Ecademy

» see ecademy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

in 1998 i was fourteen years old on a 33.6k modem in ankara, downloading nothing in particular. ecademy was launching in london the same year as a paid club for business people, a room i had no reason to walk into and no way to reach. it is one of the oldest social networks that ever existed, and it was never once part of my internet.

penny power built it with her husband thomas power and a ceo named glenn watkins, and they got there early, four years before linkedin. the idea was that business people would find each other online and help each other through community rather than cold contacts. members paid for the privilege, which felt normal in 1998 and looked strange by 2010.

the numbers tell the real story. ecademy liked to cite 650,000 members across fifty countries, but by may 2011 only about three thousand of them were paying. the free web had trained everyone to expect a network for nothing, and linkedin was giving them exactly that at global scale.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

for a while ecademy was where a certain kind of british entrepreneur lived online. it ran real-world meetups and carried a house style of relentless optimism. penny power became a recognized name in uk digital circles, later given an obe for the work. the network genuinely predated the professional-networking category, which is not the same thing as winning it.

~ the actual end ~

the shift that killed ecademy was not a competitor stealing its members so much as the internet changing shape underneath it. social media arrived and people wanted to broadcast, not converse in a paid room. in 2012 the powers sold ecademy to sunzu, a networking site owned by lyndon wood, and stepped away from the thing they had spent fourteen years building. the name did not survive the handover.

~ the long tail ~

penny power kept working, writing and speaking about business and mental health, and picked up an obe in the 2014 honours. the platform itself left almost no trace a normal person would recognize today. linkedin owns the category ecademy invented, and owns it so completely that most people assume it was always there.

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