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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | OCTOBER 24, 2000 MANAGEMENT Behind the Collapse of OneBigTable.com Co-founder Molly O'Neill talks about her dream for a food site -- and how it has been dashed with Nasdaq's Net-stock crash
As OneBigTable began to look for a second round of funding last spring, the Nasdaq plunged, and investors haven't regarded dot-coms in the same, euphoric way since. Unable to raise additional cash, OneBigTable has laid off all but six of its staff. The beta site remains on view, but the full site has never launched. And now, the company is in talks to be acquired. Recently, O'Neill spoke with Business Week Online's Julie Fields about her experience as an Internet entrepreneur. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation: Q: What made you want to start an Internet company and a Web site? A: There was a sliver in time in which small, highly imaginative, and highly creative startups could do things in the media that larger, more established media companies just couldn't do. Food is something basic and held in common by everybody who eats. And because I get tons of mail every week, I felt for a number of years that what readers want most is interaction. The subject lends itself to that, and conventional media can't provide it. Q: So OneBigTable was as much about creating a community as putting recipes and food writing on the Web? A: Right, the impetus for One Big Table is the community. In addition, the greatest thing that technology allows is the use of databases. And in terms of food writing, that is a gigantic step forward. We have thousands and thousands of cookbooks and hundreds of thousands of wonderful pieces about food that are published every single year. What we don't have is a place where all that information can rest and be built upon. So every time you go to write a story about parsley, you go back and reinvent parsley. And the idea behind the way we are built -- which is an editorial interface laying over some very sophisticated databases -- was to allow for the accumulation of, and progression of, knowledge. Q: Why was that easier to do in a startup rather than in a larger media company? A: Because we were tiny and could react very, very quickly. If somebody said that rhubarb was cure-all to cancer, we could, within six hours, post a definitive piece about rhubarb. The best a newspaper can do is overnight, the best a magazine can do is a three-month lead time. So you can be so much more expansive and thorough, in theory. Now, the downside is that reading a screen is never going to be as comfortable as reading a page. Therefore, it requires almost a poet's discipline to present and display the information in a way that helps the user get what they want without getting eye fatigue. Q: How is writing for the Web different from print? A: The column for the Sunday magazine can take a very intuitive, lyrical approach. A column for the Web site has to be completely deconstructed. Every single word is weighed and linked and considered. When I write a story [for print], I read it aloud, and I go back and I rewrite it. And I read it aloud, and I go back and rewrite. There has to be a cadence and a melody to make one of those little things hang together. But on the screen, there has to be a visual image, and I'm not talking about a photo and a graphic. It's the way the text looks on the page. The eye doesn't go just left to right. It tends to go in a zig-zag. So once you've written the piece, instead of reading it aloud and going back and fixing the melody, you're printing it out screen by screen and looking at it and saying: How do I read this from a distance? What jumps out? What's the subliminal message here? Q: I understand you never planned to rely on banner ads. So what was OneBigTable's revenue model? A: Well, there were multiple revenue streams. All of the content was leveraged across a number of platforms. Everything on the site was a book in progress, radio in progress, or television in progress. We also were developing a PBS-style of sponsorship. So let's say the Olive Oil Council is interested in sponsoring the definitive book on olive oil. We'll make that deal, and we'll get that work done, as long as it's content that we want and value and believe in. Q: What about e-commerce? A: We ourselves are not grocers. We don't sell pots and pans. We don't know how to, and we don't have any ambition to. However, there are a lot of companies out there who do a brilliant job at it. And my hope was that ultimately, anything somebody saw mentioned on the site, any ingredient they needed, any pan they needed to cook, they could get it. Somebody else would provide it, whoever did that best. Q: What was the first hint that things had changed? A: Well, the drop in the Nasdaq. All the business people at the company were just sheet white on the day the Nasdaq dropped, although I don't think that anybody really felt like we were toast then. But slowly, over the next couple of months, you could see a sort of domino effect. Q: How so? A: Very powerful alliances that we had got into very serious financial trouble. And we had to