Hot gossip from Ned Brainard's poison pen
"Troubled," is now the standard adjective for describing I/PRO. The company that once claimed it would become the standard for Internet audience counting and auditing now appears to be locked in a desperate struggle against a market that won't adopt its products as the standard, as well as venture-capital investors out for blood. The wave of troubles washing over I/PRO may have begun when it allied itself with the A. C. Nielsen company just as Nielsen-produced estimates of the Web audience were, as we noted at the time, being thoroughly discredited by Vanderbilt's Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak. The tide of criticism claimed founder and chairman of the board Ariel Poler (although he's still on the board). Now it's a tsunami. In recent weeks, a double handful of the staff and senior management corps has been swept away. Among the eight casualties during the Thanksgiving holiday: director of product development Tina Lin and general manager of new media Michael Tchong (both laid off); and marketing VP Stephen Klein (resigned).
Chalk it all up to "a shifting focus and move into strategic data distribution," says a company spokesperson. "We're not abandoning any particular product," claims I/PRO's Kimberly Smith, while admitting that a story in the January 1997 issue of Red Herring about company plans to dump its I/CODE, I/MAIL, and I/POINTS projects was essentially accurate. Meanwhile, a Flux friend familiar with the scene blames the VC firm Sutter Hill Ventures for imposing consultant Mark Ashida on I/PRO as CEO last January. "The company is rudderless. There's no focus, no real understanding of the business, no vision there," says our embittered friend. But as our friend should know, that doesn't always bother a VC.
