Somewhat awe-inspiring story of an outrageous, crash-and-burn dot-com-boom startup. There are no completely new insights here (when are there ever?) but it makes for a good read if you have five to ten minutes to spare.
We were burning through money at a rate of £250K per month while our membership and site visits were going through the roof. The on-demand streaming of high bandwidth audio and video in those days meant that the more successful we were the more it cost us and did those costs escalate - every month. We quickly became victims of our own success. I experienced corporate vertigo having gone from a happy almost family like atmosphere of a 20 person team to a 200 person company + 100′s of freelancers in less than 6 months.
(...)
This was a land grab and we were grabbing land.
Yet in the grabbing of land we were yet to really figure out how to monetize.
Ouch.
