So much for the wisdom of crowds. Techcrunch (and Mark Evans) are reporting that Calgary crowdsourcing up-start Cambrian House is headed for the deadpool. Apparently VC Spencer Trask passed on making an investment in Cambrian but instead has picked up their assets cheap - fire sale cheap. Techcrunch's Erick Schonfeld reported today that Cambrian House’s IP, assets and website will be sold to Spencer Trask for far less than the $7.75 million that investors pumped into the company.
Spencer Trask plans on taking the assets and rolling them into VenCorps, a Cambrian House project that was exhibiting as the Canadian Innovation Exchange in Toronto two weeks ago. Vencorps community builder Will Pate was holding down the booth and did a great job demoing how they're going to apply the crowdsourcing concept to venture capital.
A Crowdsourcing Foreclosure
http://crowdfunding.blogspot.com/2008/05/cambrianhousecom-crowdsourcing.html
[...] I got some more comments from Michael in an email, so I thought I would add them. Aidan Henry has also posted on Cambrian, as have others. [...]
We have followed CH and featured Gwabs on our media site http://fundfindr.tv/97.html. We will be interested what Jasmine has to say at Vidfest next week!
We definitely agree that execution and great teams are far more important than ideas and that crowdsourcing has limitations. That said, we still embrace the ethos of Wikinomics and offer ventures a public platform to pitch their early stage ventures at http://www.fundfindr.com. There are huge benefits to be gained through massive collaboration. Just don't expect the crowd to replace the team, let them supplement it.
[...] See also: Cambrian House gets the axe | Techvibes Blog [...]
[...] strategy is much like Cambrian House’s recent restructuring announcement; the current path is no longer viable, so spin some stuff off and retain the parts [...]
[...] simply removing the parts of the business that are no longer viable. This strategy is much like Cambrian House’s recent restructuring announcement; the current path is no longer viable, so spin some stuff off and retain the parts [...]
