You're In The Wrong Business
Me too. And I say that without even knowing what business you're in. But if you're not in the Webshots.com business, you're working too hard. Webshots is a picture sharing site. It was sold by CNet Networks yesterday to the American Greetings Corporation for $45 million. That sounds good, until you find out CNet bought Webshots in 2004. For $70 million dollars. That's bad enough, but running the thing did nothing but hemorrhage cash for CNet in the interim. They had an operating loss of $16.6 million dollars in the last fiscal quarter alone. You say to yourself: Someone must have been making money on this turkey. Someone was.
We may have been hasty in the headline claiming you're all in the wrong business. You might be Narendra Rocherolle, after all. The rest of you: You're doing it wrong.
Webshots founder Narendra Rocherolle and his business partners first sold the site to ExciteAtHome for $82.5 million in 1999, near the height of the dot-com boom. After ExciteAtHome went bankrupt, Rocherolle and his partners bought Webshots back for just $2.4 million in 2002 and subsequently sold it to CNet.
We may have been hasty in the headline claiming you're all in the wrong business. You might be Narendra Rocherolle, after all. The rest of you: You're doing it wrong.
