Monitor110

» see monitor110.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Monitor110 was founded in New York in 2003 by Jeff Stewart on a thesis that looks obvious now and was contrarian then: the open web was full of information that moved markets, posted by people who had no idea they were doing it. A disgruntled engineer's blog. A regional message board where somebody mentions a plant shutting down for a week. Crawl all of it, strip the noise, and sell the signal to people whose whole job is knowing something before the market does.

Roger Ehrenberg, who had run Deutsche Bank's internal hedge fund business, came in during 2005 to run the company and raise the money. The money came. Monitor110 took in roughly $20 million across its life, including an $11 million round in 2006, and spent most of it building the platform in private while the press wrote admiring pieces about what Wall Street would do once it arrived.

It arrived very late. The web product, called Portal, launched in March 2008. A research report service named Alphadesk followed in April. By the middle of that year the company had signed over a hundred trial clients at more than sixty firms and was collecting the kind of feedback that reads well in a board deck. Then the second quarter of 2008 happened to the venture market, the next round did not close, and on 15 July chief executive Brennan Carley wrote that "effective July 15, Monitor110 has decided to cease operations and shut down the business."

~ the record ~

~ what it actually read ~

The hard problem was never the crawling. It was relevance for an audience that punishes a false positive harder than a missed one. A portfolio manager who gets twelve alerts a day about a company he holds will read them for a week and then stop opening the email, and once he stops you are selling a subscription to a thing nobody opens. Five years of engineering went into that filter and the people it was built for only got to touch it in the last four months.

~ the seven sins ~

Days after the shutdown, Ehrenberg published a post-mortem on his own blog with his name on it, and it is the reason anyone still says the word Monitor110. He listed what he called deadly sins. Two of them sting more than the rest. There was no single leader until far too late, so the technology organization and the product organization each believed they were steering. And the company raised too much money, which sounds like a humblebrag until you read the next line, where he explains that capital let them keep building toward their own vision instead of forcing them in front of a customer who could tell them it was wrong.

Brad Feld linked it the same week and called it an excellent story on a failure. Nate Westheimer wrote his own reading of it four days after that. For a few years in the late 2000s it functioned as required reading for first-time founders, and the phrase "too much money" entered the vocabulary of a generation of seed investors largely through this one essay about this one dead company.

~ the next chapter ~

In July 2008 I was finishing university in Ankara on a TTNet line, and a $20 million product sold by the seat to Manhattan hedge funds was as far from my internet as a product could get. What did reach me, years later and sideways, was the shape of the idea. Reading the public web for signal and selling the summary is now an entire industry, from social listening dashboards to the alternative-data desks that every large fund runs. Monitor110 was five years early with servers that cost real money and a crawl that had to be written from scratch.

The company left no product and no acquirer. It left an essay that is still cited in 2026, which is a strange thing to be remembered for and better than most of its cohort managed.

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