They fired most of their staff. Their CEO Ben Huh said that ” we were turning into a money losing mess “and I didn’t know what I was doing.  Holy shit! This investment darling of 2011 which raised over 30 Million is now completely on the skids.  They even raised $5,000,000. from Foundry Group; Boulders wonder boy startup venture capital firm run by Rockn rollers … ah tech stars.

nuke

oops…. it just blew up… oh crap we nuked Seattle

In a confession on Back Channel Huh said: 

“In a nutshell, we didn’t know what we were doing. We had been profitable for years, selling ads, t-shirts, books and even a reality show on Bravo. But having investment money in the bank was new for us. More important, so was the process of transforming ourselves from a team that built and acquired WordPress sites to a company that produced a full-on content platform. We tripled our headcount.

After cashing out our original investors, however, our $30 million had dwindled to just $4 million. That figure is small by venture capital standards, but for a company that was used to duct tape and folding chairs, we felt like we were swimming in cash. We were turning into a confused, money-losing mess.”

What is this company ? What do they produce ? What is their financial model ? Believe it or not it is a kitty Kat humor website company who depends on fucking banner ads and T shirt sales to make it.  It was a losing idea from the beginning. Memes. really.  The entire startup world is caught up in this kind of bullshit and most of them go broke. The only people making money are the founder hustlers and the early stage VCs like Foundry. It is almost like these people plan to fail.

channel1networks-150x150 - Copy - Copy - Copy - Copy

Boulder’s unsung hero startup of the 1st decade.

I hate to toot my own horn but I sure as hell know how to turn 30 million dollars into a profitable company and not blow it on dumb shit.  Take a company like mine: Channel One Networks llc. We have evolved from cable television programming in the 90s to web based TV and news in the 2000s. We built slowly and surely turning a profit every year while expanding steadily. Now we have a grown to 6,000 TV channels and newspapers with local content and local advertising in every city in the world. We are not a flash in the pan and we don’t make Giant company ending mistakes. We compete with Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft. We build and sell our own products . We are not re sellers of somebody elses.. And we know what is King. Advertising and service sales are kings not content.  Yes we are changing the way TV and news is delivered locally and we are changing the world. 

Who in their right mind would float a company like this, let alone invest in it ?

One of the problems with the entire start-up millennium movement is that they are not business people. Most of them go broke. Most of them have little business or sales training.  They do not know how to service customers or produce results for them.  They are so caught up with making the scene that their zine meme thing crashes and they wonder .. oh gee what happened. business happened.

I wish some of these incubators and business schools would teach business instead of entrepreneurship. Not everybody can be an entrepreneur. There is great value in being a good solid worker.

From the Real World Home Town

Jann Scott

Boulder, Colorado

Jann Scott’s Journal gives a critical look at the world through the wise eyes of Boulders #1 multiculturalist