Farewell to another bubble survivor
I think that 149 New Montgomery St. in San Francisco must be a cursed address. I worked there for a period of time, preparing for the IPO that was going to be the big blow-out at the end of 1999. eGreetings had become a greetings and gifting site (thanks to a lot of torturous work from my team), and on the strength of a promising monetization story, we did the roadshow and filed to go public.
If you remember your bubble history, December of 1999 was not really a great time for an IPO. We went out, rolled over, and died, and the rest of the industry followed.
One of our gifting partners at the time survived, however – they were Red Envelope. I had a friendly relationship with the company going all the way back to my days at Excite. I remember when Pete Baltaxe came in to the Excite offices to discuss his new venture, which was to become 911Gifts. We had just launched the Excite Shopping channel, and Pete was looking for distribution. It was during my tenure at eGreetings that his company’s name changed to Red Envelope. They wanted to continue to deliver on the last-minute gift promise, but didn’t want the recipient to KNOW that the sender was sending something last minute.
Now I hear that Red Envelope has laid off most of its workforce and will likely shut down soon. Oddly, they seem to have failed to embrace the lessons that the bubble taught us about growing a customer base inexpensively. They moved into expensive but unproductive catalogs (which I remember receiving) and failed to aggressively acquire search-engine traffic to sustain flow to the site.
Looking at the stories of their failure, I was surprised to see that they’d moved into the old eGreetings offices on New Montgomery. Word to the wise – it’s a lovely location, but just don’t move in there. When times get tough, as they inevitably will, your designers will spend too much time envying the cool kids across the street at Academy of Art College and your business folks will skip out of work early for drinks at the Thirsty Bear.
