Dotcom stars have designs on your home
THE founders of Lastminute. com, Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, have teamed up again to form a new business. — Hoberman has already spent several months recruiting a team for Mydeco.com, which aims to help people decorate their homes.
Context & Ripple Effects
Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox built Lastminute.com into one of the defining UK names of the first dot-com wave, and their reunion marks a deliberate return to consumer internet building after that company's era ended. The timing fits a wider 2007 pattern in which dot-com-era assets are finding second acts — the Financial Times reported earlier this month that Boo.com has been given a new lease of life as a brand.
For Mydeco.com, Hoberman has spent several months recruiting a team ahead of launch, signalling that this is a staffed venture rather than a name registered in haste; the target market is helping people decorate their homes.
First-order effects
- Hoberman and Lane Fox put their combined Lastminute.com brand equity behind a new consumer property, giving Mydeco.com instant credibility and press attention that unknown entrants in home decoration must buy or build over years.
- Hoberman's months-long recruitment effort means the immediate work is assembling product and commercial staff while the founders lend the public face.
Second-order effects
- Established UK home-decoration retailers and media now face a well-known digital team attacking a category where they hold the supplier relationships, forcing them to weigh online tools against their showroom economics.
- A credible founder-backed entrant raises the bar for other consumer-internet ventures chasing lifestyle verticals, sharpening competition for both talent and venture attention in London's small startup scene.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the post-bubble generation of European internet companies will increasingly be founded by operators who lived through the crash — trading the 1999 playbook of scale-at-any-cost for focused, category-specific services like home decoration.
- Dot-com-era brands themselves become reusable capital, as the Boo.com revival alongside this launch suggests: names that once signalled failure are being repriced as assets by a market that has recovered its appetite.
The trend: First-generation dot-com founders and brands are recycling their experience and name recognition into focused second-wave consumer internet startups, with home and lifestyle verticals as early targets.