this case, if there was content, it was lousy content.

[MarkP]

My story as told by the Puget Sound Business Journal...

From the October 17, 2003 print edition
HouseValues overcomes investor skepticism

Four years ago, Mark Powell, founder and chairman of HouseValues.com, was out trying to raise money for the Internet startup and getting nowhere fast.

A residential real estate agent, Powell knew how difficult it was to get sales leads. His bright idea was to set up a Web site that offered visitors a free online valuation of their home by a local real estate agent, who could then follow-up with them to help sell their house.

For a monthly fee, agents could have exclusive access to all contacts for their geographic area and customized marketing materials.

The Bellevue-based company now tops the Business Journal's list of the state's 100 fastest-growing private companies, with an astounding 1,258 percent rate of growth the past three years. The firm has 150 employees.

The number of homeowners using the online valuation service has spiked upward from about 20,000 in 1999 to 600,000 in 2002. This year, with more than 1 million people are expected to use its valuation service.

Meanwhile, the number of real estate brokers paying a monthly fee for access to the Web site's sales leads has swelled to nearly 7,000 Realtors nationwide. With roughly a million real estate agents in the country spending about $11 billion a year on marketing, there is plenty of room for further growth. The company has been recruiting and retaining agents by beefing up the services it provides.

Back in those heady days, however, venture capitalists wanted "revolutionary" -- not "evolutionary" -- business plans, ones that promised to transform an industry, not just take it to the next step, Powell said.

"The traditional VC in Seattle is very IT-oriented," Powell said. "They all focus primarily on what is the proprietary technology behind the business model. HouseValues is a service model. It's built on a lot of technology, but it's all around how you get the job done more efficiently."

Making it worse, hundreds of real-estate startups were pitching for funding. Powell even found it difficult to hire a lawyer.

"They were so swamped and here we were trying to come in over the transom," Powell recalls.

After a year of knocking on doors, Powell closed a $2 million round led by venture firm Second Avenue Partners LLC. Even then, despite his now-growing company, Powell said fund raising wasn't any easier the second time around.

Powell recalls one VC saying, " 'Oh! I get this -- it's an execution play.' That immediately dismissed it in his mind from funding our business."

But looking back, Powell's difficulties raising money turned out to be a blessing. It laid the groundwork for the company's exponential growth, he said, "We had to get really efficient and good at what we do."

The company became profitable in March 2001 and has remained so ever since. Since venture backing was hard to secure, Powell funded growth from revenue, setting a cap on profits and funneling the remainder into expansion.

"The first two years were all about getting the business model precisely figured out." Powell said.

Additionally, the company built its own internal systems and software with substantial growth in mind.

With the business plan so finely honed, expansion into new markets has been almost "plug and play," Powell said, because management knows exactly how many new sales and support staffers are needed.

Chief executive Ian Morris joined the company in June 2002 as vice president of marketing. Morris, who helped launch MSN HomeAdvisor in 1997, has risen rapidly, becoming chief operations officer, and then CEO, in little more than a year's time. Powell said the series of jobs left Morris better prepared than if he had come into the top slot immediately.

"He had the opportunity to dig into the business at different levels. I had the opportunity to observe him, which built my level of confidence in him," Powell said.

In June, HouseValues acquired Soar Solutions of Naperville, Ill., for an undisclosed sum. Soar's software makes it easier for agents to determine what listings are available on the market.

Fast growth can be difficult for employees.

"It's grueling," Powell said. "You have to have a team of people throughout the organization at every level that understand that growth is hard. It means continual change."

[RallyJon]

<1998 published a modestly successful financial newsletter
1998 held several very popular "what is the web" type conferences for fearful executives
1999 formed new venture to bring vertical integration of wholesale distribution (and many other buzzwords) to our industry
2000 caught the eye of a moderate sized public company and sold the entire business to them
2001 were instructed to "not spend any money" by parent company
2002 parent company attempts to pretend we don't exist
2003 long, slow negotiations to buy back the publishing business for a few cents on the dollar
2004 publish a modestly successful financial newsletter

[id10t]

I skipped the .com stuff and just went to work in educational technology. Sure, it pays about half what I could do as a new programmer, etc. for a starup, but having a constant job with steady pay is much better. Not to mention the 3 weeks off for winter break, the 1 week off for spring break, and my normal state benefits for vacation, etc. And lets not forget those young college girls either...

[beepbeep]

-99 (company 1) Finally graduated and started working as tech at small CTI company

-00 (company 2) Friend that works at one of .COM wonders invites me to company party. Lot's of booze, money and good looking girls...of course i was to swap job. Working as a programmer...big salary hike. Company grew from 60 to 120 in three months. Employes were offered to buy options (locked to two years). Most of workforce took loans and bought options that promptly tenfolded (!!) in value. I kindly declined to buy them and went skiing. Company bought by German "Kabel New Media"... first "this cannot work" toughts appear. Having a a whale of time anyway.

-00, september (company 3)...I'm sensing that something is wrong and are jumping ship...started working as sysadmin for smaller "consultant company". Meanwhile, Company 2 is in financial troubles and are kicking people to left and right. Options are worthless! Company 3 is steady-going. Good salary. Had whale of time, went on conference trips to west indies. Sencing trouble again. Don't like the CEO either. Company 2 goes bancrupt. All option-holders loose their money (i never had any options, though)

-01 march (company 4) Jumped ship again. Started working as programmer and building bank systems for small consultant company. Biggest salary yet! Everything goes well but dark clouds are gathering again. Company 3 goes bust!! I buy a 930. I'm getting lazy and i'm ignoring obvious signs of trouble, not looking for new job.

02 july. Bad timing. I'm layed off. Company 1 looks for people (opportunity to close the circle) but i give that job to a friend, sell 930 and go back to school instead. Company 4 hanging on their bare teeths.

[911Rob]

Really enjoyed reading your posts Richard and MarkP, thanks!
Too bad Richard?

As for me....... I was once in the Amway business and just before I quit they took their business on line. Too bad, it turned out 'not' to be a pyramid?