Death of Blue Martini

This week Blue Martini announced they were being bought out. It's the end of an era, and I'm sad to see them fail. It was a good time while we were there, and we had some of the brightest engineers I've worked with. Unfortunately, it's the fall of yet another once promising startup. There was a time when the company was valued at nearly $1B, but that was long ago in the most optimistic days of the dot com boom. The writing has been on the walls for a long time and the buyout was a way to take the company off life support even though their cash position is good($32m), there is just no way to grow the business. The challenges of competing with bigger, more established CRM products like Siebel, Peoplesoft, and mid-tier companies like epiphany.com made it tough to carve out a even a small niche.

The product was good, the people were good, but they grew too fast and the market just wasn't big enough and the anticipation of more and bigger customers was met with harsh reality. It's a story repeated frequently enough around the valley.