MyLackey.com

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

~ the last words ~

MyLackey sold hours back to people who had money and no time. At sixteen, in Turkey, on a modem that still tied up the household phone line, I had exactly the opposite pair. This is a Seattle product for Seattle salaries in the last full year of the boom, and I was not remotely in the market for it, which is true of most of the people it was pitched to as well.

Brendan Barnicle and Brian McGarvey started it in april 1999, having both come out of another internet startup called eChange. The business was errands. You wanted the dry cleaning collected or the dog walked, and MyLackey would find a local contractor already doing that work and send them out in a branded shirt. Around $30 an hour, standard going rates for the service itself, with the company keeping the spread between what the customer paid and what the contractor took.

It ran out of Seattle, with Portland and Washington DC added, and there were plans on paper for seven more cities including New York. The name is the tell. In 1999 a venture backed company could call its own service a lackey and put that word on the side of the uniform, and the joke was the pitch: you are busy enough now to have staff.

~ the record ~

~ the arithmetic ~

WaldenVC put in 6.5 million dollars in the spring of 2000. By october the total burned since launch was around 8 million, the headcount was 85, and the money coming in was not close to the money going out. A person paying $30 an hour for an errand is a person whose own hour is worth clearly more than that, and there are fewer of those in Portland than a spreadsheet in 1999 wanted there to be.

What was slightly unusual is how it ended. McGarvey was 32, the company still had cash in the account, and instead of grinding it down to nothing he shut the doors on 20 october 2000 and laid everybody off in one day. Most dot-com deaths that autumn were involuntary. This one was arithmetic done early, which is the only respectable version of the same event.

~ what it became ~

The idea was not wrong, it was early by roughly one piece of hardware. TaskRabbit launched in 2008 doing the same errands for the same reasons, and Exec followed in 2012 before being folded into Handy. What those two had that MyLackey did not was a phone in every pocket that knew where it was, so the dispatch problem MyLackey solved with a call center and a contract stack became a map with dots on it.

The founders went where dot-com survivors went. Barnicle moved into equity research covering enterprise software, and McGarvey ended up running member experience at an insurance company. mylackey.com does not resolve at all now, which for a service whose entire promise was that somebody would come when you asked is a reasonably fitting silence.

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