For-side.com Stock
What remained of my first company, Vindigo, shut down yesterday. 30 people lost their jobs. It was a sad end for a company that built some of the first popular applications for PDAs and cell phones in the US.
I sold Vindigo to Japan’s For-side.com four years ago, and left a year later because I disagreed profoundly with them about what the company should do next. That year (2005) Vindigo was on track to do over $10 million in revenue and our sister company Zingy, which For-side had acquired at the same time, was heading towards $50 million. The plan was to combine the two US companies and take them public.
Six months after I left, most of my executive team had quit too. Vindigo and Zingy merged. The company went through four CEOs in three years, all of whom disagreed with For-side about what the company ought to do next.
It wasn’t just the CEOs. Of the 30 people who lost their jobs yesterday, only two were part of my original team.
And in three years, somehow $60 million in revenue fell to zero (or close enough to zero that the company had to shut down).
In June 2004, when For-side acquired both Vindigo and Zingy, the stock peaked at 231,000 Yen. Today the stock closed at around 1,400 Yen, down 99.5%.
