How turf wars and miscues crippled SpiralFrog
Before the doors closed at the once-promising start-up, money got tight, and the payroll went unpaid. Management squabbles made a bad situation even worse.
In July 2008, two months before start-up SpiralFrog's aspirations were shredded by the souring economy and a series of management gaffes, the long knives were already drawn in the music service's executive suite.
In a private meeting, CEO Mel Schrieberg was stripped of most of his power after SpiralFrog's board grew tired of his heavy spending on salaries and ineffective marketing strategies. Even worse for Schrieberg, the man intent on driving him out was an old friend and one of his main allies at the company, founder Joe Mohen.
"The board wants him removed now," Mohen wrote in a July 21, 2008, e-mail exchange with Amir Khan, an executive at 3V Capital Management, SpiralFrog's biggest financial backer. "He adds no value at this time. The management will be very demoralized, if he remains."
The start-up's short, troubled history saw other clashes among managers. At the center of most of them was Mohen. He butted heads with his handpicked CEO, as well as SpiralFrog's board of directors and financial backers.
To Mohen, SpiralFrog "was all about him controlling the company, no matter who was in charge," Schrieberg, who maintained his CEO title from January 2007 to October 2008, told CNET News in a phone interview. But Mohen, who had founded the pioneering voting site Election.com, hardly deserves all the blame for what went wrong.
Schrieberg, a former IBM executive, had no operational experience in advertising or in music. In e-mails sent to several SpiralFrog employees, Mohen called some of Schrieberg's decisions "insane."
Adding to the management dysfunction was Scott Stagg, who managed 3V (now called Stagg Capital), the company that loaned SpiralFrog $34 million. For nearly two years, Stagg paid all of SpiralFrog's bills. Only sumo wrestlers are more likely to throw their weight around than Stagg, former employees have indicated, and even Mohen says management couldn't do much without first checking with Stagg.
On March 13, 2009, the music service was forced to turn over assets to creditors and shut down. To find out how a company that some called a potential iTunes killer so quickly turned into yet another dot-com flameout, CNET reviewed numerous documents and interviewed 13 people formerly associated with the company, including former board members, executives, and employees.
Certainly, SpiralFrog, which was trying to succeed with an unproven business model, wasn't exactly in an ideal position from the start. But former insiders, most of whom requested anonymity, say inexperienced managers who allowed petty squabbles to cloud their judgment didn't do themselves or their company any favors.
Could have been a contender
In December 2008, cash-strapped SpiralFrog appeared doomed. Entertainment conglomerate Viacom had expressed interest in acquiring a minority stake in the start-up three months beforehand, but the deal fell through. Yahoo would also eventually kick the tires on SpiralFrog but it also passed. Stagg, in a December 11, 2008, e-mail to SpiralFrog's board, from which he had recently resigned, sized up SpiralFrog's bleak financial situation.
"At this time, the company is out of money, all employees have been terminated, (and) over $8 million of payables remain outstanding," Stagg wrote. "There are multiple lawsuits with pending judgments, and the major music publishers, including Sony/ATV, Warner Chappell, and Harry Fox are expecting $550,000 of long overdue payments. Sony ATV is demanding a payment of $100,000 by Monday, December 15, which, if the company fails to meet, might force SpiralFrog to remove all of Sony ATV's content from the site."
Stagg may have overstated the situation a bit. Money would eventually trickle back in--virtually all of it from him--to help the company limp along while the board searched for an acquirer. There's no doubt, however, that at that time, SpiralFrog was nearing collapse.
Mohen, 53, acknowledges that mistakes were made. But, he added, what else could you expect? SpiralFrog was breaking new ground as it attempted to become the first service to offer music downloads free of charge to the public. In his version of the company story, everyone did their best and came close to turning SpiralFrog into a hit service, which attracted more than 2.5 million register users before closing.
What really killed SpiralFrog, according to Mohen and Schrieberg, 66, was the collapse of the investment-banking industry in September and the nation's subsequent financial meltdown. "There is not much you can do when funding and advertising sales go down precipitously due to economic conditions," Schrieberg said.
