Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets • Hacker News Board

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#11

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 12:12 AM UTC

jbyers wrote: post #3

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...

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

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#12

Post by ojbyrne » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 1:30 AM UTC

jfarmer wrote: post #5

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?

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

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#13

Post by clearlight » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 1:42 AM UTC

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

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#14

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Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#15

Post by wmf » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 4:39 AM UTC

tdavis wrote: post #8

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.

Clearly failure is scalable.

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#16

Post by brandonkm » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 5:06 AM UTC

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.

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#17

Post by mattmaroon » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 5:51 AM UTC

tdavis wrote: post #8

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.

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

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#18

Post by markessien » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 8:45 AM UTC

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.

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#19

Post by dhouston » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 10:37 AM UTC

jfarmer wrote: post #5

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?

almost certainly wasn't voluntary... note the part about DAG claiming the financing should be renegotiated after the business model and projections "changed" suddenly after the financing closed.

Re: Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

#20

Post by halo » Mon, Dec 15, 2008, 11:59 AM UTC

markessien wrote: post #18

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.

"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.