Scient

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

~ the obituary ~

Eric Greenberg left Viant in late 1997 with a $1.7 million severance and used it to start the company that would spend the next three years beating Viant. Benchmark and Sequoia put in another $20.5 million, Stanford University came in alongside them, and the whole thing was operating before anybody had built anything. That is the internet consulting business in one paragraph. The product was people, and people move.

Scient itself sold nothing you could buy. Its customers were banks and retailers and startups who wanted to be on the web and had no idea how to get there, which meant its output always reached the public wearing somebody else's name. Hotwire launched in September 2000 as a travel site. It was Scient's work, and nobody booking a flight was told so.

I have no memory of this company and could not have had one. In 2000 I was sixteen, in Turkey, and the only part of the American bubble that made it into the house was newspaper coverage of the Nasdaq. Scient's entire surface was invoices to US corporations, so there is no version of my life where I would have run into it. This one is written out of court filings and trade press.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Robert Howe, who had run global consulting at IBM, took the company public in May 1999 at ten dollars a share. By the end of that year the stock was near a hundred. It peaked at $133 in early 2000, at which point the market was valuing Scient at roughly twenty times the revenue it expected to earn in a year, and Greenberg was a billionaire on paper. Eleven hundred and eighty people were on the payroll.

The client list explains both halves of what happened next. Chase Manhattan and Texas Pacific Group were real institutions with real budgets. Living.com and PlanetRx were not, and they were paying Scient with money raised from the same venture funds that were about to stop writing checks. A consultancy whose customers are startups has the startup risk without any of the equity.

~ the actual end ~

Funding dried up in May 2000 and the stock followed in August, down from $133 to somewhere near ten. By December the firm was telling the market to expect quarterly sales to fall by thirty percent. In 2001 Scient moved its headquarters from San Francisco to New York and let go of 675 people, half the company.

The last move was to merge with iXL Enterprises, the Atlanta firm that had been its rival. The two combined on 7 November 2001 and the surviving company kept the Scient name, with iXL holders taking one share for one and Scient holders taking 1.24. By then quarterly revenue was eleven million dollars against the hundred million of a year earlier. The Chapter 11 petition went in on 16 July 2002, and SBI and Company lent the firm $4.9 million to keep the doors open while it bought the assets, a price it refused to disclose.

~ the next chapter ~

SBI spent the summer of 2002 collecting the wreckage of an entire industry. It took Scient in July and closed on Lante that September, and later picked up the Razorfish name and adopted it wholesale. Razorfish went to aQuantive in July 2004, Microsoft bought aQuantive in 2007 for six billion dollars, and in 2012 wrote almost all of it off. Publicis had already taken the agency off Microsoft's hands in 2009 for $530 million.

What is strange about Scient is how little it left behind for a company that was briefly worth billions. There is no artifact. The sites it built were redesigned by somebody else inside two years, and the only durable output was a few thousand resumes carrying a line that is now twenty-five years old. Greenberg had already done this once at Viant, and Viant died two months after Scient did.

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