Until the economic meltdown, Mohen said SpiralFrog was on track. "It was all going to happen for us in October," he said. "We came a lot closer than people will ever know."
Although Mohen declined to specify how SpiralFrog's prospects might have changed in October, records show that company executives believed that a Viacom investment, which to them seemed imminent, would save the start-up.
The terms of drawn-up contracts, copies of which were obtained by CNET, called for Viacom to give SpiralFrog $100,000 in cash and $6.5 million worth of advertising on its MTV Networks unit. In exchange, Viacom would receive 4.3 million shares of preferred stock. The deal, if closed, would have valued SpiralFrog at about $120 million.
In September, at about the time the economy was becoming unglued, Viacom backed out of investment talks, and SpiralFrog's chances to survive the recession soured. One executive who did business with SpiralFrog and had seen the company's books said it's hard for him to conceive that anyone would have bought it. The source said the company's debt was just too big and complicated.
Who is in charge?
Headquartered in New York, SpiralFrog was a different kind of start-up from the get-go. It funded operations through loans. The company issued secured notes, essentially a contract whereby a company promises to repay at a certain interest rate.
After receiving $9 million in traditional equity funding in 2006, Stagg's investment firm began loaning SpiralFrog money in May 2007. Eventually, Stagg would lend the music service $34 million in convertible notes, which gave him the option of converting the loans into stock. Stagg said he never recouped the money.
So why go that riskier route, borrowing money? Most companies that can attract venture capital do. Taking out loans is less attractive because loans typically have to be repaid with interest, regardless of how the company fares.
Another way SpiralFrog differed from most start-ups was that it spent lavishly on salaries. Start-up CEOs typically ask for more equity in their companies rather than a big paycheck. It's common to see Silicon Valley managers earn less than $150,000 a year.
Not at SpiralFrog, which paid Mohen $360,000 a year in annual "consulting fees," documents show. Before he departed, former CEO Robin Kent was paid a $340,000 salary. Schrieberg's salary was $279,000.
A power struggle between Kent and Mohen paved the way for Schrieberg's appointment as CEO. In December 2006, Kent nearly drove Mohen out of SpiralFrog in a failed takeover bid. Mohen barely had enough board votes to keep control, and Kent, who had become CEO only seven months earlier, was sent packing. Just days after that, Mohen handed SpiralFrog's CEO position to Schrieberg, whom he had known for 11 years, Schrieberg said.
It was a questionable call. According to several former employees, to entice users of illegal peer-to-peer sites to SpiralFrog's legal and free music service, the company needed a CEO with a strong background in advertising and music. Schrieberg, who spent most of his career as a sales manager at companies like Xerox and IBM, had neither.
Power struggle
In early 2008, Schrieberg spearheaded a massive search engine- and affiliate-marketing campaign that would eventually cost the company $11 million, records show. The strategy was successful at drawing visitors but failed to generate lasting interest. Most people stayed a few minutes, viewed a few Web pages, and moved on. The practice of paying for traffic was supported by the board of directors and Mohen, but eventually, they lost faith in the strategy and in Schrieberg.
Perhaps not surprisingly, by the summer of 2008, it was becoming apparent that Mohen, Schrieberg, and Stagg were competing for control of the privately held SpiralFrog, former employees say. SpiralFrog was dependent on Stagg's money, which gave him considerable influence. Schrieberg had the board behind him at least until July. Mohen's personal financial troubles and feuding with fellow board members, meanwhile, sapped much of his power.
Despite his significant consulting fees and the private sale of some of his SpiralFrog shares, Mohen took out a personal loan of $115,000 in 2007 from a financial-services firm that was doing business with SpiralFrog, records show. He acknowledged to CNET News that he has not yet repaid the loan.
Schrieberg said Mohen asked him to be the guarantor of an American Express card that Mohen would use for business expenses. And since it was Stagg covering those expenses, he could deny any charge. That made Mohen beholden to Stagg as well as well as Schrieberg, who said he was never reimbursed for more than $40,000 that Mohen rung up on the credit card.
As for how he got into financial trouble, Mohen suggested that it was because of SpiralFrog's collapse. "I risked everything on the company," he said, adding that he invested $400,000 of his personal wealth, an amount he says he never recovered.
