Idealab
Idealab was founded in March of 1996 by Bill Gross. He serves as the Company’s Chairman of the Board and CEO. Gross founded Idealab to build successful businesses that capitalize on innovations. Idealab was one of the first companies to provide an incubator that was open to individual entrepreneurs. Idealab provided venture capital and gave entrepreneurs a place to work and develop their business ideas with other entrepreneurs (Schneider, 556) Incubators were all the rage in the late 1990’s through the Internet Market Heyday. Even major venture capital firms set up their own incubator operations or partnered with existing incubators, to recognize that many of the dot-com startups they wanted to represent, required more hand holding than they were used to providing. During the first wave of e-commerce, Idealab was quite successful. Many of its incubated companies eventually failed, but enough of them succeeded , that Idealab was able to fund several generations of new businesses through its operations. During its first year, it supported at least 10 new businesses, including City Search Website. Idealab, in its second year, helped create another ten businesses including Shopping.com, Tickets.com, and WeddingChannel.com. In later years, Idealab incubated other companies such as cooking.com and GoTo.com. Not all of Idealab’s companies were successful. In 2000, critics had started to look at incubators suspiciously, seeing them as more of the dot-com craze. Following the bust of the technology stock market, incubators rapidly disappeared as investors rushed to liquidate their capital investments. By 2001, the incubator model had basically drifted away, with few investors ready to sink money into such a risky startup. The primary survival method for many of these firms was to try and merge their struggling companies with already successful companies. Bill Gross devised a new strategy that would go way beyond Idealab’s initial purpose as an incubator. He
Cited: Schneider, Gary P. (2013) Electronic Commerce, 10th ed. Boston, MA: Course Technology