Saturday, September 29, 2001

Remora

The news that Excite@home filed for bankruptcy should surprise nobody who watched them in the late nineties, taking on debt as if they were a real company. But it struck a nostalgic chord in my heart, so I went back to the ante-diluvian era and dug up this article on VC star John Doerr. Those who rely on biz journalism to tell a straight story should check it out:

Forbes.com: The Best VCs
Especially pause and linger on these two grafs, balancing the usual flattery of the wealthy with, in the next paragraph, that devastating list of companies. Each one either gone belly up or seriously damaged by the way they were initially financed:

"It is no longer possible to write simply about this veteran venture capitalist named John Doerr, so wrapped is he now in the mantle of myth and fable. He has become both the sign and the signifier of high tech venture capitalism, a metaphor for success, the synecdoche of the entire e-commerce era. That's a lot of freight to carry to the office in your PalmPilot each morning. Megalomaniacs are made from a lot less. But it is to Doerr's credit that he hasn't become a grotesque or a hectoring Mother Hubbard (though, with time, all his Democratic political work bears that risk).

The list of Doerr wins is itself a touchstone, like DiMaggio's major league record hitting streak--Compaq, Cypress, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Lotus, Amazon.com, Healtheon, Intuit, Excite@Home. Even Doerr's failures, like pen computing, have an epic, Homeric quality to them."

It's ... it's an Ozymandias moment, folks.

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