Andy Wang and Ironminds Weather the Dot-Com Shakedown

Last spring, Wang moved to New York City to help create a new online venture. Novix Media was founded last January by Michael Berman, cofounder of George, and venture capitalist Douglas Eger, who was the CEO. Novix's plan, a version of which Wang showed me back then, was to create a multi-"channel" portal for twentysomethings, covering careers, sports, entertainment, etc., which Wang would edit.

Asked now what sold him on Novix, Wang says, "One guy. That was Bill Martin, the guy who started Raging Bull," the financial site he sold to AltaVista early this year. "Twenty-two-year-old guy, and given that he did sell his company for something like $160 million in stock, completely unpretentious. A smart guy, a real guy, just a guy that you'd like to hang out with."

Wang says he had some reservations about Novix's plans from the start. "I thought that parts of it were shit ideas," he says, but it was a chance "to go play with Bill for a while and build something for real, even if they build an inferior product. I thought, if we build something that actually reaches a million people, and they fuck everything else up, that's still someplace that reaches a million people and we can publish cool stuff on it."

Ironminds tailed Wang to New York?Novix bought out the J school with stock?and as he was building his Novix editorial staff over the summer, they put out Ironminds on the company's dime and with the bosses' blessings, having nothing much else to do while the tech staff was still building the new Novix site. It was fat times and a good summer for Ironminds?Wang says it was "like summer camp"?editorially highlighted in July by a Celia Farber interview with O.J. Simpson.

Unfortunately, Novix got started just as the bottom fell out of the new economy. By August it had blown through most of its startup capital and the principals were having serious trouble raising more. It fired its tech staff and most of Wang's editorial staff just before Labor Day. A new game plan was announced?something about acquiring existing sites to plug into its portal, rather than creating in-house. As late as mid-September?even while New York Press and no doubt every other venue in the city was getting freelancer queries from those former Novix writers, who were telling dire stories of a firm in its death throes?Berman was still insisting to reporters that the site, to be called wetpaint.com, would launch in late fall. Meanwhile, Wang, who says he knew by then that it was all over, was going into the Greenwich St. office every day and working on Ironminds, paying some contributors small fees out of his own pocket and scheming how to keep it afloat when Novix tanked.

Two weeks ago, he called to tell me Novix was shutting down. (Berman made it public a couple of days later.) Wang says he actually missed the final meeting where Berman made the announcement to remaining staff?he was out trying to raise funds for Ironminds. He says Novix's closing "really was the third or fourth thing I was worried about that day. My first question was, 'How much longer do I get my office?'"

Of his former bosses, he says, "I think Berman actually is a nice guy. I think Eger clearly wasn't a media guy. I think some of the problems that Novix had were that he just went to the wrong places for money. They were good guys, but they were in over their heads. They were like everybody else [in new media], looking for a quick kill. They were like, 'Well, fuck, we can turn this into a billion-dollar company.'" And, obviously, the timing was disastrous. "If we were doing this a year ago, we would have raised $50 million easily. So it's not that Berman or Eger were any dumber than anybody else out there. But the timing... It's gone from bad to worse, recently, if you've been watching the market."

Wang got a final paycheck but no severance, no golden parachute. Asked how he's getting by financially, he says, "See, the thing about that, people think I'm full of shit about this, but money's always a fluid thing for me. It's about moving money between four things?my bank account, stock portfolio, credit card debt and whoever happens to be paying me at the time. So until the day comes when I can't walk into a grocery store and buy the $2 spaghetti I like versus the 79-cent kind, it's not a big issue for me. I'm gonna keep paying rent. I'm living in the West Village. It's expensive, but I can afford it, it's fine. I'm still going wherever I want to go, eating wherever I want to eat, buying what I want to buy."

He says he instantly started hearing from friends in the industry offering him jobs. For now he's holding out while actively pitching Ironminds to potential investors. "I mean, we're so lean. Ironminds could operate efficiently on $300,000 per year, and if we have $750,000 we can put out more stuff than Salon does. If we can stay alive until January, when a lot of this [dot-com failure] shakes itself out, we'll still be here, and we'll be one of the first choices for a pet content project."

