The last pixel show
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Even within DEN, doubts began to arise. One young executive, now a high-ranking star at another startup, remembers being stunned by the amateurish nature of the shows and the apparent cluelessness of the people in charge. "I thought they were nuts," he says bitterly. "They didn't get the Web. There was nothing going on -- no production values, no excitement. All they did was make everything as minimal as possible." Another former executive points out that DEN's 13 shows were attracting an almost negligible audience, averaging fewer than 5,000 hits per day.
The culture of many Internet startups is casually communitarian, reflecting something of the hippie ideal of the '60s. As Craig Caryl, DEN's former head of production, phrases it, "The Web is all about sharing."
But DEN didn't work that way, at least not when it came to producing its shows. "DEN was never really a startup, in the sense that there was never a cross-pollination between different kinds of expertise," Joel Brand explains. "Part of what the startup thing is about is getting a potent mix of energy, talents, and experiences together and seeing what they create. At DEN, the vision was always top-down, and there wasn't that kind of mixing....DEN was a house divided. On one side were all the former television people, who made up the executive team and the production staff. On the other were the tech people, many of whom were far more creative and saw what was coming from very early on."
Through further rounds of venture-capital funding, as well as through advertising contracts with major clients that totaled some $7.5 million, the money continued to pour in. Unfortunately for the investors, it was pouring out again just as fast. With outlays for salaries, cars, and business entertainment continuing to climb, DEN's burn rate sailed north of $3 million a month. Meanwhile, DEN's founders filled their offices with $1,800 Eames chairs and state-of-the-art DVD players, hoping the smell of money would be enough to keep attracting Hollywood players. They also began spending less and less time in the Santa Monica studio, preferring the comforts of a place they shared in Encino -- a mansion that had once belonged to Suge Knight, the jailed founder of Death Row Records.
Daniel S., too, eventually wound up in Encino. After finishing his acting stint, he was offered a job maintaining DEN's computers. Soon he was assigned to an office in an outbuilding on the estate grounds.
At the mansion, Collins-Rector, Shackley, Pierce, and their guests enjoyed a lifestyle as lavish as any of DEN's writers could have dreamed up. "There were white shag carpets, there were gold banisters, and there were statues of black jaguars in the house," says one former employee who spent some time at the estate. "I'm talking about the very new rich. Not that I'm old money or anything, but I know not to have gold banisters, and I know that bookshelves are nice, as opposed to neon lights on the wall."
As time wore on, the attention of the three men wandered from the company to focus increasingly on the constant round of parties they threw for a largely male group of friends. "You would go to the house," says another former employee, "and the door would be opened by this 15-year-old boy, and there would be teenage boys all over the place. It was very strange."
Ultimately it fell to David Neuman, the former Disney executive, to see to the task of actually running the business. Though he'd never before worked at an Internet company, Neuman became the public face of DEN, adopting the air of a techno-prophet. The media loved to quote him. In USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and a host of trade publications both on- and offline, he emerged as the glib, well-spoken voice of the next new Web success. (Neuman declined to be interviewed for this article.)
On September 17, 1999, DEN filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, formally signaling that it intended to offer its stock for sale to the public. According to its filing, the company expected to raise as much as $75 million from the IPO -- though by now few employees expected the money to go toward creating a better product. "They might have been able to cash out," says one. "They never would have had a successful company, but all the investors would have been able to cash out and take their profits. That's what it was all about. You think these people care about the computer? Do you think they care about the technology or the Internet?...They just care about cash."
