kane

just rented this movie called startup.com the other night. It's a documentory about 2 guys that start a dot com biz, raise 60 millionin venture capital, have over 200 employees and then lose it all within 2 year. It was very interesting to watch and I would reccomend it to anyone in this biz. I was amazed by the fact that at one point they had around 200 employees, had raised 40 million dollars and had been in biz over a year and still didn't have a working website. . . maybe I got this whole dot com thing wrong but shouldn't your site be the first thing you work on?

Keev

I watched it 3 times, each time certain things you notice and you can see how the 1st wave of dotcom companies bite the big one.

Its a natural phase or evolution only the strongest survive and more will come and more will die!

BrettJ

Just saw it tonight.

true to life.

Soo much money was wasted by people that forgot they need to provide a benefit/value to a customer.

In the very beginning of the movie...when they run the text...explaining the concept...it made sense...there is value there. The fuckers were just soo caught up with their personal drama, securing funding, and spending money...they lost site of the customer.

did you go to govworks.com ???

it's soo confusing...they try to do everything...and end up not doing anything.

but paying parking tickets online and renewing your drivers license online...like they say...you have to take a day off of work to deal with the government. Removing any of those ineffeciencies would be great.

BrettJ

i see your point keev... but disagree in part. You say it's natural.

sure companies come and go...

But venture capitalists, angels, and personal investors are to blame. Nobody should have given money to the bulk of these guys...

They thought..."hey i can do this really cool thing with technology... i'm going to change the world" with out asking the important question, so what?

who cares? does anybody want it? will anybody benefit from it? are they willing to pay for it?

The .com Bust never should have happened...taht's why I don't think it's a natural occurence

kane

I watched it twice and it seemed to me like they were more interested in taking the company public, getting on T.V. and telling everyone how great it was going to be than they were in actually making it great. Yeah I went to the website too and it was pretty lame.

It is a good idea. If I could renew my drivers license, pay a traffic ticket, ect from my house I would but like you say somewhere along the line it became less about the value and more about the glamour of what they were doing.

I think there was such a rush of investment into these companies because some of them really were taking off and people got caught up in it. They see companies stock shooting through the roof and they think, " we can do that too" and it seems like none of these companies ever actually thought, "you know some day we are going to need to make money for this to work."

Keev

BrettJ,

As far as the natural occurance you dont think its a natural cycle in business for the strongest to survive? Thats what capitalism is all about the most effiecent and companies that are able to adapt to the needs and wants of the consumers stay and those who are not are either bought up or are dismantled.

You look at any industry at its infancy you will see more companies fold than at any other time in the industry. It can be compared with dinosaurs, more dinosaurs died off when the slightest occurance of competition or change due to the inability to adapt to its enviroment. I agree most of it shouldnt have happened because it was mosly human error overseeing the issues of importance but its just part of the cycle.

eRock

I thought the flick was kinda boring...

Lexxx

Just watched the movie in its whole and I'm wondering who would ever go to some non-governmental website to pay a parking ticket when one can easily write a check and drop the ticket in any mailbox... and license renewals are available at RMV websites anyway... the idea wasn't that great in the beginning.

Let's shoot a documentary on a porn business... might be entertaining.

eroswebmaster

Well in my opinion it was inevitable...too much growth too soon and not enough people actually willing to do all of their biz on the net.
Take for instance e-toys...a few short years ago they were the #1 online toy presence on the net.
Toys 'r' us decide to venture on the net and see if they can grabe the same market share they enjoy in the brick and mortar world...they fail miserably.
So Toy's 'r' Us decide to piggy back with Amazon.com a website that already has a well established internet presence...and e-toys has it's worst year yet and within a few months after Christmas 2000 (spring 2001) they go out of biz.
Point is...people don't trust the net. In the beginning those who wanted to purchase their kid's santa toys on the net used what was available...but a name people knew and trusted teams up with another name that people have learned to trust on the net and those two power houses (amazon and TRU) run them out of the biz.

I think part of the problem stems from the porn and online auction industry.

I've been doing online auctions for a number of years now and it seemed at least once a week there was a story somewhere on the net, in the papers, on t.v. about some major rip off going on at eBay where some asshole took people for some quick pocket change.

Same here with porn...so many people have been burned by dialers, hear the horror stories about cc processors getting hacked etc...I do believe this scared off a large part of our customer base.

I think we will see "real" growth over the next 10 years...nothing like what happened prior to the dot com bust, but a growth that will be stable.

It will take regaining the trust of the average citizen who is so fucking scared as soon as they log on the net.

eros

BrettJ

What I was saying was that ... if worthless ideas hadn't have had soo much cash dumped into them there wouldn't have been a chance for a bubble to form...thus removing the possibility of the bubble bursting.

BrettJ

and while your example...gets the conversation off track...the "Trustworthy" Amazon and ToyRus Fucked up big time that year... not delivering purchases until 8 days after new years.

kane

so many website companies popped up with sites, they got venture capitol and went public ( in were trying to) and never really thought about making a profit. I think a lot of people thought of it as a get rich quick scheme. Make a company, open a site, go public, sell your stock and walk away rich. and so many people belived it that the stocks went through the roof. If the venture capitolist and the investment brokers that set up the stock going public would have actually looked at these companies they may have stopped a lot of problems from happening.

BrettJ

here here

eroswebmaster

I never said anything about quality of service...just laid out what happened.
The simple fact is Amazon and Toys 'r' Us both had name recognition and beat out the #1 toy company on the internet.
But you just illustrate my point even more...people will have to resolve a lot of trust issues before dealing with product and purchases on the net.
I for one won't buy a damn thing from Amazon ever again. I purchased what I would deem a collectible from them and it was packed horribly to the point the item arrived damaged.
They sent me a 2nd one...same thing. Finally I just kept the best looking one of the two.

eros

eroswebmaster

Well I don't believe it was all worthless ideas but once again a rush to service a market that had not yet formed.

eros

grumpy

isnt that the movie about Boo.com?

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