Dot com party
Encyclopedia
A dot com party is a social and business networking mixer hosted by an Internet-related business, typically for promotional purposes or to celebrate a corporate event such as a product launch, venture funding round
, or corporate acquisition
.
" business era of 1997 to 2001, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area
.
Dot com parties, compared to "scenes from The Great Gatsby
", were markedly different than conventional corporate entertainment, which tends to be more private, and often fancier if less ostentatious. Among the common features of dot com parties were live bands, decorations, product demonstrations, gatecrashers, exotic or fancy venues, excessive alcohol consumption, and "schwag bag" giveaways. Some popular alternative musicians such as Elvis Costello
, Beck
, the B-52s, and Moby
, were particularly active on the Internet circuit. Some Internet entrepreneurs such as Craig Newmark
and Patty Beron were well known for hosting and attending the events. Others noted Internet partiers included Oliver Muoto
and the founders of a public relations
firm, Marino & Associates. Guest appearances by Internet meme
celebrities such as Mahir
were also popular.
During the height of the era there were 15-20 such events per week in San Francisco alone. The hosts were typically Internet start-up companies, although some events were held by service providers, magazine publishers, venture capital firms, and industry organizations. Trade shows such as siggraph
, Macworld
, and Comdex
would have several parties per night, some open but mostly by invitation. Various gossip blogs
, newspaper columns, and websites such as DrinkExchange, WorkIt, sfgirl.com
, Fucked Company
, and the A-List, regularly chronicled the exploits of the companies and their dot com party guests.
Time Magazine called The Industry Standard
's rooftop parties a "San Francisco Institution". The "ultimate" dot com party was arguably the iBASH'99 launch party held at the MGM Grand Las Vegas
at a cost of more than $10 million, featuring The Who
and the Dixie Chicks
. Its host, Pixelon
, was a sham company that went bankrupt within less than a year. The 2000 Webby Awards
in San Francisco, although far less expensive or lavish, is sometimes considered the "watershed".
By late 2000 funding for parties had begun to dry up as corporate events became more frugal and private, less ostentatious, and more closely directed to achieving specific business goals. During the final days of the dot com bubble, company-hosted parties gave way to trade show and industry mixers, that typically cost $40,000 to $60,000 to host. The subsequent crash of the venture finance-backed Internet industry in 2001 caused a lull in public celebrations, although there were some nostalgic events in honor of the massive layoffs and demise of many companies such as sfgirl's "pink slip parties" and similar events in New York City, which also became a focus of corporate recruiters.
began to host Internet office parties once again, to celebrate office moves and product launches.
, and event promotion
services. Websites that list upcoming parties and events, sometimes in exchange for paid sponsorships, are now common in most cities and most industries worldwide.
Some websites such as Craigslist
, and Ryze
(an early predecessor of Friendster
) that were started in order to organize or publicize dot com parties, became major companies in their own right.
, publicity, and recruitment
, they rarely tracked the success or financial return
from the money spent. In reality, at a typical party most guests were uninvited and typically had no idea who the host was or what business they were in. Many commentators criticized the events as wasteful displays of wealth
, poor planning of inexperienced managers, or excuses for binge drinking
.
Business historian Nancy Koehn noted that "Never before, not during the textile, transportation or steel booms, have companies spent so much money on people who don't work for them". Salon.com
, commenting on the excess, compared dot com parties to more traditional corporate entertainment: "Wall Street never thought to invite half of Manhattan".
Venture round
A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the primary stimuli for the development of new companies...
, or corporate acquisition
Mergers and acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions refers to the aspect of corporate strategy, corporate finance and management dealing with the buying, selling, dividing and combining of different companies and similar entities that can help an enterprise grow rapidly in its sector or location of origin, or a new field or...
.
History
Dot com parties were a notorious part of the culture of the American "dot comDot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
" business era of 1997 to 2001, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
.
Dot com parties, compared to "scenes from The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
", were markedly different than conventional corporate entertainment, which tends to be more private, and often fancier if less ostentatious. Among the common features of dot com parties were live bands, decorations, product demonstrations, gatecrashers, exotic or fancy venues, excessive alcohol consumption, and "schwag bag" giveaways. Some popular alternative musicians such as Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello , born Declan Patrick MacManus, is an English singer-songwriter. He came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the mid-1970s and later became associated with the punk/New Wave genre. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader...
