

7 Lessons from the Zantaz Firesale (Sold for $375m, Founders Got Nothing) - tomh
http://www.foundread.com/view/7-lessons-from
short version: company sells for $375M, founders got zilch.  Check the details in the link.
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nickb
Stay away from comVentures and Roland! They screwed FilmLoop and Nishan
Systems too! Here's some more info:

[http://venturebeat.com/2007/02/13/filmloops-demise-the-
reput...](http://venturebeat.com/2007/02/13/filmloops-demise-the-reputation-
of-vcs-and-how-you-can-help/)

<http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=43685>

One commenter in this article on Zantaz offers a list of VCs to avoid:

[http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-
th...](http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-the-
unfortunate-back-story/)

"ComVentures/Roland van der Meer, Crescendo/Spreng, Worldview/Orsak and Wei
have similar operating approaches as reflected in the cases of Zantaz, Nishan,
Force 10 and other Worldview deals."

Fellow entrepreneurs, beware! Wolves are out there. In today's age, it's easy
to vett these VCs.

------
zach
Well, it's better to get none of something big than a big part of nothing,
right? Wait a second...

------
henryw
In a linked article, it was reported that one of the founders got 650k, which
is still nothing compared to the 375M. It really makes you look at the
reputations of the VCs.

"The reportedly terminally ill founder, William Bankert, will end up with only
$650,000 or so from the sale."
[http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-
th...](http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-the-
unfortunate-back-story/)

~~~
pg
I checked who their VCs were, made quite a discovery.

[http://www.generalatlantic.com/usa/news/newsarticle.asp?id=1...](http://www.generalatlantic.com/usa/news/newsarticle.asp?id=1435)

Name familiar to anyone? General Atlantic were Ars Digita's VCs:

<http://www.waxy.org/random/arsdigita/>

~~~
exAD
general atlantic are a bunch of buffoons, for sure. of course what philip
never mentions is that he personally did the deal with GA because they were
offering the most money.

------
mynameishere
375 million isn't a firesale; especially when you're dealing with "email
archiving" which sure sounds like a wrapper around the "cp" command.

~~~
nickb
Just a "cp" command?! Heh... do you realize that some of the most successful
startups in the recent history have been reimplmentation of various UNIX
commands? Think about it for a second...

~~~
danw
napster?

~~~
nickb
Who re-implemented rsync? Who re-implemented finger? What about talk?

When you start looking, you'll realize that blogger, mozy, twitter, GTalk etc.
etc. are nothing more than versions of UNIX command line programs :)

They say that a successful startup will implement and modernize one of the
UNIX command line programs. I couldn't agree more.

~~~
steve
You know that wasn't meant to be taken seriously...

~~~
staunch
I would have just pointed out that Napster was released in 1999. In the
technology world that's ancient times.

