web.philly.com
An e-entrepreneur gives up on his start-up
By Reid Kanaley
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Marvin Weinberger, the self-proclaimed "serial entrepreneur" who has struggled for more than a year to
keep alive a local Internet business, Electric SchoolHouse, said the Web site would go dark next week, another dot-com victim.
The Web site for families and educators has been operating in recent weeks with a skeleton staff of three. It has its headquarters
in a former elementary school in Narberth, where Weinberger also runs an Internet business incubator called Innovation Factory.
Weinberger said he was waiting until the close of the school year to shut down the site.
"Friends, I write today with a heavy heart, to inform you that e-SchoolHouse must now close due to lack of funding," Weinberger
said in an e-mail yesterday to 10,000 registered users of the site at eschool house.com
He wrote that the site would close on Wednesday.
Weinberger, 45, estimated his own total investment - now his loss - at $3.5 million.
For 11 months in 1998 and 1999, The Inquirer followed Weinberger as he battled to launch Electric SchoolHouse, one of
thousands of start-ups that have scrambled or pleaded for venture capital in the rush to the Internet.
Weinberger has founded or cofounded an assortment of high-tech companies, including Wayne-based Internet research service
Infonautics Inc., and Databasics Business Inc., a company that, through a series of mergers, was absorbed into CDNow Inc. of
Fort Washington.
He opened the Electric SchoolHouse site for business in March 1999. To do so, he had pledged his house and all he owned,
spent $2.4 million of his personal funds - over the initial objections of his wife, Fran - and squeezed money from investors and
other sources.
The company grew to 29 employees by last summer, but, in the end, lacked sufficient funding to market its services, which
included Web-site ratings, educational Web "tours," customized Web sites for classrooms, and a "virtual fridge" where individual
families could post notes and calendars.
As his staff dwindled through attrition, Weinberger said, he spent the last few months trying without success to sell or merge the
business in the face of growing competition from Internet powerhouses that included America Online Inc. and Microsoft Corp.,
and such better-funded start-ups as San Diego-based Lightspan Inc., which went public in March.
Though it was small, Electric SchoolHouse was far from alone in its cash crunch. Even some high-profile Internet players -
DrKoop.com and CDNow among them - find themselves scrambling for money to continue operations. Crime news site
APBNews.com ran out of money and fired most of its New York-based staff this week.
Weinberger said his e-SchoolHouse odyssey took an emotional toll on his family. Fran, he said, has continued to be supportive,
has offered repeatedly to go back to teaching if the family becomes insolvent, and has been concerned primarily that her husband
not have a heart attack under the pressure of managing a failing business.
Weinberger said he was now concentrating on Innovation Factory, which has stakes in two new ventures, Circle of Learning, a
distance-education Web site for seniors, and ArtOutThere.com, an online art site opening late this month that promises "the art
gallery experience in virtual form."
"I've now probably made more [mistakes] than pretty much any other entrepreneur around," Weinberger said. But, he continued,
"This is a big advantage to the companies which we nurture here at the Factory. Hopefully, some of the local venture community
will be willing to take a substantive look at what we've created and support our worthy companies."
Losing e-SchoolHouse, he said, is "like losing a family member."
"It's been a grieving process," Weinberger said after a tour of the desolate e-SchoolHouse offices, where unused chairs and file
cabinets had been pushed into a clump in the middle of a room, and a table was stacked with blank-screened computer monitors.
"I'll try to sell it off, maybe auction it on eBay," he said of the furniture. "And I'll take the software and put it in a drawer, and every
once in a while open it and say, 'There's $6 million.' "
Weinberger, who lectures widely on the travails of entrepreneurialism, said he sees his experience as a cautionary tale, and he has
some advice for would-be entrepreneurs: "If you think you're only doing it for the money, you definitely aren't going to stick with
it." |
