Kiko’s $258,100 Web 2.0 failure
September 2nd, 2006
The online calendar startup Kiko has been sold on eBay for $258K. The bidding story is here. Following the successful sale of the meta-search engine Jux2 for $101K, eBay is really becoming a plausible way to cash out.
Kiko was seed-funded by Paul Graham’s YCombinator, for the price of one programmer’s 6 month salary. Paul sums up Kiko’s failure in two words: Google Calendar. Supposedly it was the integration with Gmail that made Google Calendar more useful. This is the same office-effect Microsoft has used in the past to combat rival office products: integrating products together.