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Valleywag
Until a recent article from ReadWriteWeb declaring online file-storage and sharing service Omnidrive dead, founder and CEO Nik Cubrilovic was missing in action. The support forums for customers went unattended even as the site went down. An investor, Clay Cook, who sunk six figures into the company couldn't get a reply to his email. Also nowhere to be found? Any reporting from TechCrunch.
After winning kudos from the site that chronicles startups in 2005, Michael Arrington invested in the company. Cubrilovic even contributed to the site and crashed at Michael Arrington's place for a time. What followed were many laudatory posts which, though the relationship was disclosed, didn't state the obvious — that by mid-2007 the company owed customers, investors and employees money.
The only mention that the site, and the company, was facing problems came in an addendum to a post about Joyent. Arrington had stopped writing about the company as investor, but continued to write other companies he'd funded which weren't tanking. Duncan Riley finally pointed out last January that "there are big questions about [Omnidrive's] long term viability." Riley proceeded to defend Cubrilovic on a podcast run by the entrepreneur, before one of the hosts described spending an evening at Arrington's house in January of 2007 "doing shots all night with [Cubrilovic]."
The details that I've heard are that a competitor, possibly Box.net, tried to make a deal that could have at least allowed the company to close the book on some debts; but that because of the company's structure, Cubrilovic had to sign off on the deal, yet was unreachable. Observers say that the CEO's erratic behavior showed a pattern perhaps indicative, in their opinion, of substance abuse. Former CTO Phil Morle's contention that payments went directly to an account held by Cubrilovic sounds like a recipe for a binge-spending disaster.
In an update to his original post that Cook published yesterday, the investor seemed to dance around the issue of alcoholism:
Too many parties, too many conferences, too much working between 1-4am, not enough working normal business hours, too much socializing, not enough focus, no business development, and not enough follow up and delivery.For Cubrilovic's sake, I hope all this time offline was spent getting some help, but based on his latest round of promises that everything's fine even as the site continues to experience sporadic bouts of uptime, I'm not optimistic. Arrington and his team continuing to ignore the story? In recovery-speak, that's called "codependent enabling." (Photo by Brian Solis)
Comments
Michael Arrington has, IMHO, one of the worst track records in the valley. There just seems to be one failure after another.
"Too many parties, too many conferences, too much working between 1-4am, not enough working normal business hours, too much socializing, not enough focus, no business development, and not enough follow up and delivery."
Why does this sound like most of the Valley 250? oh wait because it is.
When I hear the name "Nik Cubrilovic" the only thing that comes to mind is he helped bust Dead 2.0 blogger.
Maybe he should have focused on business instead.
Just to put all this nonsense about Nik being an alcoholic to rest, I'd like to point out that I've rarely seen him drink, much less drink to excess. This sort of irresponsible reporting has got to stop. I would have gladly told anyone who had bothered to fact-check with me that we were always far too busy freebasing cocaine to bother boozing it up.
@sggrf: You're right; he's the kiss of death.
If you're a startup, staying away from techcrunch seems like a good move.
@Rick: Exactly! Or to be more precise, Dementor's Kiss:
+ Watch video
@Michael Arrington: You? a crack addict? no way! It explains so much about why TechCrunch is impossible to read.
@tawni: Alas, it is the only way I can keep up with the 961 Facebook notifications per day.
I thought Nik was an intern, a 19 year old kid....
@Michael Arrington: Only 961? Calcanis still has you beat. Work smarter not harder and drugs won't help that.
calacanis should merge with Arrington. Both overhyped blowhards with "thin" resumes. A match made in Silicon Hell!
So Jackson, what are you saying here? People who stay at Arrington's and get support from him are doomed to have their projects fail?
Any software or webware venture can melt down and be reconstituted, and other than the fiscal bridges burned, the users can often overlook the hiccup.
But storage services - once they demonstrate unreliability, they have committed a sin that is difficult to redress. No second chances.
Two things: I only defended Nik in context that we don't know all the facts, second Nik doesn't run the podcast, never has. He once owned the domain name but the podcast has always been controlled by Cam Reilly (no relation). Nik hasn't appeared on the show for maybe 2 years or so....because he has literally disappeared.
@sggrf: @Michael Arrington:
Maybe Mike can tell us how the heck was he persuaded to invest into DanceJam and Seesmic. Both are disasters in waiting. DanceJam is pointless and its only claim to fame is that some washed out hip-hop guy is part of it and Seesmic is a pointless waste of time. They've integrated comments on TC and yet no one uses it. That says it all.
@Figaro: You're damned right re: seesmic.
I love the "creative" entrepreneur who takes another concept and says, "OMFG what if we did this with video??!!"
What they don't realize is that there are two types of people on the internet: people who know how ugly they are and people who are oblivious. Only people in the second category create video content of themselves.
Too many words!
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