Viant

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

~ the obit ~

Nobody outside a client meeting ever used Viant. That is true of the entire dot-com consulting class, which is why a sector that produced billion-dollar public companies left almost nothing a normal person can point at afterwards. The websites are gone, the clients renamed themselves, and the firms exist now as a line in somebody's LinkedIn from twenty-five years ago.

Eric Greenberg founded it in April 1996 with three partners under the name Silicon Valley Internet Partners. Kleiner Perkins put money in. Robert Gett came in as chief executive later that year and moved the headquarters to Boston, Greenberg left in 1997 to go and start Scient, and the firm renamed itself Viant in 1998. The pitch was that strategy and design would be sold in the same engagement as the engineering, which in 1998 counted as a business model rather than an obvious statement.

Forbes ran a feature on the company in February 1999 under the headline "We only do digital". Viant went public that June. By the end of the year its market capitalization was above two billion dollars, on a business that was fundamentally people billing hours.

Then it stopped. The clients that were paying for websites in 1999 were the same clients that had no money in 2001, and a consultancy has no product to fall back on when the phone stops ringing. Viant ran layoff after layoff between 2000 and 2002. On 5 April 2002 it agreed to sell itself to divine, inc. for about $96 million in stock, and by the time that deal actually closed the terms had been rewritten downward.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what really happened ~

Viant shareholders approved the merger on 26 September 2002. divine put out the completion release the next day, and the common stock stopped trading after the close on Friday 27 September. Each Viant share converted into 0.0725 of a divine share plus $1.4625 in cash, which across the whole company came to roughly 3.6 million divine shares. The April announcement had described issuing about 200 million.

divine's own press release described gaining a legacy of long-term client relationships and outstanding talent. On 25 February 2003, twenty-one weeks later, divine filed for Chapter 11 and was auctioned off in pieces. Viant survived the crash by exactly long enough to be inside somebody else's bankruptcy.

~ what replaced it ~

Viant was one of the five firms the trade press had branded the Fast Five, the nimble answer to the Big Five accounting consultancies. Greenberg's second company was another one of them. Scient combined with iXL in November 2001 and kept the Scient name, filed Chapter 11 in July 2002, and was bought out of bankruptcy by SBI and Company, which also closed on Lante that September. marchFIRST had gone under the year before. The bracket emptied in about three years and the wreckage kept landing with the same handful of buyers.

The name did not stay buried. Specific Media, the Vanderhook brothers' ad business, bought Myspace in 2011 and renamed itself Viant Technology in January 2015. It listed on Nasdaq in February 2021 under the ticker DSP and closed its first day at more than double the offer price. Nothing connects it to Boston except an available trademark, which is what a dot-com name becomes about a decade after the company holding it stops paying.

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