kirkerblog 4.0

I gotta say: this summer is proving to be one of the most yin-yang periods I can recall experiencing in my adult life. Really incredible highs -- becoming an uncle, launching Pirwi, subsequently landing a Product of the Day mention on Dwell's home page, etc. -- matched with really incredible lows, most of which I'd just assume not get into here. One, I will admit, was my first serious car wreck in over a decade; no one was hurt, thank God, but my car's still in the shop and will require in all six weeks of repair time (the body shop's backlogged, but OTOH it's the best in town), and the car that hit me (a late '90s Civic) was totaled. And it was mostly my fault, too: I was turning left across two lanes of traffic into a parking lot; two large trucks exiting simultaneously distracted me and made me hit the brakes; and as a result I miscalculated how fast the Civic was coming towards me in the opposite direction. Visibility was only a slight issue: this happened at the top of an incline, but mid-afternoon in bright sunlight, and I ended up getting hit broadside on the passenger side. I'm amazed my car ended up comparatively unscathed -- no airbags deployed, no windows broken -- whereas the Civic crumpled like an accordion (with both front airbags set off and the windshield shattered), never mind that it's actually larger than my car. Score one for Teutonic engineering, I suppose.

I have threes on the mind tonight; bear with me, as I'm in an odd mood. Many conversations I've had lately have included some mention of the phenomenon of celebrities dying in threes ... which through convoluted logic got me thinking about the fact that I've now worked for three companies in a row -- two of which I founded -- that had very good ideas that were essentially ahead of their time.

The first company was the one I didn't start: it had an admittedly stupid name, iluvcamp, but a great concept, as well as a Rhodes Scholar for a CEO. I don't know if any of you readers went to summer camp as a kid, but for people who did, it seems to almost invariably be one of their most cherished childhood memories. I didn't go to camp myself, admittedly, but my dad did for many years and even went back to work as a counselor as he hit the tail end of high school. When I was a kid he even made us go on a lengthy road trip up to Michigan's Upper Peninsula (Dad grew up in suburban Detroit since my grandfather was a designer at Ford) to check out the camp itself, though by then it had been shuttered for 15 years or more. Point being, I get it, the fervent devotion kids have to camp, and iluvcamp's owners -- who also owned two camps here in Texas, including one of its most popular ones, Camp Champions -- came up with the brilliantly simple concept of bringing summer camps into the digital age. A part of the camp experience not always known is the fact that while some parents are happy to have a break from their kids, others miss them terribly and hate the fact that they're missing out on the seminal experiences they're having there -- and kids can be away at camp for up to eight weeks at a stretch. iluvcamp's business model had several different elements, but the principal one was a site (or, more specifically, a customizable application) called "campparent." The company created a custom software application that would allow camps to take digital photos of the kids and auto-upload them to a server, where they would automatically be sorted out and posted on the camp's own Web site. (For privacy purposes, all of the sites were encrypted and password-protected, and only parents with kids at a specific camp could see that camp's photos.) Although I know the idea of uploading photos to a Web site seems like kid's play today, thanks to Flickr & Google & the like, as well as ubiquitous high-speed home Internet access, but keep in mind this was back in the year 2000; digital photography had yet to hit the mainstream then, and most home Internet users still used dial-up analog modems.

The company had a multiple-revenue-stream model, which I learned from my previous employer -- Hoover's Online, one of the very few Internet content companies to successfully survive the Web 1.0 bust (they went public in '99, made a profit every quarter even after the bust, ended up being bought by Dun & Bradstreet four years later for just under $120 million, and today generate annual revenue figures nearly as high as D&B's purchase price) -- was critical to success in the Internet sphere. (I'd previously interviewed at a number of companies that I learned clearly via the interviews had no realistic business model whatsoever -- the most infamous being drkoop.com, one of the biggest dot-com failures of all. Shocking though it seems in hindsight, a company that had generated less than $50,000 in revenue in 1998 went public the next year and at one point had a market capitalization of over $1 billion. Their only current and future revenue source, as I figured out during my interview, was banner ads, and I realized immediately after exiting their lavish, Aeron chair-filled class-A office space that they were toast; no amount of banner ad sales on a niche Web site could possibly cover that level of overhead. I was right: that billion-dollar company was liquidated for under $200,000 two years later.) Anyway, iluvcamp planned to not only secure sponsorships and partnerships with advertisers and vendors selling the many products kids have to take to camp -- that was my job, incidentally, working as their Director of Sponsorship Development and helping their non-techie ad sales team explain to potential clients the nuts and bolts behind the curtain and what kinds of custom marketing solutions we could provide -- but also, most importantly, sell prints of the shots taken. Again, this seems almost anachronistic today, when people post photos on Facebook & Google instead of getting them printed on paper, but back then there was still a booming business in "event photos." Any of you go on ski trips back then? Remember the ski area-licensed photographers at the top of the mountain, who'd sell you a keepsake photo with a brilliant mountain backdrop that you could pick up, already framed, at the end of the day for a "mere" $20? That was the crux of the concept, which to its credit worked, at least for iluvcamp's first summer.