But why would Schrieberg share his card with Mohen? Schrieberg said he was just trying to help him out. Several former employees said, however, that Schrieberg went to great lengths to ingratiate himself with board members, including Mohen.
During the two years Schrieberg was CEO, the company hired the sons of board members Steve Norcia, Tom Mackell, and Bob Gordon. Schrieberg confirmed this but said the board member's sons were well-qualified.
Hiring relatives of board members can be problematic, according to corporate-governance experts. Employees can file discrimination suits, if they believe that a board member's relative was given a promotion that rightfully should have gone to them. Schrieberg said all the hires were cleared by the company's legal counsel. He also denied that such decisions made him unpopular with SpiralFrog employees. On the contrary, he said, "I was revered."
Nonetheless, Schrieberg lost the board's backing on July 21, when a $974,000 invoice from AOL, for affiliate-marketing services, reached the desks of Mohen and other board members. The bill was a shock; Schrieberg had told the board that the costs add up to about $600,000, according to 3V's Khan. In an e-mail exchange between Mohen and Khan, who was also a board member, Mohen lobbied for 3V to oust Schrieberg.
"(Schrieberg) needs to be kept out of the office," Mohen wrote. "When I saw the invoice today, I realized how serious this is...At this point, the majority of the board and senior-(management) team find him incompetent...Make him vice chair, and pay him for his cooperation."
Khan replied that Schrieberg was "CEO only in name. His duties are all gone to me." But Khan stopped short of agreeing to remove Schrieberg. "We can't have another CEO leave," he wrote.
Schrieberg said he resigned of his own volition in October. But he acknowledged that Mohen came to him sometime around July 21 and told him that Khan would be taking over most of the CEO duties. He said he agreed to go along with the plan because Stagg and 3V were already calling most of the shots. But Schrieberg strongly maintains that he performed well at SpiralFrog and that the board and senior management were aware of "every penny" he spent as CEO.
Starting over
In an interview, Khan and Stagg said Schrieberg was kept around because of the ongoing Viacom negotiations. Stagg said he and the rest of the board believed that removing Schrieberg would have rattled the entertainment conglomerate, which had expressed interest in obtaining a minority stake in SpiralFrog. With Stagg's blessing, Khan and some of his lieutenants at the hedge fund tried operating the start-up for several months without any official titles. In an interview, Mohen called this effort a disaster.
"The management team to a person was alienated by Stagg's people," Mohen said. "That was because they tried to operate a business, and they didn't have the skills to do it."
In mid-September, the wheels came off. Viacom declined to invest in SpiralFrog. Stagg continued to provide some funding, but only a small percentage of what he once did. In November, Mohen gathered employees still left and told them that the company would not make payroll.
The situation was tough, but there was a brief upside for Mohen: without Stagg's money, SpiralFrog's management no longer had to placate him, former employees said. Mohen was named interim CEO and began looking for new investors. He tried convincing 3V to continue funding the company by threatening to steer SpiralFrog into bankruptcy and start all over with a new company.
Still, everyone knew that such an endeavor would be impossible, according to Stagg, because the licensing deals that SpiralFrog had with Universal Music and EMI were nontransferable. If SpiralFrog went bankrupt, Mohen would have to renegotiate for new music licenses.
Stagg made several unsuccessful attempts to take control of the board but always failed. "The truth is, we never had control (of the company) because we never had control of the board," Stagg said.
Proof that Stagg and 3V did control SpiralFrog could potentially cost the investor more than he's already lost over it. Antaeus Capital, a financial-services firm that began working with SpiralFrog in 2006, has asserted in a lawsuit that the start-up breached several agreements. The complaint, filed last November, alleges that SpiralFrog was really Stagg's property and that he should make good on the money the company owed. The case is still moving through the courts.
In the end, the current suit is a fight over the bones of a dead company. SpiralFrog's domain name was sold in May to MyMojo, a mobile-content site, for $20,000, sources say. After three years' worth of turf wars, more than $40 million worth of loans and investments, and a long list of unfulfilled promises, that's pretty much all that was left.