Saturday, July 19, 2008

Monitor110 - Post Mortem

Monitor110 is a company that I’ve been tracking for some time. In short, their model was to pull in millions of web sources and apply sentiment analysis on the data to help institutional investors track information across the internet – a next generation Bloomberg if you will.

Last week Monitor110 was shut down when they were unable to sell the business or raise another round of capital. Roger Ehrenberg joined the company in 2005 as CEO and co-led with Jeff Stewart who was the technology head. Roger released a post mortem on his blog ‘information arbitrage’ on Friday. The Seven Deadly Sins Roger writes about are:

  1. The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game
  2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
  3. Too much PR, too early
  4. Too much money
  5. Not close enough to the customer
  6. Slow to adapt to market reality
  7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board
This is a great read for anyone who is a part of a start-up. Knowing what can go wrong is critical to making sure you do it right. I highly recommend you read it:

http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/07/monitor110-a-po.html