Well, sort of. Okay, this post is already much longer than intended, but suffice it to say iluvcamp's model had several flaws, one of them being that rural summer camps nine years ago had no feasible form of high-speed Internet access -- satellite connections were still in their infancy, and despite their myriad technical problems cost an arm and a leg -- and in order to be printed on standard film paper, the shots taken by counselors had to be uploaded at the highest possible resolution, meaning it could take a veritable eon for dozens or hundreds of full-res shots to upload over a 56K connection. Another problem was the company founders' disastrously poor choice for a chief technology officer, one who had a sterling resume running a large technology division but zero actual experience working in an Internet-related field. He went with a custom software app for powering this whole enterprise instead of working within the parameters of an off-the-shelf program, but somehow missed the part in the contract with the developers where the company would require a $125,000 monthly "consulting fee" for maintaining the customized database. Oh, and the software guys had the license on the code, so it couldn't be used at all minus their involvement. (Btw this was a tech company that considered itself so upper-echelon elite that it literally offered a brand-new $200,000 Ferrari as an incentive to anyone who could recruit a mere handful of programmers who actually got hired; basically they only hired types who had MIT Ph.D.'s in six fields and had already cured several forms of cancer.)

By the following year the founders realized the insanity of their error, the CTO & software had been unceremoniously dumped, and the switch had been made to Vignette's off-the-shelf database software, but by then it was too late: after frittering away about $2 million of their $7 million in startup funding on the failed software system, and having failed to secure the follow-up funding planned for expansion (it being 2001 and well into the dot-com bust by this point, capital for content-focused Web companies had essentially evaporated), they had the horrible but unavoidable circumstance of having to tell the hundreds of camps they'd successfully signed on as customers that they'd be going out of business right before summer camp season began.

Lesson learned? Even the smartest, savviest people make ill-advised business decisions when entering fields in which they have no prior experience and when relying on the advice on supposed experts who turn out to be full of shit, mistakes that are always ultimately exposed but most brilliantly so during the midst of an economic downturn. As it turns out, this lesson has proven unfortunately apocryphal.

Okay, this is long and it is quite late, so I'll follow up with Part 2 tomorrow or Saturday...

No, this one has nothing to do with business. I'm talking about Michael Jackson.

I can't defend -- or, really, comprehend -- much of what he's done starting around 20 years ago. The numerous plastic surgeries ... the skin bleaching ... the incredibly sketchy relationships with young boys which very well may have been sexual ... all of that. It's been obvious for a very long time that Michael sustained a deep level of trauma at an early age, and while I'm not going to armchair-psychologize, his attempt to morph his physical body into a figure most closely resembling an anorexic Caucasian woman is a pretty much indisputable sign of deep internal self-hatred.

Rather, I'd like to remember Michael at his prime. I have friends ranging in age from 20 to 60+, and in conversations the past few days with the younger end of that spectrum -- who weren't yet alive when Jackson fever reached its apex -- it's hard to explain the phenomenon, much like I can't rationally process "Beatle mania" because it happened so long before I was born. Still, I'm happy to admit that the first concert I ever saw as a young boy was The Jacksons at Texas Stadium in 1984, and I vividly recall the hysteria that accompanied every aspect of it, including the unprecedented requirement of purchasing a minimum of four tickets at $30 each. Although today such a figure seems laughable -- the best seats at a Stones show are at least ten times that -- it was highly controversial at the time, and Michael received significant negative publicity over the fact that his ardent lower-income fans couldn't afford such an outlay. If I recall correctly, they ended up loosening the four-ticket-minimum restriction, but tickets were still in such demand that a lottery system was in place to obtain them, so we considered ourselves privileged when we landed seats for the Dallas show -- never mind that our designated seats were at the opposite end of the stadium as the stage, and it was impossible to see them perform minus the Jumbotrons erected for the event.

Though ostensibly a "Jackson Five reunion," everyone knew that it was all about Michael, and his solo hits took precedence. Still, the air in the stadium that night was electric in a way I haven't seen since, and when the crowd burst into hysterics once Michael busted out the moonwalk during "Billie Jean," I could for the first time understand what all the Beatlemania fuss two decades earlier was about.