What Happened to Jangl?

So, after spending May at Disneyland and other notable family vacation spots, I recently resurfaced in the Web2.0 social scene.  And, the inevitable questions started coming up at parties, meetups, conferences -- even today's Community Unconference (ForumOne).  Specifically, I'm talking about variations on this question:

"So, what's the inside story on Jangl's implosion?"

Usually, in the follow-up, people want to know about some rumor that they heard related to the founders, companies interested in acquiring Jangl, Jangl investors or departed Jangl employees.

So, I'm going to provide my views in a series of posts, with no follow-up Q&A:
RE: Michael.  Cerda's blog is entertaining.  And, there's a lot between the lines of his comments.  He and I are close, and I don't think that he was referring to me when he described egos, silos, etc.  I feel that way because he has often talked about how we might work together again.  If you read his blog, you can see that he was dealing with some serious internal trust issues well over a year ago.  He had suffered enormous acts of employee disloyalty before I arrived, and more acts were perpetrated literally as I walked in the door. Those acts had an effect on the trust Cerda extended to and received from everyone associated with the company.  The details of which are his story to tell, not mine. 

I like "Mike" and I know that top-notch venture guys wanted to work with him and Ben, but couldn't get behind Jangl for another round for a myriad of sound business reasons.  Specifically, these reasons:

1. The Jangl business idea that garnered the Series B was not a big enough opportunity.  Markets are dynamic, and the dating industry went south between 05 and 07.  It is projected to be flat to negative in the US for the next five years.  That's not the founders fault.  All early indicators from Match and others suggested that the company could do well IF -- this is the key assumption -- the dating partners invested marketing resources in the service. 
So, what went wrong here?  Dating partner sites didn't give the Jangl powered service a chance to grow.  The deals were done at the top, and the middle-managers at partner companies could care less how Jangl was integrated.  Partners flat out didn't execute, and, worse, there was a lot of management turnover.  Michael was constantly selling. That's the plain truth I walked into as I joined. 

2. Jangl was a tweener, not a clean investment.  The founders and I did make the right product and business shifts -- we built for social networks, put deals in place, and then executed once the networks were open.  Bebo in particular was very successful.  We even managed to put the ads in place relatively quickly -- through Pudding Media.  We proved the direction, and started to generate modest revenues on a new business line.  Michael recently gave me credit for that strategic vision, that shift.  Although, I'd be inclined to give him credit for his decision to go get me from PodShow, knowing that free-ad-supported would be my instincts. 
Still, all of this momentum was 12 months too late.  The momentum wasn't enough to earn a clean series C deal from series C investors.  At best, it was an ugly series B do-over, and there were very few firms interested in that kind of deal.  There are a lot of tweeners going under right now.  Venture firms like to keep up appearances, unusual deals like tweeners don't work within that mindset.

3. Jangl's burn history was inflated due to operational decisions early on.  And, this is the issue that no VC could get over.  Despite Brian Longest's amazing abilities to pare back the burn and get Jangl out of bad deals, it was a burn history that hinted at financial mismanagement. 
When I got there, Jangl had a VP of FinOps that had negotiated amazingly low rates and service commitments.  Unfortunately, those came with huge minimum monthly commitments.  The product team was chronically behind schedule, so the monthly burn on telco and platform costs was PAINFUL.  So too was .NET.  Why were our product teams always late?  Because we couldn't find .NET developers.  If you're looking for a .NET developer in Silicon Valley, you might as well be hunting for snipe or waiting for the Great Pumpkin with Linus.  .NET is as dead as Sanskrit.  Out of desperation, I tried to recruit.  I asked some kick-ass developers from Contactual to look at the platform -- they said they'd rather get a root canal or catch venereal disease than work in .NET  .NET was a decision driven by early Jangl finops.  That Ops guy was a fellow Microsoft alumn that couldn't/didn't see the downside risk in .NET development and he modeled for an explosive viral growth curve that, like the product, never quite arrived. 
Personally, I hate that guy for working to undermine senior management with the investors and the engineers.  But, again, that's Cerda's story to tell. 
However, I will say that the original finops guy got fired, and that was too kind. Seriously. I wouldn't take his Kharma if it came with all of the money in the world.

Comments

[nt102008]

I wonder what happened to Jangl. I came across another similar phone widget. "JingleMe" (http://www.jingleme.com). “JingleMe” has features that address the privacy and the anonymity requirement that is needed in Social Networking space. I never used Jangl - However, JingleMe.Com a similar widget that seem to work flawless for Social Network sites. It has all the call features and controls that I need. JingleMe will allow you to listen to the caller's name before you accept the call. If you don't feel like taking the call, you can reject the call and the call will never go thru. You can even block the particular caller. I like the time of day feature. You can set your profile, such that you can accept (or not accept) calls at certain day and time of the week. I liked that feature.