He adds, "Bill and I are actively looking at media opportunities together. Bill still has a lot of clout. If AltaVista goes public he'll have $20 million and he'll really be fine. We are working on possibly pitching a print project that's tied to a website...and I think that Ironminds could end up being part of this mix."

A print magazine? Does Andy Wang, dot-com wunderkind, see the irony there?

"I completely see the irony there," he concedes. "You know, the beautiful part about a print magazine?this is what Inside.com has done, and TheStreet.com should have done it too?when you do a print magazine, you get a completely different business model, because it's based on historical precedents. Nobody expects you to make money in the first two years. Period. So, it's sorta like, if we do a print magazine, we're not gonna see an IPO payday, but fuck, we get to actually build something."

Yes, I know, I tell him. It's called Old Media. Come to papa.

Still, he cautions, he doesn't see himself going totally old-school. "I'm not looking to go be senior editor at The New York Times Magazine or go work for Brill or something?fuck no. I'd kill myself before I did that."

Of the general bloodbath in new media lately, he says, "I think a lot of what's happened is an overreaction, but it's a very deserved overreaction. I think that from now on, most if not all business plans are going to be based on some sort of reality. If you're an e-tailer, [investors are] going to say, 'Wal-Mart is at 30 times earnings, so this is what we have to base you guys on. And based on this, we're not going to give you funding.'"

For people like him, who want to create and run content sites, he predicts that either "you're going to start small and lean, or you're just going to become an extension of an old-media property." He notes that old-media giants like Conde Nast and Hearst haven't really embraced the Web yet, "although Esquire's site is pretty damn good now. Rollingstone.com is a bunch of shit right now. A lot of these guys are going to take their publications online, and that's where the smart people like me, four or five years from now, are going to end up. It's very very hard to just start something now and rise above the noise."

Asked what he likes in current online magazines, he says, "Flack is pretty smart. It's a bunch of college students. I read Romenesko. I read Salon from time to time. I still read McSweeney's." Of content sites in general, he predicts, "I'd say two months from now, there are going to be fewer. There's going to be a lot of content sites that are going to die." He believes, however, that the better-known ones will survive. "A year from now Salon's still here, Slate's still here, Smoking Gun's still here, Suck's still here, Feed's still here."

Inside? "Inside's gotta exist," he grins. "Who else is gonna write about everything I do?" Still, he's very skeptical of that site's subscription model. "What are the two sites that can do that? The Economist and The Wall Street Journal... The idea of somebody just paying for [Inside] is ridiculous to me... Romenesko in a way has made Inside kind of useless." On the other hand, he thinks Inside's plans to offer a print magazine as well as the website is a "killer model," with all sorts of potential for others. "Somebody like Hearst saying, 'For $15 you get all the content on our site, and we'll send you Esquire. Or let's say something like digital music or file sharing solves itself. Think about something like that?you pay a subscription fee, we'll throw in a magazine. New media is going to exist in a huge way, but all the ones doing really well are going to be extensions of old media."

What other developments does he see coming in the near future?

"A lot more people are going to put cartoons and tv on the Web. The technology's not here yet. There's going to be another $100 million lost before people realize this is a really fucking dumb idea. I mean, Pseudo.com [now defunct] was pompous enough to say, 'We're competing with CBS.' A lot of people are going to keep trying anyway. The model makes no sense whatsoever... At least for the next year, it's gonna get uglier and stupider for a while."

Wireless technology similarly doesn't impress him. "To me, your phone really isn't something you're going to interact with. Not for me." On the positive side, he thinks TiVo is a "killer app." "It's gonna be pretty empowering." Though he predicts there will be Luddites who "say this is the end of the American family?people won't sit around and watch tv together anymore."

As for himself, his immediate plans are quite old-school: he's organizing a fundraiser for Ironminds to be held this Thurs., Oct. 26, starting at 8, at Filter 14 in the meatpacking district (432 W. 14th St. at Washington St.)." Ironminds contributors will give readings, there'll be a band and, for a gimmick, a silent auction of items like having your name placed on the Ironminds masthead.

Asked what's the big lesson he's learned from this year's experience, he replies, "The big lesson is that when you come to New York everything is magnified. All your successes and failures... But if you really want to do media, sadly, you have to be here, for a while. If you want to do media on this level."