The Failure of Cambrian House

I built (the first incarnation of) the TechCrunch job board in the summer of 2006. I started at Cambrian House a month later (worked there about 9 months) and tried to introduce Arrington to Cambrian House's CEO to get some coverage. Nothing ever came of it, MJ just sort of blew it off. Sad to see that this is what finally gets them covered.

A lot of CH employees invested in the company, and I'm sorry to hear they've lost their investments. There are also some truly excellent people in the community I met, and I hope their experience with CH has left them with a desire to succeed at their own ventures.

I was an active community member at CH for a long time, over a year. The problem that I could surmise from their actions and meetings they posted was that they knew what they needed to do but were reluctant to do it.

They refused to work within the tech community and just tried to attract anyone who had an idea. Instead of going for the people who could execute and have ideas anyway and promoting the "contracting + equity" aspect of the ventures, they wanted to have a hand in every project.

Also, they seemed to have a clear strategy, but just not follow it. They were always hiring, when it probably would have been more prudent to contract out and actually

building the site that was supposed to make them special.

They were always hiring, but no one could figure out why they weren't improving the site like the community wanted. No one could figure out why they looked so busy on the videos, but nothing was ever completed.

I think although the crowd may produce interesting creative ideas, it needs the energy and the determination of some few people to make a project succeed. Your opinions?

Great quote from the CEO:

> The limiting reagent in the startup equation is not ideas, but amazing founding teams.

Sounds rather PGish, eh?