Wednesday, July 05, 2006



Amanda Congdon Fired From Rocketboom - Heads To LA??




Amanda Congdon -- in my view the business side of Rocketboom -- has been fired. As her vlog reports -- complete with an upside down map -- she's no longer with the organization she owned 49 percent of. I met Amanda at Vloggercon and -- as I told her -- came away convinced that she was developing a good business head.

I also explained to Andrew Baron that they seemed to work as brother and sister. Rocketboom -- at the time I talked to Andrew at Vloggercon -- lacked a real corporate structure, other than being an LLC without stock. If Amanda owns 49 percent of Rocketboom and there's no Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws to govern "who's bringing what" to the total value of the Rocketboom LLC, then Amanda could claim that her 49 percent is the "image" of Rocketboom, and thus be paid a royalty for each time Andrew uses a rerun in the future.

For his part, Andrew uses the RB blog to explain what happened:

"RB Announcement:

Amanda Congdon has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood.

We wanted to meet her request to move production out to L.A., however, we are a small company and have not been able to figure out a way to make it work, financially and in many other ways at this time. So sadly we bid Amanda adieu and wish her all the best.

Rocketboom goes on.

Andrew Baron, the founder and creator of Rocketboom, will stay with the company in New York and will continue to produce and direct the show. We are in the daunting process of recruiting a replacement for Amanda.

While Amanda will be sorely missed, we have big plans for Rocketboom and are determined to make the show better than ever.

After Field Week and a week on hiatus, we know that you are hungry for the news! Rocketboom will be back with a news episode and an interim host this MONDAY, JULY 10. "

....and certainly less than the 250,000 daily viewers the show drew with Amanda Congdon. What Andrew and others are about to get is a hard and tough business lesson: image rules on the Internet. Andrew took an unknown and made her known without a solid plan to build a business around her as her popularity grew.

It was obvious that he was in uncharterted water with this business venture. Now, he's got to dig himself out of a hole he's created. His ability to do that will be the test of his business savvy and determination.

But first, I'd give one more crack at working things out with Amanda. She's going to be huge -- can I say "huger" -- with or without Andrew. If I were him, I'd take the "with."

The idea of having a Hollywood location is totally workable, and at Vloggercon Andrew Baron talked about -- heck, bragged about -- the number of "Rocketboom correspondents" that were nationwide. So they could have worked out something.

The real truth's out there....


This video was originally shared on blip.tv by unboomed with a No license (All rights reserved) license.

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