

Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/14/bad-times-for-bittorrent-17-m-financing-undone-valuation-plummets/

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tdavis
Let me see if I've got this straight. It took one guy to write the BitTorrent
protocol in the first place, but it takes 19 people (previously even more) to
fail at turning it into a business? As soon as you have titles like "Chief
Scientist" I think you're pretty much destined for failure.

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mattmaroon
Trying to make money off of P2P and failing is so amazingly ironic. Karma's a
bitch.

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pxlpshr
I'd hate to sound like a digg-comment, but nice delivery there. It drew a nice
lol from me. ;)

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mattmaroon
I'd hate to sound like a Reddit comment, but thank you very much.

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mdasen
Well, what's their business model?

BitTorrent DNA seems like an awesome idea - use individuals computers as a
content delivery network to reduce bandwidth on your servers. However, it
requires users to install a client program on their computer which means most
people won't be able to use it.

And, like BitTorrent itself, what's stopping someone else from just
reimplementing it and loosing them their profit?

I'm not saying that they don't make something of value. It's just that they
don't monetize it well.

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Zev
DNA is based on uTorrent, which is closed source - rather then the open
sourced BitTorrent client.

But if you want to go down that road, whats to stop anyone from redoing any
idea on their own instead of using a pre-existing product? Not very much, in
reality.

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jbyers
This article reminded me of something I read on GigaOm back in 2005:

"In the ephemeral world of digital content, Bit Torrent is as close to a sure
thing, you can get."

[http://gigaom.com/2005/08/11/bittorrent-seeded-now-waits-
for...](http://gigaom.com/2005/08/11/bittorrent-seeded-now-waits-for-vc-
funds/)

~~~
stcredzero
Those guys and Gartner often just reinforce the popular illusions of the day.
The trick is that they get paid for doing that.

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jfarmer
I've heard of downrounds, but I've never heard of a startup returning a round
to their investors. Are there other examples of this happening?

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ojbyrne
Odeo/Obvious Corp/Evan Williams did. That seemed to have turned out well.

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markessien
BitTorrent has never displayed any sign that they are in any way good at
business. The only good thing to come out of bittorrent is the idea - even the
best implementation of this idea was not done by bittorrent, but by utorrent.

Till there are people will real business ideas at the top, the company will
not be able to be a significant player.

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halo
"The idea" being the core protocol. I can't wait until you criticise Tim
Berners-Lee for creating a poor web browser compared to Netscape.

I agree on the business side though - it was always going to be an uphill
struggle, and they seriously missed a trick by being beaten to market by
Kontiki and seem to be struggling to find a decent business plan.

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markessien
"The idea" is not the protocol. The protocol itself is nothing special, it's
the idea that is special. I consciously decided not to praise the actual
protocol, as there is nothing unusual about it.

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brandonkm
Seems like a 'perfect storm' was brewing between BitTorrent and their
investors. My guess is Accel and Co. got a bit nervous about allocating $17
million to a file sharing site.

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tlrobinson
Bram is the "chief scientist". Interesting title. Why not "CTO"?

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sachinag
From the stories about Bram's Aspergers, I'd guess that this role means fewer
management responsibilities, which probably suits him just fine:
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b41050468...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b4105046863317.htm)

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zandorg
I love the abrupt banning by Arrington in response to a guy who criticises his
grammar, yet has no room to speak.

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retyred
running ads on torrent tracker search sites...that is probably the only viable
business behind this technology. not much there to sell a VC, but it is money
in the bank.

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clearlight
I'm a BitTorrent fan.. but I can see why they had a hard time getting
funding...

