Amanda Congdon has been forced to leave popular RocketBoom video blog over a disagreement with her partner, Andrew Baron. For details, see the video Amanda recorded and placed on her blog. She says “My partner, Andrew Baron, is no longer interested in being my partner.”
No word yet on who will replace Congdon on the show.
RocketBoom has catapulted itself to success, with 250,000ish daily viewers, distribution via Tivo and $40,000 per week in advertising revenue. It was beginning to rival national cable television shows for audience share.
There is certainly another side to this story – but whatever happened it is an unmitigated disaster for the show. Amanda was RocketBoom. She will certainly go on to continued success. The future of RocketBoom may not be so bright.
TechCrunch has an early profile on RocketBoom from July of 2005.
Update: Andrew Baron has his say on the situatioin (image hosted by Dave Winer), which paints a vastly different picture. Oh and Dave, you are wrong. Listen to the video. Amanda doesn’t say the word “fired”, but she does say words that mean the same thing. The funny thing is, based on what looks like really happened, she’s full of crap. Or both of them are.
Update: I just got off a plane to Europe and things are getting even stupider. I think I’m done with this story.
Wow, something pretty huge must have happened for Andrew to put his own neck in the noose like this. The audience is certainly going to follow Amanda, not Rocketboom. I wonder how Tivo and other partners feel about this?
Can’t be true… this has to be a joke/stunt.
Mini-Murdoch/Baron would never let the talent walk out the door… clearly this is a stunt (and a well-played one!)
Amanda UnBoomed, Rocketbust! ;^)
@Matt Grommes
No kidding, the first thing I thought when I saw/read this was “who is this twit Andrew Baron”? Maybe he’s a great guy and all, but… wtf? Amanda’s “unboomed” vid is so very sad.
Does she remain 49% owner?
That’d be awkward.
I agree, I think it may be a stunt. Rocketboom is all about viral buzz — and this gives it even more!
That is really to bad I was just starting to digg that site. I’m sure she will land some where.
If it’s a stunt, it’s a lame one.
Lame of Baron, nonetheless.
If this was a marketing stunt, it would be an extremely risky one. Of course, the attention generated right now is tremendous, but the loss of authenticity and the potential loss of previously very loyal viewers could outweigh this effect in the long run. Given the current success of rocketboom, it seems unlikely to me that they would put their business at stake like that. Unfortunately.
I’ve got a response from Andrew Baron here:
http://www.math...-amandas-video/
The Boom has left the building
Wow @ Matthew
So this is all her own doing. This is horrible.
I wish it were a hoax. It ain’t.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that she was fired. According to Andrew Barron this is news to him as well. They were business partners, and partners don’t fire each other. They obviously had differences that couldn’t be resolved so they parted ways. That’s not getting fired.
Sounds like the folks at The Soup of the Day had some inside info…
But not everyone is disappointed. Congdon’s juvenile political posturing will not be missed in some quarters.
While she did alot of vlogging I did not like her.
I think people like sexy, pretty, and smart, and funny girls doing show. Unless he can find another similar girl I will not watch one guy talk show, kinda creepy.
So…. what are the odds that disagreements about MONEY and EQUITY played a big part of this?
Like the Denton/Spiers split at Gawker 3 or 4 years ago, perhaps?
Baron Should get in front of the camera and try doing it Amanda style, with the hair swoosh.
It doesn’t sound like she got fired, but that she quit.
Check out the transcript of Amanda’s announcement and Baron’s reaction.
Baron sounds like he had no clue this was coming. It doesn’t sound like he canned her, but that she made the decision to move on because she and Baron weren’t seeing eye-to-eye.
Congdon may be going on to bigger things – but you have to give Baron credit for figuring out how to make this work before anybody else.
Oh, please. Amanda was an idiot, and she is what made me quit watching. Now that we are going to get some fresh blood, perhaps I’ll give Rocketboom another try.
Your title is inaccurate. What makes you think she was fired? You’ve only portrayed one incomplete side of a story… The one where Amanda fails to mention she voluntarily moved across the country in search of something bigger/better. It’ll be another David Caruso-goes-to-Hollywood failure.
Honestly, I never liked Amanda and from this episode she seemed even more childish & irresponsible.
I don’t think Amanda “is” rocketboom. It’s like a lead singer leaving a popular rock band. If the band’s got the songwriter & producers, they’d continue thriving. Of course, this means they need to find a decent replacement. My opinion’s biased because I don’t think Amanda is hard to replace.
But you guys are right. This is indeed generating a lot of buzz. What will happen? More people know about Rocketboom! More people know about Amanda! Both of them will be more popular in the future! (perhaps I should do something similar to hype up my http://www.2tothe22.com experiment )
Some how this situation reminds me of what Arrington and his UI designer had a while back …..
Spammy – Title is based on what Amanda says in the video. Did you watch it? Information about the other side of the story was not yet available when I published this story.
Where did you get the info that she was fired?
from the video
She never uses the word “fired”. She never says “I was fired”. She says, “no longer interested in being my partner” and “I’ll have to live with that.”
Where in the video does she say she was fired?
when a majority partner tells a minority partner that they are no longer interested in being partners, the minority partner has been canned. Fired. Let go. etc.
