Yes they got rich, but that was just by happenstance. You need only look at the teen site kibu.com to see how incompetent these guys (and gals) are. Remember, TJ blew through his own money on Kibu.
sfweekly.com
Kibu.com's blueprint was based on the kind of optimistic "research" typical of Web start-ups: 12 million teen girls are on the Internet, the founders surmised, and it won't be long before they're buying their hair products there. Kibu ("foundation," in Japanese) was aimed at "the teen girl ... at that critical age where she is building the foundation for the rest of her life," the site's page of frequently asked questions proclaimed. And Kibu's strategy, like those of many online start-ups, was one of sheer profligacy: spare no expense to build brand awareness and an online customer base in a flash; pray that the results will be impressive enough to attract another round of financing; wash; rinse; repeat.
MacDonald and Lynch brought a new level of verve to their mismanagement, documented painstakingly in an extensive postmortem memo provided by an ex-employee. Web ventures tend to spend money like convicts just out of the joint, but Kibu put ordinary dot-coms to shame, scorching through $15 million in venture capital by Oct. 3, 46 days after it charged onto an online teen field crammed with sites selling makeup and dolls. Kibu.com boomed from zero employees to 70 -- and then crashed back to zero -- in less time than some kids spend at summer camp.
Kibu was to be a teen's online network featuring 20 channels of original programming on fashion, relationships, and the like, each hosted by a "face," the young-adult heir apparent to MTV's VJs. In place of banner advertising, Kibu would give product samples to its clientele -- the "digi-girls" who completed its surveys. Girls were to earn points for completing questionnaires and quizzes about their product preferences, information owners hoped would prove useful to commercial sponsors.
Kibu had an office in Redwood City and a "studio" in touristy Ghirardelli Square. At the heart of the Kibu recipe were the site's kicky, homemade "faces." "Girls want real people online," MacDonald told Red Herring in the early days. "It won't feel like an online magazine, but like more of a relationship." The 19 faces were paid in the $100,000-per-year range, and although their primary task was to write magaziney articles about the fields they "covered" (love, hair, etc.), they weren't professional writers -- so Kibu.com hired a parallel editorial staff that initially tried to teach the faces reporting and writing, and inevitably wound up massaging the faces' copy. (A 300-word piece could take five weeks to produce.) Ultimately, the role of a face amounted to participating in chat rooms, posing for mug shots on the site, and mixing with passers-by at the Ghirardelli Square "behind-the-scenes production studio."
As it squandered cash on its faces, Kibu neglected its vital organs. Its business plan called for chat rooms, bulletin boards, instant-messaging, custom e-mail, and other personalizing features the firm never got a chance to execute. A scheme to distribute tens of thousands of direct-mail packages crammed with prizes was abandoned as too expensive. A point-earning system letting the digi-girls win prizes by clicking banner ads was so strict that only six ever won any of the cheap prizes.
Kibu's hiring tactics were downright foolhardy. MacDonald and Lynch offered handsome salaries for Web developers, posts they filled with software engineers without relevant Web experience. And Kibu spent bushels adorning its Ghirardelli Square "studio" with expensive leather furniture, dressing rooms, plasma screens, and high-end audiovisual equipment. ("It was huge -- the size of a tremendous restaurant," one veteran says.) The studio was presented to the public as the site's brick-and-mortar location, as an imaginary back-office to Kibu.com's cyberlocation on the Web -- an illusion requiring many staffers to maintain desks and computers in two locations, 45 minutes apart. |
