1990s: Dot-Com Survivor

Vancouver's Blast Radius weathers the late-'90s economic storm. The ’90s were above all the decade of the Internet. The technology had been around for decades, but as sites such as eBay and Amazon – both founded in 1995 – exploded from startup to multi-million-dollar commerce platforms, the gold rush was on.

By BCBusiness / May 8, 2012

Vancouver’s Blast Radius weathers the late-’90s economic storm.

The ’90s were above all the decade of the Internet. The technology had been around for decades, but as sites such as eBay and Amazon – both founded in 1995 – exploded from startup to multi-million-dollar commerce platforms, the gold rush was on.

Here in B.C. the landscape was littered with dot-com hopefuls. There were portals whose value was measured not in dollars, but “eyeballs.” Among them were the financial websites: Stockhouse.com, Stockgroup.com, Canstock.com, Stockscape.com. Then there were the city portals: Vancouvertoday.com, MyBC.com, Vancouver plus.ca.

Then there were the e-commerce sites that promised the demise of the “bricks and mortar” economy; most notable among them was Onvia.com, an office products retailer, which hit the timing just right, cashing in on a $240-million IPO just before the crash in 2001.

Most of those Vancouver startups are long gone, but one that lived to tell the tale is Blast Radius. Founded in 1996 by Gurval Caer and a group of classmates from the Vancouver Film School, it quickly found a niche not just building websites but developing online marketing strategy for international clients including Nike, Casio and Nintendo.

Today Caer recalls how in those early days everyone was a budding retail magnate: “In the late ’90s we were inundated with business plans from startups that wanted to build the next eBay or Amazon. It was very easy business,” Caer says.

Blast Radius’s current-day marketing vice-president, Brian Mitchinson, was working at Vancouver’s Pivotal Software at the time, and he recalls those times with a laugh: “There was such an insane level of hype the entire time. Four or five job offers would hit my email every single week; it was a $100,000, $150,000 and stock options. I was being inundated with so many companies popping up that desperately needed people to be able to run these things.”

On the other hand, Mitchinson explains, no sooner had the dot-com boom taken off than the first wave of slow-downs began to hit in 2000: “People who had been let go were now were trying to find jobs. The resumes started coming in, and people wanted insane money. And when you interviewed them and asked them what they were working on, they would say, ‘I was in charge of putting logos on carpets in our hallways,’ or ‘It was my job to build these . . .’ and it would be little tchotchkes.”

While the “new economy” of B2C and B2B platforms and “sticky eyeball” portals didn’t demolish the old-world bricks-and-mortar model, neither did the bust of 2001 spell the end of the Internet. And Caer sees a similar pattern in the current mania for social media: “It will probably go through a cycle not unlike what the Internet has gone through: a hype phase and then a bust phase and then a consolidation/maturation phase, because there is something real in it at the end of the day.”