I don’t read TechCrunch.
For that reason, I’m always the last to know about hot new Web 2.0 dot-com startups. I usually don’t find out about them until I start seeing their names in Russian pill spam, or run across them when someone posts a link to a virus downloader promising hot free young Latvian girls in one of my blogs. I look at the spam link, Google the name of the company hosting the spam, and invariably discover that it’s the trendiest new dot-com property this side of the Great Firewall of China, with $42 million in venture capital in the bank and table tennis on the roof.
Some of these companies are more over-the-top than others. There’s a brand-new startup called
What these companies never advertise for, it seems, are folks with a background in security.
And so, they get pwn3d, like the has-been startup founded by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame called “Ning.” Ning was supposed to revolutionize social networking. After burning through all its capital with virtually nothing left to show for it, Andreessen bailed, and it is now little more than a shell for Russian virus downloaders, as I’ve mentioned before. The virus droppers I talked about a year and two months ago? Most of them are still active. Lights are on, but nobody’s home.
So it is with companies like Flavors.me and
Right now, as I type this,
So in the efforts of public service, I’ve created this handy-dandy flowchart detailing the life cycle of a hot new Web 2.0 startup. This seems to be about the way that nearly all of them go–at least the ones that create a lot of buzz by spending a ton of investment capital and getting written up in TechCrunch before they even go live.
You can click on the picture for a much bigger version. Enjoy!
ROFFLE! Is this the present-day analogue to the failed dot-com-bubble company of 1999?
Oh, yeah. This is Web 2.0, now with all-new bubbles and all-new failure modes!
Is there actually any difference? The species look indistiguishable to me.
I keep wondering how many times this has to happen before there starts being funding for modest, realistic internet business plans that aren’t soaked in buzzwords and amygdala-damage levels of exuberance. But the answer is probably never. The capital is apparently only interested in a 1% chance to make a billion dollars in five years, not a 70% chance to make 10 million dollars in ten years. And if you do the math, that’s actually perfectly rational. But it certainly generates spectacular amount of idiocy for something rational.
I didn’t realize that there wasn’t even a web page coming up at cuil.com now. My, that certainly didn’t go well.
I don’t think there is a difference… just like before, people are coming up with shiny solutions to problems which didn’t actually exist before the technology existed to create the solution, and then they’re wowing VC gamblers into giving them shitloads of cash with the hope they can get enough traction to sell out and retire young.
Which I admit, as a career goal, has appeal.
ROFFLE! Is this the present-day analogue to the failed dot-com-bubble company of 1999?
Oh, yeah. This is Web 2.0, now with all-new bubbles and all-new failure modes!
Is there actually any difference? The species look indistiguishable to me.
I keep wondering how many times this has to happen before there starts being funding for modest, realistic internet business plans that aren’t soaked in buzzwords and amygdala-damage levels of exuberance. But the answer is probably never. The capital is apparently only interested in a 1% chance to make a billion dollars in five years, not a 70% chance to make 10 million dollars in ten years. And if you do the math, that’s actually perfectly rational. But it certainly generates spectacular amount of idiocy for something rational.
I didn’t realize that there wasn’t even a web page coming up at cuil.com now. My, that certainly didn’t go well.
Absolutely brilliantly hilarious….and oh so sad.
Absolutely brilliantly hilarious….and oh so sad.
I don’t think there is a difference… just like before, people are coming up with shiny solutions to problems which didn’t actually exist before the technology existed to create the solution, and then they’re wowing VC gamblers into giving them shitloads of cash with the hope they can get enough traction to sell out and retire young.
Which I admit, as a career goal, has appeal.
LOL! If it wasn’t for your post, these web empires would be born, grow, wither and die without me ever having known they existed at all :p
LOL! If it wasn’t for your post, these web empires would be born, grow, wither and die without me ever having known they existed at all :p