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Much has been written about the iconic American brands that have recently left the corporate landscape. Names like the bankrupt Circuit City and the nowhere-to-be-found Pontiac are casualties of the Great Recession, and there are most likely more to come. But every downturn means the end of the road for certain companies. Just a few years ago, brands like Kozmo, Flooz and Pets.com were going to change the way we all shop. So what happened to the CEOs of those dot-com casualties? We caught up with a few of them.
1. Jared Polis: BlueMountainArts.com
Artist Stephen Schutz and poet Susan Polis Schutz had been running greeting card company Blue Mountain Arts for several decades before their son took the business online and co-founded bluemountainarts.com. But Jared really caught the attention of the e-business world when he sold the company to Excite@Home in a deal worth $780 million. (Later, Excite sold the company for $200 million.) In 1998, he launched ProFlowers.com, a web company selling flowers direct from growers to consumers, which expanded to become Provide Commerce, which was then acquired by Liberty Media Corporation. In 2006, he founded Techstars, a seed incubator for web startups, and in November 2008, Mr. Polis was elected to the United States Congress to represent the second Congressional district of Colorado. Today, Fortune estimates his personal wealth at $160 million.
2. Joseph Park and Yong Kang: Kozmo.com
Remember when you could get a pint of Cherry Garcia, a Snickers and the New York Times delivered at 2:00am? Those were the days. And that's also the reason Kozmo is no more. The company's unsustainable business model promised free delivery of anything, in under an hour. And they lost money on every delivery. The two founders, Joseph Park and Yong Kang, took different paths after they closed shop. Park went to Harvard Business School and is now running Askville, a community site operated by Amazon.com. As for Yong Kang, he returned to Wall Street, and as of May 2008 listed his occupation as investment banking at Lehman Brothers. Rough decade.
3. Greg McLemore: Pets.com
4. Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander: Boo.com
Boo.com was the brainchild of Ernst Malmsten, a poetry critic, and Kajsa Leander, a former Vogue model, who grew up together in Sweden. In the 90s, they wanted to create a website where the most fashionable people would buy their clothes, and before they had sold a single item, Fortune magazine had christened them "one of Europe's coolest companies." After the highly publicized launch, it took all of 18 months for the company to burn through $135 million in venture capital before closing down in May of 2000. Now, Kajsa Leander lives in Venice with her husband, raising their three children, and Ernst Malmsten runs a London-based agency that represents architects, fashion designers, graphic designers and other creative types. He also wrote a book about the experience called Boo Hoo: a Dot.com Story. As for Boo.com, it's now a travel website with user-generated reviews...no sign of Miss Boo anywhere, though.
5. Robert Levitan: Flooz.com
6. Josh Harris: Pseudo.com
Josh Harris was one of the most interesting characters of the web 1.0 days. The founder of both Jupiter Communications and Pseudo.com (a live audio and video webcasting website), Harris became notorious for his six-month, $600,000 project "We Live In Public," a Big Brother type concept in which he placed more than 100 artists in a New York City human terrarium, capturing every move the artists made. After Pseudo.com filed for bankruptcy in 2000, Harris literally bought the farm: a 153-acre apple orchard in New York, which he sold in 2006. These days, Mr. Harris is the CEO of the African Entertainment Network based in Sidamo, Ethiopia. I'm sure he's capturing the entire experience on video.