Alando

» see alando.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 1999 I was a teenager on a dial up line in Turkey and there was nothing online to buy. Payment did not work, delivery did not work, and the internet was somewhere you went to read and argue. Alando is a grave from the other end of that year: a German site that existed for less than four months, sold for forty three million dollars, and is the shortest life in this inventory by a wide margin.

The story is well worn in Germany and still worth the retelling. Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer had spent time in Silicon Valley, come home convinced that eBay was the important American company, and written to eBay offering to run Germany. They got nothing back. So with Jorg Rheinboldt, Karel Dorner and Max Finger they built the site themselves in Berlin, put it online on 1 March 1999, and called it Alando.

It was a copy and nobody has ever pretended otherwise. It was also in German, priced in marks, and it was there before eBay was, which in 1999 was the only thing that mattered. Within the first month the site was doing three million page views. By late May it had roughly 50,000 registered users and 80,000 items listed.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hundred days ~

eBay agreed terms on 30 May 1999 and closed the acquisition on 22 June for about $43 million. Alando's founders became the management of eBay in Europe. The site kept running for a while under its own name and then became ebay.de, which is what eBay had bought it for. The brand was not the asset. The head start was.

This is worth being clear about, because it is a different kind of death from most of the ones on this site. Alando did not fail, run out of money, or get outcompeted. It was constructed to be purchased, it was purchased, and then it was switched off on purpose by its new owner within months of launch. The founders had built a company whose exit strategy was its product strategy, and they executed it in one hundred and thirteen days.

~ what it became ~

The Samwers took the forty three million and the lesson and turned it into a method. Jamba came next, then StudiVZ, then Zalando, and eventually Rocket Internet, an actual factory in Berlin whose stated business was to find an American internet company that worked, stand up a regional copy of it at speed, then either sell the copy back to the original or beat it into the market. Kaymu and Lamudi and dozens more came off that line, and several of them are already graves here.

People have argued about the ethics of it for twenty five years and the argument does not really go anywhere, because copying a website is not illegal and being first in a language is a genuine service to the people who speak it. What is harder to argue with is that the model treats a company as a temporary structure built around a market position. Alando was the prototype, and it is the only one of them that got to be right and get deleted in the same season.

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