DISQUS

Jerry Neumann · 1 month ago

The problem was, if I remember correctly, that the stock market was valuing the public digital consultancies at something like $200,000+ per employee. The cost of hiring someone (and losing money on them until they could be fully utilized) seemed to be about $100,000. It seemed like every 20-something with a royal blue shirt was getting a $100k+ offer to go work in an office facing Union Square.

To me (I was investing in digital consultancies from 1997 until the valuations went haywire in 1999), these companies--there were four or five of them--seemed like cynical build-and-flip public market arbitrage strategies on the behalf of their funders. I remember talking to one VC at the time and saying to him "wtf? You can't build a business by hiring 1000 people in that short a time: the quality of the work will suck. Why are you investing in them?" He looked at me scornfully and said "I'm investing in them because I'm going to make money."

And he did.

Spencer Rascoff · 1 month ago

Hey Niki,
Ah Scient. You really sent me back down memory lane.
I co-founded Hotwire back in 1999 and we were one of Scient's biggest clients back in the day. At the peak of our engagement, we probably had 100 Scient people working on Hotwire. As we ramped up our full time employees, we ramped down the Scient engagement. But when all was said and done, we spent about $10 million with Scient from 1999-2000. Several of the Scient consultants ended up working at Hotwire (and some still work there, almost a decade later and 6 years after Expedia bought Hotwire). I have a lot of fond memories of Scient, and they did a great job for us, though they charged an arm and a leg. I still wear my Scient fleece vest proudly as a reminder of those early days.

emmaspringer · 1 month ago

It sounds like Scient was no different than Twitter. As you said Twitter has no real business plan and neither did most of the dotcom companies.