Word: dotcom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...start-ups will have emerged better from the dotcom meltdown than Betfair. Launched in 2000 by Britons Andrew "Bert" Black and Edward Wray, the London-based online betting exchange has since grown into the world's largest. Rather than play house, Betfair matches bettors with odds offered by other users, its whizzy technology handling some 300 wagers a second. The small cut the firm takes from the bettors' winnings these days adds up to big profits: Betfair pocketed $39 million in net earnings last year. And in refusing wagers from the U.S. - where online gambling is outlawed - Betfair has dodged...
...remember, this was the time when, if you didn't have a dotcom idea, there was something wrong with you. It seemed you could raise money for any dotcom idea, and so to be honest I thought it was going to be very straightforward just to go out and raise money. Probably because we thought it would be very easy, it was a bit hit-and-miss the way I put it together. We went to a few institutions at the end of '99, and basically, they said "thanks, but no thanks." We subsequently found out one of the reasons...
...coffins which is arguably a little distasteful but, you know, you had to do that sort of thing if you wanted to catch the attention of the papers. And all of this because we didn't have any money to spend. So a typical company, launching in the dotcom world at that time, would have had a huge marketing budget if they were serious. We didn't have that, so we had to make what we had work extra hard for us, but we did get few people's attention...
...Wray: Looking back now, one of the best things that happened to us was that we didn't raise lots of money. Because dotcom companies were throwing money around right, left and center and because we couldn't afford to do that we thought very hard about what we applied our money to. For example, that picture with the two of us and a bookie pretending to be in a coffin, which was very tongue-in-cheek, was the front page of the Sunday Times business section three days before we launched...
...stuff you might expect. The concerns have always been "can this company rise to the occasion here?," because here we were, in my eyes, a bunch of earnest amateurs, who were getting stuck in but we were just this tiny little company, a bunch of guys without any dotcom heritage who didn't really know what they were doing but were feeling their way around, and we knew we had to turn ourselves into something much bigger, much more solid, much more dependable, reliable, and a big functional, corporate entity...