, Beck
Beck
Beck Hansen is an American musician, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, known by the stage name Beck...
, the B-52s, and Moby
Moby
Richard Melville Hall , better known by his stage name Moby, is an American musician, DJ, and photographer. He is known mainly for his sample-based electronic music and his outspoken liberal political views, including his support of veganism and animal rights.Moby gained attention in the early...
, were particularly active on the Internet circuit. Some Internet entrepreneurs such as Craig Newmark
Craig Newmark
Craig Alexander Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based international website Craigslist.-Biography:...
and Patty Beron were well known for hosting and attending the events. Others noted Internet partiers included Oliver Muoto
Oliver Muoto
Oliver Muoto is a Polish-born serial entrepreneur responsible for co-founding several early stage companies including vFlyer , Epicentric and RandomNoise...
and the founders of a public relations
Public relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
firm, Marino & Associates. Guest appearances by Internet meme
Internet meme
The term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...
celebrities such as Mahir
Mahir Çagri
Mahir Çağrı became an Internet celebrity in 1999. His picture-laden personal homepage, which exclaimed in broken English his love of the accordion, travel, and women was visited by millions and spawned numerous fansites and parodies, one featured on Fox's MadTV...
were also popular.
During the height of the era there were 15-20 such events per week in San Francisco alone. The hosts were typically Internet start-up companies, although some events were held by service providers, magazine publishers, venture capital firms, and industry organizations. Trade shows such as siggraph
SIGGRAPH
SIGGRAPH is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals...
, Macworld
Macworld Conference & Expo
Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...
, and Comdex
COMDEX
COMDEX was a computer expo held in Las Vegas, Nevada, each November from 1979 to 2003. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world, usually second only to the German CeBIT, and by many accounts one of the largest trade shows in any industry sector...
would have several parties per night, some open but mostly by invitation. Various gossip blogs
Gossip columnist
A gossip columnist is someone who writes a gossip column in a newspaper or magazine, especially a gossip magazine. Gossip columns are material written in a light, informal style, which relates the gossip columnist's opinions about the personal lives or conduct of celebrities from show business ,...
, newspaper columns, and websites such as DrinkExchange, WorkIt, sfgirl.com
Sfgirl.com
sfgirl.com is an online community founded by Patty Beron, a "legendary party crasher" and "queen of San Francisco's dot-com party scene".-History:...
, Fucked Company
Fucked Company
Fucked Company was a website created by Philip J. "Pud" Kaplan as a "dot-com dead pool" which chronicled failing and troubled companies in its unique and abrasive style after the dot com bust in 2000...
, and the A-List, regularly chronicled the exploits of the companies and their dot com party guests.
Time Magazine called The Industry Standard
The Industry Standard
The Industry Standard is a news web site dedicated to technology business news, part of InfoWorld, a news web site covering technology in general...
's rooftop parties a "San Francisco Institution". The "ultimate" dot com party was arguably the iBASH'99 launch party held at the MGM Grand Las Vegas
MGM Grand Las Vegas
The MGM Grand Las Vegas is a hotel casino located on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. The MGM Grand is the third largest hotel in the world and largest hotel resort complex in the United States in front of The Venetian. The MGM Grand was the largest hotel in the world when it opened in...
at a cost of more than $10 million, featuring The Who
The Who
The Who are an English rock band formed in 1964 by Roger Daltrey , Pete Townshend , John Entwistle and Keith Moon . They became known for energetic live performances which often included instrument destruction...
and the Dixie Chicks
Dixie Chicks
The Dixie Chicks are an American country band which has also successfully crossed over into other genres. The band is composed of founding members Martie Erwin Maguire and Emily Erwin Robison, and lead singer Natalie Maines...
. Its host, Pixelon
Pixelon
Pixelon was a dot-com company founded in 1998 that gained fame for its extravagant Las Vegas launch party and the sudden and violent decline less than a year afterwards. It promised better distribution of high-quality video over the internet using technologies that were, in fact, fake or...
