Mike Arrington is between a rock and a hard place this morning: He has some news about a failed Web 2.0 company joining the Deadpool, but it’s a company he co-founded and is on the board of, the classified-ad company Edgeio. Mike and the rest of the board decided to shut the company down — a decision that was probably relatively easy to make, since it had apparently run out of money.
Edgeio seemed like a good idea to me when it launched: A kind of distributed version of Craigslist, in which ads would be pulled from wherever they were — sitting on blogs or whatever, provided they had the right tags — and then aggregated at Edgeio’s site. But like Frederic at The Last Podcast, I never found much of value there, likely because not enough people decided to get on board and tag their posts properly.
It’s interesting to read the comments on Mike’s post, as he responds to some of the obvious questions about the failure of the company, including “What the hell did you spend $5-million on” (Mike says: “Parties, scotch, hookers, blow. You know, the usual) and “Isn’t it ironic that you, the king of Web 2.0, have a company fail because it can’t find a reason to exist?” (“That is indeed ironic,” Mike says).
The unfortunate part is that Mike no doubt has tons of inside info on what happened at Edgeio and where it went wrong, but he can’t talk about it. The only thing he says is:
“In general I’ll say this – it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself.”
Good advice.