Left for dead, these tech companies are still kicking
Comebacks are a rarity in the fastmoving corridors of Silicon Valley
Iconic TV shows SAN FRANCIS CO have a way of emulating life.
Silicon Valley captured the gestalt (uncomfortably so) of, well, Silicon Valley today. Mad Men chronicled advertising on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. Break
ing Bad looked at the underground business of meth
labs in the 2000s.
The Walking Dead has company in tech: Once high-flying start-ups left for dead are alive and kicking, pivoting to new markets, redefining themselves or simply soldiering on.
This month, Zynga announced a new mobile action game it insists will lead to a return to dominance. Anonymous app Whisper has pivoted to become a media company. And the company behind live-streaming app Meerkat has rebooted a new popular app among those under-25. Even Myspace, the king of zombies, is still kicking. Exhibit A: Life on Air, whose wildly popular livestreaming app Meerkat was a sensation at SXSW in 2015 before the emergence of Twitter’s Periscope and then Facebook Live, has quietly renamed its app as Houseparty, a groupvideo chat app, in February. It’s been a fixture in the Top 10 in the App Store for a few weeks, with more than 1 million users daily.
“As an independent company, we had to change the direction of our company,” said company CEO Ben Rubin, who categorized Houseparty as a new product, not a relaunch. The live-video app, he said, “( brings high school and college students) together in the best possible way when they are physically apart.”
Comebacks are a rarity in the fast-moving corridors of Silicon Valley, where today’s groundbreaking idea is tomorrow’s “sowhat.”
Only a few companies have successfully rebounded from marketing missteps, a glut of competition or products that fizzled after briefly shining brightly.
Apple and Priceline.com are among those to have persevered — Apple under Steve Jobs and a new hardware roster; Priceline under adroit acquisitions.
“It is really hard for social companies, which is all about your identity and friend group, to remain popular,” says Travis Katz, a former Myspace executive who is now CEO of travel site Trip.com. “Once (a consumer) decides (they) don’t want to interact in that space, it’s hard to go back — it’s like going back to an old girlfriend.”
And yet the demise of onetime sensation Whisper, for example, has been greatly exaggerated. Its 30 million monthly active customers open the app almost 20 times a day and spend about 30 minutes on it, according to the Venice, Calif.-based company, which opened an office in New York for its growing ad business after deals with Coca-Cola, Universal Studios and Dove.