What does Herring's death mean?

It's fascinating to see some of the post-mortems on Red Herring, and I only now saw this one in Salon.com annoyingly called "Death of a cheerleader." Despite the obnoxious title Om Malik, who used to work for Herring, gets it mostly right. His fanciful construct, however, that Herring was about a "religion of optimism" and now is the time for a "religion of pragmatism" may be the thing that captures the imagination of Salon's editorial team (who, it seems, only saw Herring as news-worthy in its demise--I don't remember them covering any of our successes over ten years) but it only hints at the truth--and is mostly wrong.

Certainly Red Herring grew in a time of optimism, a commodity that we are now in short supply, and tended to reflect the reality of its era. And it’s true that Tony and I are perhaps more optimistic than pessimistic creatures. Yet while the Wall Street Journal called us the "bible of Silicon Valley," taking the religion metaphor too far misses the point of what Herring was about. We were about helping people become successful. That's all we wanted to do. I had zero interest in hyping an industry or proselytizing a faith--of any kind. I always felt--and employees who were at Herring before Om will remember me saying--that we were not there to herald a revolution. We didn't want to prove that the world was becoming "wired" nor that companies were becoming "fast." We had no theory to prove--except that growth happens. We knew that business and technology trends are cyclical and follow adoption curves. The first piece we ever wrote in our launch issue in May 1993, in fact, was an open letter to Trip Hawkins suggesting that he should hold off on the 3DO IPO as it was a company built more on hype that substance. We often spoke of the need for a "healthy skepticism." We were built on the idea of pragmatism. Our goal was to help those entrepreneurs trying to build companies be successful. We knew that this wasn't accomplished by hyping fanciful ideas. We weren't always perfect, of course, and many of our predictions proved wrong--that is the nature of predictive journalism.

The truth, however, is that Red Herring, like many other companies in 2000, took a gamble and ultimately lost. With fierce competition from large players we felt we had to "double down or take our chips off the table." We chose to go for it. We raised tens of millions of dollars and built a large company--for too brief a time it turns out. We didn't exit and the fall from our previous height proved fatal. But this was a corporate failure--not a market failure (though the market was surely brutal for a time it was never worse that our first 2 years of operation). Herring got tied into a pretzel and couldn't untie itself, but the need for Herring remains. Tony is capitalizing on this with AlwaysOn, and we shall see how well Alex Vieux, who now owns the rights to the brand, does with "Red Herring."

I say that Om hints at the truth with his religion metaphor—there was certainly a premium on ideas in the late 1990s, while now there is a premium on execution. But today doesn't feel a whole lot different than the early days of Red Herring in the early 1990s--we are just exiting a recession and a war with Iraq. We are recovering from a stock market bust and a VC slowdown. And yet, new technologies, new ideas, and many, many talented people abound. In fact, I feel a whole lot more optimistic now then I did 10 years ago.