Kiko

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

~ the obituary ~

Kiko was a calendar that lived inside a web browser, which in 2005 was still a claim worth making. Gmail had shown the year before that a page could behave like an application if you threw enough JavaScript at it, and Kiko did the same trick for the thing that sits next to your inbox. You dragged an event across a week and the page did not reload.

It was built by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, both twenty-two, both a few months out of Yale, in the first batch Y Combinator ever funded. The money was tiny by later standards, around $62,000 from angels in Paul Graham's orbit, and the product shipped quickly. For roughly half a year Kiko was the thing you pointed at when somebody asked whether a serious calendar could work on the web.

Google Calendar launched in April 2006. It was free, it was already wired to the mail account and the address book most of the audience used every day, and it did the same drag-and-drop trick. Kiko's growth stopped almost immediately. The founders looked at the numbers, decided there was no version of this they could win, and did something nobody else in their position was doing. They put the company on eBay.

Source code, domain name, user accounts, everything. The listing ran through August 2006 and became a story in itself, because a startup admitting in public that it had lost was rare enough to be news. The auction closed on 26 August at $258,100. Elliot Noss of Tucows was the winning bidder.

~ the case file ~

~ what the auction was for ~

The money mattered more than the price. Kan and Shear had taken angel money from people they would need again, and $258,100 was enough to hand it back rather than write it off. Tucows wanted the calendar for its own email product and said afterward that getting the feature six to twelve months early had been worth more than what it paid.

I was at university in Turkey that year, on TTNet broadband, and my calendar was a piece of paper. The whole argument Kiko was making, that the browser was becoming the place software runs, had not arrived where I was sitting yet, and when it did it arrived as Gmail rather than as anything smaller.

~ the second startup ~

Ten months after the auction, Kan strapped a camera to his head and started broadcasting his life continuously at justin.tv. The lifecasting stunt was the marketing; the actual company was the video infrastructure underneath it, and when other people started using that infrastructure to stream games, the founders spun it out. Twitch sold to Amazon in 2014 for around $970 million.

The line from a failed calendar to a $970 million exit gets told as a lesson about persistence, which flattens it. What actually carried over was the willingness to declare a thing finished on a specific date and move the same week.

~ the second death ~

Tucows did not switch the calendar off when it bought it. Archived captures show kiko.com still serving the original marketing page, still calling itself a new kind of online calendar, as late as 31 March 2009. Somewhere in the following seven months it stopped.

By 9 November 2009 the address answered with a page headed "Kiko.com has been discontinued." The text underneath is short and Canadian-polite: if you arrived here looking for kiko.com, we have gone on to work on other projects. It then recommends Hover, the domain and email service Tucows was building at the time. Three years and a bit after the auction, and the second obituary is the only one Kiko ever actually got in writing.

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