what was that? is that all there is? who is this? this is it.

87 photo

the answers are not on Pat McQuaid's laptop

what it is

what it was

what it could have been

Divine Cycling Group intervention

looking forward to the latest installment in this dramatic tale

Wooderson: hey man, you know anything about bikes?

DCG: no, not really

Wooderson:  it'd be a lot cooler if you did

7 Comments

What a shit show. More here, http://www.velocipedesalon.com/forum/f2/cue-madfiber-announcement-layoffs-34140.html

maybe some venture capitalist or investment banker or just an avid cyclist with an MBA will explain to me where the profits are, in buying a weak or injured company's debt and then running it into the ground.

http://www.bicycleretailer.com/north-america/2013/10/30/mad-fiber-shuts-down-may-be-headed-bankruptcy#.UnHTt1OW5mg

http://www.wheelfanatyk.com/blog/onward-upward/#comments

Thanks for those links Mark. I gotta say, Hjertberg is remarkably Zen about the whole thing. I don't understand why it all had to end this way either. Seems like a waste of a lot of potential and while I was never likely to be customer for Madfiber products I was definitely pulling for their survival. I would have thought that if there was any place for a small innovative company like them to survive, it would have been here, in Seattle. I guess not though.

I'm in the same boat. I'm not the carbon wheel target market poster child, but I have a lot of respect for innovative things. Ric and Max came up with an amazing wheel. And all the other hurdles and hoops and horseshit that go along with bringing a product to market are what baffle me. Incredible engineers often don't have great business sense and business people often don't know shit about cycling. But finding the perfect storm of people to work together constructively in a startup is a real challenge these days when hemorrhaging money like Kozmo.com is no longer an option.

Roger all of that. Way back in the year of nineteen hundred and ninety eight I moved cross country to Seattle for a framebuilding job. Three weeks later I was being laid off. As is so often the case in the bike biz, the owner of the company was a very smart bike guy, not such a great business guy. Finding someone with enough knowledge in both of those fields (to be able to innovate, and run a successful business) is not as straightforward as it might seem, it seems. Also: You need some luck too.

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