Now that Andrew has said his side of the story, after my post, and note that I said we only had one side of the story, things look a little different.
Now go away and troll someone elses site.
Presumably they’re incorp’d, perhaps with no shareholders agreement, and because of the 51% Andrew controls the board, grounding his authority to terminate her. But assuming her 49% is not unvested or otherwise subject to being clawed back on termination, this could be challenging. Sooner or later Andrew is going to want to hand out more equity. And Amanda’s piece is a whole lot of dilution, for no future value.
Oh, and AFAIC, Amanda was a mediocre interviewer at best. The Soros thing was an unmitigated disaster. Rocketboom traded then, as it does now, on novelty. They key issue now, with or without her, is whether they can do something with the buzz they have. Replacing her will be easy. A nationwide call for the next face of Rocketboom would be awesomely buzzy and would surface a lot of talent far superior to Amanda. No offence to her, but she was in over her head.
GeekBrief.TV has Andrew Baron’s side of the story.
looks like Dave W. is trolling you too then.
http://www.scri...ewAndRocketboom
Mike, I thought you were on your way somewhere.
And I did listen to the video. Very carefully. The only phrase that could possibly be taken to mean “I was fired” was “I was unboomed” — which is hardly a technical term. If she was complaining about being fired, she could have (and should have) said “I was fired.”
All in a video in which she claims to be transparent. Heh. Not very.
Love, Crazy Uncle Dave
so…either Andrew is a liar or Amanda is an impatient, manipulative diva. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
“Oh what a tangled web 2.0 we weave, When first we practice to deceive”. modded Sir Walter Scott
I’d have to agree with the “trolls” that two roughly equal partners splitting does not constitute “firing”.
The real quesiton is: what is Rocketboom and who is Amanda Congdon?
I watched the vid again after seeing your note to Dave Winer and I still don’t think she was fired. It sounds to me like she had a condition (or set of conditions) that needed to be met in order for her to continue at RocketBoom and those conditions were not met. “If you want to continue being my partner, then you have to do [something].” [Something] was not done and so she tells us that he no longer wants to be her partner. She can not fire him, so she leaves.
At least, that is how I read it. Her lack of transparency makes it pretty hard to glean the real facts but I have been in this situation before and, from what she said in that video, I think I recognize it.
I could be wrong, of course. I am wrong at least once a day.
Seems to me like she said the show had to be done in LA, and her partner wasn’t up for LA. That’s it, game over. So, one person would see that as being let go another would see it as an ultimatium. Frankly, talent rules in this world so my position has always been let talent live where they want and work around them. Folks on my team live all over the world and I let them do that under the condition that we do some face time every 4-8 weeks… folks love that.
The funny thing about the “fired” argument is that it’s irrelevant now that we have Andrew’s side of things. But the way I saw the video, she was saying she was fired. The more interesting question (than whether she said she was fired or not) is who will win the pr game.
Dave – On my way to amsterdam, at the airport.
The argument that “unboomed” doesn’t mean fired is ridiculous. What does it mean, then?
Hot dog! This leaves the door wiiiiiide open for http://www.truegritz.com !
So now, the term, “unboomed”, is becoming a mysterious cultural buzz word, like “rosebud” in “Citizen Kane”, or “so dark the con of man” in “Da Vinci Code”?
Somewhere, Amanda is having a good laugh, as in, we have been suckered into her clever PR move. The lady is not as dumb as some of you may think.
Amanda has now posted a full account of her side of the story and my comments above were wrong: http://amandaun...for-record.html
As you said, Michael, our “fired” guesses were (and are) irrelevant but you were still correct in your reading of her initial comments.
Andrew is so gonna stiff her of her 49%.
Send lawyers, guns and money…. to us.
Yep, clearly not fired. Two equal partners disagreeing on direction. Happens all the time.
Now she can move on to an unhealthy career in Hollywood. What a drama queen. I would have to agree that they are both more than likely full of crap – especially her. They’re both backed-up septic tanks. How does a company like this succeed? Says a thing or two about the faction of society that support them.
UPDATE: I swear I had no idea she moved to Hollywood when I was writing the above. I won’t spell out the tremendous laughter it brought me to see the announcement that she actually is, but it should have come as no surprise to anyone. …*LOL*
Oh, when will they ever learn. This is business, not a party. I give the company 5 months without her, and don’t take that the wrong way, folks, it’s not at all complimenting her. If she makes a return I give it about the same amount of time after that.
Don’t expect to see a 2.0 Bubble on the scale of the 1.0 several years ago, but this fat balloon is full of puke and fecal matter and you can count on it not holding for long. Prepare for 3.0, the likes of which few can imagine.
How did Rocketboom make $40,000 a week.. they must have made millions in the past few years!!!
Sad news for me I quite enjoyed rocketboom. After reading both sides of the story it seems like a crap-ton of miscommunication to me. Either way I hope amanda continues to be successful, and I hope the split doesn’t mean the death of rocketboom. Anyone else notice the map was upsidedown in the video on amanda’s blog?
Its all a scam people, how do I know? Well, I left a very professional blog entry in her favor, basically telling her to move on to bigger and better things but she did not publish it. Its as if she is herding her blog to a certain premeditated outcome.