Amazing story in the papers this morning about a company that managed to blow $160M in just 2 years, without once making any actual profit. When did this happen? 1999? Nope. Try last year. Incredible.
Throw into the mix some supercars, a Maybach limousine, some yachts, a pile of firearms, some visa irregularities and all this on top of champagne-fuelled "dud product" launch parties at which Sting and Busta Rhymes mingled with investors and journalists.
Read about it here.
This is eerily reminiscent of the stories of boo.com and ValueAmerica.com at the "end" of the dot-com boom. Sounds like this boom is not over for everyone.
David Kuo made a packet of money writing about his sad experience in ValueAmerica, and has been savaged more than once for his real lack of remorse for his own role. Look at this review of his book for example.
Likewise Ernst Malmsten did the same by writing a book about boo.com. His book does not cover him in glory while at the same time one is left feeling like he doesn't really see what happened as such a bad thing. One of his former employees wrote a piece about their so-called business plan. Read about it here. Terrifyingly if you visit the boo.com site today you'll see a message that boo.com is coming back in 2006!!
Why do people continue to throw investment funds and venture capital at these people without at the very least checking if they are credible?
1 comment:
It was bought out by Fashionmall.com but I'm not sure that's where the story ends..
I just checked it out (me being a super sleuth) on domaintools.com and you need to see this... scroll down to the bottom and you'll see the registration pointing to a woman in Ranelagh.
http://whois.domaintools.com/boo.com
or this
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?whoistoken=0
Strange....
Let's split up and look for clues (as Fred "Freddie" Jones in Scooby Doo used to always say)
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