Kiko Sells for $258,100
BBC America fans are quite familiar with a delightful show called, Cash In The Attic. The premise of the show is that antique experts go to someone's house and find things which might look like trash but end up being valuable, selling for a lot of money at an auction.
Context & Ripple Effects
Kiko's death was already public material before the hammer fell: Paul Graham's Kiko Affair post and OnStartups' post-mortem on the failed Web 2.0 startup ran the week before the close, framing the shutdown as a lesson rather than a private wind-down.
The close itself traveled unusually far for a small-company liquidation — GigaOM led with it, and Venture Voice picked up the same story the same day under the framing 'eBay turns iBanker.' A failed startup's asset sale was being covered like a financing event.
First-order effects
- Kiko's assets change hands for $258,100 at public auction, converting a dead company into cash and giving buyers its product outright — a priced outcome where no acquirer had stepped forward.
- Both GigaOM and Venture Voice treat the eBay close as news in its own right, establishing the marketplace auction as a legitimate exit channel for failed startups rather than a garage-sale curiosity.
Second-order effects
- Other struggling Web 2.0 companies gain a visible template: run the liquidation openly on eBay, where the bidding itself does the work a banker would otherwise broker, and press coverage becomes part of the marketing.
- Buyers learn that failed startups carry real recoverable value — code, users, domains — which puts a floor under assets that would previously have been abandoned or quietly absorbed.
Third-order effects
- If distressed startups keep exiting through open marketplaces, downside outcomes become more legible to investors: recoverable value gets bid per asset instead of being written off wholesale, subtly repricing what a failed venture returns.
The trend: Startup failures are shifting from private wind-downs to public asset auctions, with marketplaces like eBay standing in for the investment bank in the exit process.