Are you kidding? The investors put in $9M, and the end result was a "liquidation." That is failure, from an investment standpoint. That is what the article said. The article said nothing about failure in terms of popularity of the site or technical glitches. The NYT could care less about that.

"Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga Inc., a San Francisco company that develops online games that can be played on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, says his previous company, Tribe.net, “is for sure a failure from the investors’ standpoint.” ribe.net was an early social networking company that Mr. Pincus says raised $9 million in venture capital before it was liquidated in 2006."

But here is what I want to know. Where is tribe.net's federal bailout money? We can't stand by and let tribe.net fail.

Dig deep, folks. Re-up your premium subscription if you have not already.

He did say from "an investor's standpoint." And most investors want big payoffs. Tribe had to liquidate, and sold to Sun. SO they never generated a huge payoff for the investor. Kind of typical of Pincus, if it doesn't zoom high, he quickly loses interest. And the follow up on most of his projects has left something to be desired, as we all know. And, typically, he fails to mention that Tribe is still in business.

The whole article is kind of suspect, in my opinion. It starts based on a professor's idea, a "working paper", and slants things to support their hypothesis. Statements such as where he says that successful entrepreneurs have almost the same success rate as unsuccessful give you the idea that there is a close statistical count between the two. But by his own numbers, there is an 11 % difference between the two. And in my book, that isn't "almost'. SO take it for what it's worth, a failure of Journalistic standards, since the writer has done little research beyond reading that position paper.

that was a very unflattering picture of Pincus in the NYT, by the way.

As a stockholder I can assure you that Tribe Networks, the corporate entity that owned Tribe.net originally, was a complete and utter failure. I could also go on at great length about why I believe that was the case, but that's not the point right now.

To correct some misconceptions: Tribe.net was not sold to Sun. Tribe.net was sold to a new company, Utah Street Networks, shortly after I left in 2006. I believe that USN was the corporation that Mark spun up in order to buy the site back. My knowledge becomes slightly fuzzy at this point, since I was no longer an insider.

USN later sold Tribe.net's intellectual property and engineering team to Cisco, while maintaining ownership of and operating rights to the Tribe.net site itself. My understanding is that there's some slightly weird licensing deal in place that gives USN the right to continue using what is now Cisco's intellectual property, but I know little about it except that the terms are completely confidential.

Last year, NSA made some sort of deal to essentially buy Tribe.net from USN. However, the deal was publicized as an "operating agreement" rather than an outright sale, so I suspect that the terms are again confidential and probably complicated.

(Amusingly, I notice that the copyright statement in the footer gives copyright to USN. I wonder if that's accurate? I doubt it.)

Disclaimer: I have every reason to believe that what I've written above is factual, but there may in fact be errors in it.


In any case, coming back to the original point, yes. Tribe Networks was a horrible failure. It got nine million dollars in investment capital and turned it into a shaky and vaguely-schizophrenic site with a small (but mostly fiercely-loyal) user base and a relatively small revenue stream. I really can't accurately assess what the business is worth right now, but my upper bound on the valuation would be... oh... half a million dollars. At the time that it was sold to USN, the valuation was probably smaller than that. Turning nine mil into half a mil seems like failure by any reasonable set of standards.

At this point, even the fierce loyalty of the users seems to be fading away. Most of my friends have abandoned the site in favor of more lively, more welcoming, and more stable pastures. I still drop in daily, mostly because I'm sentimental, but I rarely find a discussion that seems to be worth my attention for very long. Perhaps other communities on Tribe are still lively, but they don't show up on my radar.