, was a sham company that went bankrupt within less than a year. The 2000 Webby Awards
2000 Webby Awards
Held in San Francisco's Masonic Center for a crowd of 3,000 invited guests, the 2000 Webby Awards were widely considered the peak of the Webby Awards and a watershed of dot com party culture...
in San Francisco, although far less expensive or lavish, is sometimes considered the "watershed".
By late 2000 funding for parties had begun to dry up as corporate events became more frugal and private, less ostentatious, and more closely directed to achieving specific business goals. During the final days of the dot com bubble, company-hosted parties gave way to trade show and industry mixers, that typically cost $40,000 to $60,000 to host. The subsequent crash of the venture finance-backed Internet industry in 2001 caused a lull in public celebrations, although there were some nostalgic events in honor of the massive layoffs and demise of many companies such as sfgirl's "pink slip parties" and similar events in New York City, which also became a focus of corporate recruiters.
Resurgence
In the late 2000s, social network services such as Yelp.com and Foursquare (social networking) held frequent parties for their members as a way to reward loyalty and participation among their members, sign up new members, and channel promotional goods and services from their paid sponsors. With a return of venture capital investment following the great recession, startups such as AirbnbAirbnb
Airbnb is an online service that matches people seeking vacation rentals and other short-term accommodations with those with rooms to rent, generally private parties that are not professional hoteliers. The site was founded in August 2008 by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. In July 2011, the company...
began to host Internet office parties once again, to celebrate office moves and product launches.
Legacy
One innovation of early dot com parties, e-mail invite lists and online RSVP lists, continued and has become a key feature of online event marketing, "events" features of online social networking services such as FacebookFacebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, and event promotion
Promoter (entertainment)
An entertainment promoter i.e. music, wrestling, boxing etc is a person or company in the business of marketing and promoting live events such as concerts/gigs, boxing matches, sports entertainment , festivals, raves, and nightclubs.- Business model :Promoters are typically hired as independent...
services. Websites that list upcoming parties and events, sometimes in exchange for paid sponsorships, are now common in most cities and most industries worldwide.
Some websites such as Craigslist
Craigslist
Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements, with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums....
, and Ryze
Ryze
Ryze.com is a free social networking website designed to link business professionals, particularly new entrepreneurs. The site claims to have over 500,000 members in 200 countries, with over 1,000 external organizations hosting sub-networks on the site. Both paid and unpaid membership levels are...
(an early predecessor of Friendster
Friendster
Friendster is a social gaming site that is based in Malaysia, KL. The company now operates mainly from the three Asian countries namely in the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore....
) that were started in order to organize or publicize dot com parties, became major companies in their own right.
Commentary
Although companies often justified party-throwing as a tool for branding, sales, marketing buzzMarketing buzz
Marketing buzz or simply buzz — a term used in word-of-mouth marketing — is the interaction of consumers and users of a product or service which serves to amplify the original marketing message. a vague but positive association, excitement, or anticipation about a product or service...
, publicity, and recruitment
Recruitment
Recruitment refers to the process of attracting, screening, and selecting qualified people for a job. For some components of the recruitment process, mid- and large-size organizations often retain professional recruiters or outsource some of the process to recruitment agencies.The recruitment...
, they rarely tracked the success or financial return
Return on investment
Return on investment is one way of considering profits in relation to capital invested. Return on assets , return on net assets , return on capital and return on invested capital are similar measures with variations on how “investment” is defined.Marketing not only influences net profits but also...
from the money spent. In reality, at a typical party most guests were uninvited and typically had no idea who the host was or what business they were in. Many commentators criticized the events as wasteful displays of wealth
Conspicuous consumption
Conspicuous consumption is spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth. In the mind of a conspicuous consumer, such display serves as a means of attaining or maintaining social status....
, poor planning of inexperienced managers, or excuses for binge drinking
Binge drinking
Binge drinking or heavy episodic drinking is the modern epithet for drinking alcoholic beverages with the primary intention of becoming intoxicated by heavy consumption of alcohol over a short period of time. It is a kind of purposeful drinking style that is popular in several countries worldwide,...
.
Business historian Nancy Koehn noted that "Never before, not during the textile, transportation or steel booms, have companies spent so much money on people who don't work for them". Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
, commenting on the excess, compared dot com parties to more traditional corporate entertainment: "Wall Street never thought to invite half of Manhattan".