Edgeio, a company I co-founded in 2005, had a final board meeting this evening and made the decision to shut down operations of the company. We are putting it into the TechCrunch DeadPool.
Edgieo first launched in February 2006 after a beta period. The company raised a small angel round of financing, then in October 2006 closed a $5 million Series A from Intel Capital and Transcosmos.
The company burned through that money according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled, meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. But the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met. And that meant no one else was going to put more money into the company.
For the last few months CEO Keith Teare has been working on a number of plans to keep the company going, but none of them panned out. So tonight the board decided, appropriately, to shut the company down. This will be orderly – employees will be let go but will be fully paid. In this job climate, all of them will hopefully find work very quickly.
I’m obviously sad about this since I was one of the founders, although my involvement for the last two years has been as a board member only. But this is the way the startup world works. You win some, but you lose most. Edgeio wasn’t meant to be a success. And now Keith and the rest of the team can start the fight over again, and hopefully next time they’ll come out winners.
On a side note, our job site, which is run by Edgeio, will be transitioning over in the next day or two.
It’s very sad when a company closes. My best wishes to all the employees.
sincerely,
angela hayden
art goddess
Mike – in words that you posted not long ago and I think they are more relevant now than ever as Theodore Roosevelt:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
ah yeah, I love that speech.
http://www.tech...n-in-the-arena/
lol – mike’s human.
the entrepreneur god’s wouldn’t allow you to have more than one big hit(TC)
are any of the assets up for sale?
About time, I warned you people about this months ago!
But would you listen to me? Noooooo, we cannot listen to a fake blogger!
Well just so you know, I am not!
Mike, This reminds me very much of BANS (BuildANicheStore). Let me buy the asset.
Email me!
Yes, we need a few servers too, any them up for sale?
Yeap, why didn’t you ever listen to people’s malign comments?
Edgeio is going to fail. You know that… You can’t do different things and co-founded with partner. Techcrunch is your DNA body. About 80% entrepreneurs here got famous.
P.S. Techcrunch fans predict you are going to get nose punch. Facebook and Google is your worst enemy. They hate your guts too.
“Edgeio is going to fail.”
You are 100% right about that.
Mike – Are you guys reverting to the original job board software?
Mike,
Sorry to hear this. Are you guys planning to make anything opensource ?
Jay – haven’t decided yet. We’re dusting off the old code, which worked well, but we always had problems with the paypal API, which is a total piece of crap. Will decide tomorrow.
Wow, you went easy on this deadpool. lol joke
Sorry to here that. The startup up world is definately tough. At least they gave it a go. Gotta respect the effort.
Next Venture, THruDispatch – this one will make money Mike, with you raising the dough and me running the Product and market dev.
A real business with real users that have been surveyed and tested. A real niche with no entrenched competition from the big boys. Not a social network, not a video sharing site.
An open portal for independent automotive trades. http://www.squi...om/ThruDispatch
Come on Mr. Arrington, make it rain.
Uniseek will be taking over where Edgeio left off.
One big difference is we’re using a unique scoring system for search results. Spam will not be an issue, such as it was when Edgeio was first launched. There are many other differences, too, but we were hoping to have a little bit of competition from Edgeio.
Sorry, Mike. You win some and you lose some. I know you’ll get right back into it. Before we know it you’ll be fully disclosing your founding relationship with another innovative company.
good luck to the team in their next project. the deadpool posts are always solemnly humbling.
I tried using edgeio a few months ago. The most annoying aspect is that there seems to be no information regarding closing an account!???!! Now the classified board is linked to my website in the cloud out there. Will this data be removed once you shut down the edgeio servers? It’s akin to there being no way to delete a Facebook account.
Mike,
Surprising! It seems to have decent traffic!
Were there any buyers? I am sure it could be have sold for at least 2-5x return.
Mike, I am sorry to hear about this. I always like the original concept of aggregating meta data at the edge using RSS in a smart way. It seemed like a really nice Web 2.0 way that moved in a useful way to the dream of the Semantic Web without using RDF, OWL or Microformats. I would like to beleive that you weren`t wrong on your vision..I guess you were just a little ahead of your time.
aauuhhh… thats so sad. I never had a chance to try it out.
Cheers
Startup failure — “$5 million Series A from Intel Capital and Transcosmos.”
lesson to learn for every entrepreneurs:
Never use VC for your startup and ask for huge rounds. Next year’s tax break You can lose your beautiful home, saving, your cute girlfriend, etc… Most of money belong to wealth banks. It’s too much risk.
How to get money?
Apply Financial Aid for College and Drop out. You have $ 1,000 startup money. If you start company with less than $100. you create stupid lame killerapp. Techcrunch is going make you star.
- We like to read rocky balboa startup.
- We need legend.
- We need startup Icon.
- We need an Asshole too.
I could sense that the bubble has started bursting……………….
Sorry bout your founding company, mike.
Nothing is better than Techcrunch..afterall??!!
“Edgeio wasn’t meant to be a success” – what’s that supposed to mean? Predetermined fate? Ha.
