Lante

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

~ the goodbye ~

In February 2000 I was on a 56k modem in Turkey and the Nasdaq was somebody else's weather. Lante was never a website you visited anyway. It was a consultancy that billed other companies for building websites, so the only available relationship with it was to be an American investor or an American client. I was neither, and this one is written out of the filings.

Mark Tebbe started the firm in Chicago in 1984, out of the University of Illinois, and ran it for fifteen years as an ordinary technology consultancy doing ordinary consulting work. Then the internet arrived as a category and Lante rewrote itself into an internet services company building business-to-business marketplaces, which in 1999 was the most fundable sentence available in the English language.

The IPO was 11 February 2000. Four million shares at twenty dollars, and the stock closed its first day at $54.94. Jay Ritter's tally of money left on the table puts the gap at roughly a hundred and forty million dollars, which is about how much more Lante could have raised had the bankers priced it where it actually traded. Nobody minded that day. Everybody minded afterward.

The peak lasted about five weeks. The Nasdaq turned on 10 March 2000 and the B2B marketplace category, which was the entire repositioning, turned faster than most of the market did. The clients paying for marketplaces had been funded by the same money that had just stopped existing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

What happened next happened to every firm in the business simultaneously. Revenue fell and the firm cut staff, which did not stop revenue falling. By 2002 Lante was announcing a layoff of 22 percent of its people, which came to 45 employees, and that number tells you more about the state of the company than the percentage does. A firm the market had briefly valued in the billions was down to a couple of hundred consultants.

Its peers went the same way and mostly went louder. MarchFirst, the other Chicago name, filed for bankruptcy in April 2001 and was the largest single collapse of the consulting bust. Scient bought its rival iXL in August 2001 with quarterly revenue already down to eleven million dollars, then filed for bankruptcy the following July. Viant was absorbed by divine in September 2002, and divine went under itself five months later.

~ the postmortem ~

SBI and Company, a Salt Lake City consultancy, announced on 19 July 2002 that it would buy Lante for about forty one million dollars, a dollar ten a share. The stock had been trading near fifty five cents, so the offer was a premium, which is its own sort of obituary. The tender took roughly 96 percent of the shares and the merger closed on 5 September 2002.

SBI had bought Scient out of bankruptcy weeks earlier and it kept buying after Lante. It picked up the Razorfish name in a later deal and eventually adopted it, and in July 2004 Razorfish was sold to aQuantive, which Microsoft bought in 2007 and then wrote off almost in full in 2012. Follow the chain far enough and the Chicago consultancy Mark Tebbe founded in 1984 ends its life inside a six billion dollar impairment charge.

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