Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets | Hacker News Reader

Bad Times For BitTorrent: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets

techcrunch.com

26 pointsvaksel21 comments

Let me see if I've got this straight. It took one guy to write the BitTorrent protocol in the first place, but it takes 19 people (previously even more) to fail at turning it into a business? As soon as you have titles like "Chief Scientist" I think you're pretty much destined for failure.

Clearly failure is scalable.

Trying to make money off of P2P and failing is so amazingly ironic. Karma's a bitch.

I'd hate to sound like a digg-comment, but nice delivery there. It drew a nice lol from me. ;)

I'd hate to sound like a Reddit comment, but thank you very much.

Well, what's their business model?

BitTorrent DNA seems like an awesome idea - use individuals computers as a content delivery network to reduce bandwidth on your servers. However, it requires users to install a client program on their computer which means most people won't be able to use it.

And, like BitTorrent itself, what's stopping someone else from just reimplementing it and loosing them their profit?

I'm not saying that they don't make something of value. It's just that they don't monetize it well.

DNA is based on uTorrent, which is closed source - rather then the open sourced BitTorrent client.

But if you want to go down that road, whats to stop anyone from redoing any idea on their own instead of using a pre-existing product? Not very much, in reality.

This article reminded me of something I read on GigaOm back in 2005:

"In the ephemeral world of digital content, Bit Torrent is as close to a sure thing, you can get."

http://gigaom.com/2005/08/11/bittorrent-seeded-now-waits-for...

Those guys and Gartner often just reinforce the popular illusions of the day. The trick is that they get paid for doing that.

I've heard of downrounds, but I've never heard of a startup returning a round to their investors. Are there other examples of this happening?

Odeo/Obvious Corp/Evan Williams did. That seemed to have turned out well.

almost certainly wasn't voluntary... note the part about DAG claiming the financing should be renegotiated after the business model and projections "changed" suddenly after the financing closed.

BitTorrent has never displayed any sign that they are in any way good at business. The only good thing to come out of bittorrent is the idea - even the best implementation of this idea was not done by bittorrent, but by utorrent.

Till there are people will real business ideas at the top, the company will not be able to be a significant player.

"The idea" being the core protocol. I can't wait until you criticise Tim Berners-Lee for creating a poor web browser compared to Netscape.

I agree on the business side though - it was always going to be an uphill struggle, and they seriously missed a trick by being beaten to market by Kontiki and seem to be struggling to find a decent business plan.

"The idea" is not the protocol. The protocol itself is nothing special, it's the idea that is special. I consciously decided not to praise the actual protocol, as there is nothing unusual about it.

Seems like a 'perfect storm' was brewing between BitTorrent and their investors. My guess is Accel and Co. got a bit nervous about allocating $17 million to a file sharing site.

Bram is the "chief scientist". Interesting title. Why not "CTO"?

From the stories about Bram's Aspergers, I'd guess that this role means fewer management responsibilities, which probably suits him just fine: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b41050468...

I love the abrupt banning by Arrington in response to a guy who criticises his grammar, yet has no room to speak.

running ads on torrent tracker search sites...that is probably the only viable business behind this technology. not much there to sell a VC, but it is money in the bank.

I'm a BitTorrent fan.. but I can see why they had a hard time getting funding...

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