Sorry to hear the news. And, wow, that is a great TR speech posted in #2. First time I ever “heard” it and I am glad I did, as a struggling startup founder in the earliest of early stages. You done good and your blog and staff are inspirational to me. Thanks!
what exactly did you spend 5 million dollars on?
Your startup should look like this:
http://upload.w...8British%29.jpg
This is your future startup and your enemy innovator (facebook, Google,etc)
http://www.yout...h?v=K5fXbEivWec
Andrew – parties, scotch, hookers, blow. you know, the usual.
This proves that if you have a company and rely on web 2.0 companies like Edgeo you have a problem. Edgeo provides a jobboard and now they shut down. Where does that leave all the companies that have build for example a jobboard?
And this isn’t happening the first time. There are many samples.
Wasn’t it ironic that you, Michael, are so well versed in understanding how Web 2.0 startups succeed, but for whatever reason decide that pouring money into a project with no revenue (dot com bust era style) was the way to go?
Shouldn’t you know better?
Jono – that is indeed ironic.
Hard luck Michael. Yeh….you tend to lose some and win some. Look at the bright side. At least now you know one idea that would never work
Michael, didn’t you make a video on this a few days ago about the web 2.0 bubble? Didn’t I see Edgeio’s logo in there somewhere? I could have sworn I did.
I would love to write at length about some of the struggles that happened at board meetings, but sadly I told myself those facts off record. When Keith writes a blog post summing up Edgeio, perhaps he’ll go into detail.
In general I’ll say this – it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself.
Sad to see it go, a site so well designed with the right balance of graphical and textual UI, and with Intel vc behind it..
Really wonders, what’s the difference between kijiji.com (if indeed successful, not so sure) and edgeio.com (more of a search engine for local stuff)..
Implications being, adsense and equiv (adbrite, eg.) isn’t really the savior solution to all?
And, the effectiveness of this 125×125 tiles miniature display ads (on any site)..
/ac.
Sorry to hear about that – the paid digital content platform was something I wanted to play with. In general it looked an interesting solution for digital content – simplifying both the transaction and search/discovery pains.
Dear Michael,
Sorry news.
I think that’s not the first startup Keith Teare is involved in and shutting down (although the product seems to have a bright future).
I am suspicious that his management skills are not very good when it comes to management of finance. In daily life, you can see people can succeed much more without so much capital.
Btw, i really think that focusing on the “core” skills and assets is always the right thing to do, for any individual or company. You are really, really very succesfull with TC. Although it is never the end of the world, i think you do not deserve being listed as a board member of some failure.
Best wishes for all people involved in Edgeio.
What was the business model Michael? UI is clean, proposition nice… But it seems you relied on the listing sites to post vs. trye aggregation.
Sorry first time I looked at it.
Freaking typo… vs. true aggregation.
@ Mike
“In general I’ll say this – it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself.”
Words to write in gold letters on any “Startup 101″ book
but, ’tis better to have etc etc
Too bad this startup didn’t make it. I used their services a few times with FreeAdLists. I thought it was an intriguing concept (meta data aggregation), but I guess it wasn’t meant to be.
Its always a sad day when people lose their jobs that way. I went through it myself back in April and it was the best thing that has happened to me. There is so much work out there at the moment these guys will get jobs no problem.
On a side note, Mike maybe you should grab some of the tech guys to start up your own ad network for the topend bloggers and replace FM…
Also makes people thing, UI design, while important, is not the real maker or breaker..
A site that went dead last month was this http://www.findory.com (can no longer see their swift ui).. all text, rss based, well sprankled with adsense, but drop dead.
Re EdgeIO, looking forward to some rise-from-the-dead glory later.. or if for sure not, mightbe yes open source it is a great idea.. when (hp’s) OpenMail went dead, its later-came open source became Scalix, if i remember correctly.. And before Zimbra’s 350M acquisition, ppl were comparing Scalix to Zimbra…
In any case, was saying, still lots of remaining values (to the community, or to the owners) (or future owners)…
I’m sorry to hear that, it would be amazing to read a post about exactly what went wrong and where that money was spent for us all to learn from.
Sorry to hear it’s going down.
But I did find it amusing and annoying that you worded this post remarkably different to others that have gone to the deadpool. With your founding interest you made this look like a nice graceful exit. I wonder if it had be another company that the angle may have been different about how the money was burned through, or if there was just too much competition etc.
Either way, sorry to hear about it going under… I still find it amazing how a company can ‘burn’ through 5 million and not work, but those that have a few $ and their own time become the best successes
@ alan p
Great quote, and should go just under the plaque which has the motivational text of “Do it fucking now”.
So I guess if “Edgio wasn’t meant to be a success” you’ve succeeded?!
Mike,
It’s sad to see Edgeio in the deadpool. I use to use them in my pitches all the time when I spoke about our company partnerships and distribution channels for our merchant-built coupons.
Our Series B and new partnership with Citysearch will help fill the void left by Edgeio.
Thanks for previously covering our Series B. Good luck to all the folks at Edgeio.
Kevin
http://www.merchantcircle.com