GoFish, a video-sharing site much like YouTube, has acquired another video site, Bolt, to save that company from lawsuits that threatened to sink it.
The $30 million transaction, first reported by the NYT, is reportedly being used by New York’s Bolt to pay a settlement of “several million dollars” to Universal Music Group, which had sued Bolt for copyright infringement. (See merger filing here)
Thus ends the topsy-turvy ride of Bolt, the company started in 1996 to target teenagers, and once backed by investors like Highland Capital, America Online, and Oak Investment with more than $66 million. It had even filed to go public in December 1999, with only $4 million in revenue and no profit — just as the dot-com meltdown began. It was forced to pull its IPO.
So co-founder and chief exec Aaron Cohen and co-founder Lou Kerner bought the company back from investors in 2004. Which is why Cohen tells the Times: “This deal is economically painful to Bolt shareholders…It is setting a precedent that companies that violate copyright at minimum risk litigation.”
Bolt apparently had revenue of $7 million by the end of last year. It had 5.3 million users in the U.S, according to ComScore Media Metrix.
GoFish, a two year old San Francisco company, went public last year through a reverse merger, so called because it merged with company that was already publicly traded but had no operations. GoFish has little, if any revenue, but has a market value of $134 million. GoFish.com had 1.4 million users in December.
Cohen and Bolt president Jay Gould are now involved with a project, called WikiYou, which has received seed funding from First Round Capital and Mayfield Fund, reports NewTeeVee.
7 Comments
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Liz Gannes said:
It’s NewTeeVee, not MeeTeeVee!
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Daniel Carroll said:
Ouch…that has to hurt for Bolt. What was a fair valuation for that company? Did they sell for cheap simply to acquire money to pay off lawsuit? Seems desperate to me.
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Matt Marshall said:
Sorry Liz. Fixed.
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Aaron Cohen said:
Matt:
Good knowledge of our history. Jay and I want everybody to know that we are joining GoFish in senior level capaciites. Jay and I started another company — Wikiyou — a few months ago. When our transaction, closes GoFish will be a shareholder of Wikiyou and we will be discussing that company in the future. That said, Jay and I are joining the executive team of GoFish and will be working full-time at the company. GoFish, to its credit, gets that Jay and I both need outlets for our creativity and they have every right to participate or even finance anything we do.
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Wing Yu said:
The ticker symbol for GoFish is GOFH.
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Jennifer said:
This is a shame, because the BOLT users seemed to enjoy the site and it always let their community be front and center. And it’s always sad when people lose their jobs.
That said, I worked at BOLT at one point and I’m rather surprised to hear senior management from BOLT got senior level jobs out of this. Why not? I guess failing upwards isn’t unheard of in this or any other industry.
But best of luck to them. Maybe they will surprise us all!
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Jennifer said:
Actually I take that comment back, it was not very generous. We’ve all made plenty of mistakes in our various jobs and I’m sure we all learn and grow from them as well. Good luck to all.