kill our mutual initiatives -- and those were body blows. We had already developed a lot of the work for them and were ready. We had done our part and were ready to launch. Q: Did OneBigTable's business strategy change at some point? A: The business plan didn't change. But we definitely became more aggressive about initiatives that had clear revenue streams and quick revenue streams as opposed to slow build-outs. We were very aggressive in pursuing additional B2B [business-to-business opportunities]. We were very aggressive in pursuing print-on-demand. And so to that extent, yes, we did our best to change with the market. Q: What happened when you tried to raise a second round of funding? A: A few private investors who were committed took serious whacks, got scared, and pulled out. And the larger media companies that we had always been in conversation with could afford to really take a lot of time to decide exactly how they were going to proceed. Q: When did you realize that you would have to layoff staff? A: In July. When two B2B accounts went belly up, we laid off nine people. We had commitments for enough revenue that if we cut back on our burn rate, we would stay alive until November, which seemed like enough time to continue all the conversations we were involved in. All the editorial people left were just working on editing things that we had amassed and stuff like that. Q: And then what happened? A: In late August, an investor pulled out. They had signed papers and initiated a wire transfer that they then aborted. When that happened, we would not have been funded through November. We would not have been able to bring our publishing program to fruition. And we said this makes no sense. It would be much better to take these assets and place them in established and more mature plays, and move on. Q: And abandon the Web site? A: Forget the Web site, and take individual initiatives and place them where they're needed -- whether it's another food site, whether it's a general lifestyle site, whether it's a B2B site, whether it's an established media company. Q: You mentioned the possibility of being acquired. What types of companies are you talking with? A: Conventional media plays. Q: What's the timing? How soon do you expect something to be resolved? A: I wish I knew, because I'd really like to know what I'll be doing. I suspect that over the next few months it'll all become clear. Q: Are you still interested in being involved with OneBigTable? A: Well, yes. Look, a startup is bone-crunching, heartbreaking. It's all of those things. It's also being alive. Do I believe that our model was disproven? No. I believe somebody is going to do exactly what we've mapped out. Am I still really excited about it? I think about it constantly. It's a revolutionary possibility, and therefore tremendously exciting intellectually and creatively. Q: In hindsight, what would you have done differently? A: Golly, I can think of hundreds of things that I would have done differently. And that I will do differently. They seem to me just the result of an accumulation of knowledge and experience. I don't have regrets for having spent 14 months doing this. It's the hardest thing I've ever done, and also the bravest. I think that creative people only continue to create when they're completely alive. And so I'm grateful for the chance to try to imagine and to build something new. I think if we had been more cynical and less sort of idealistic about what we were doing, we would have slashed the staff in April, the day after the Nasdaq dropped. Q: For you, what was the hardest part of starting an Internet company? A: That you could never get through your list of things to do in the day. And that the degree of multitasking was just inhuman. I'd be sitting at my desk writing an opus of my own while the DSL line isn't working, and somebody has to make that happen. And a staff member is having a professional crisis. And there's a deal to be made that requires 2,000 hours worth of diligence -- and it's due the next day. So that kind of pressure is pretty exhausting. Q: What are your thoughts, in general, on the future of special-interest and lifestyle Web sites? A: It's a very powerful niche. It connects people. And we're living in an era of huge isolation. There's simultaneously this deluge of information and access, and extreme isolation. And to have a tool, however flawed and however crude, and still in its infancy, that promises to connect people and is an antidote to isolation, God, I just think that that's huge. Q: So you're still optimistic about content on the Web? A: Yeah, yeah. It's really fun and incredibly challenging and incredibly risky all at once. It's sort of like bungee jumping, which I've never done. It's extreme in every single sense. You have to, I think, decide that you'll be satisfied with the process and not with the outcome. If any of our self worth were hung on the outcome, we would be immobilized. You have to like what you're doing every single day and believe in what you're doing. And also be flexible enough to say, "Gee, that worked two months ago, and today it doesn't."   | | |
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