The Undertakers of Silicon Valley: How Failure Became Big Business
In the world of tech startups, messing up is practically a religion. This company is here to pick up the pieces
By Adrian Daub
I am on the phone with the one-time owner of Kozmo.com. Back in 2001, Kozmo.com was going to deliver your Starbucks coffee in less than an hour. Its former owner is … not what you’d expect.
Martin Pichinson is about 70, a former music manager who came to Silicon Valley in the mid-1980s. His business partner is Michael Maidy, another septuagenarian who, judging from a Google search, favors dark suits that look about a half-size too big for him. Maidy was recently the CEO of another failed tech company: Pebble Tech LLC, maker of smartwatches. Pichinson and Maidy look about as far from our image of the Silicon Valley CEO as you can imagine. But they are nevertheless an important, if rarely glimpsed, part of its ecosystem.
Their actual company is Sherwood Partners, and unlike Kozmo.com, Pebble, and about a thousand other companies they have wound down over the years, ita), still exists and, b), its business is always booming. The company is Silicon Valley’s premier specialist in “assignment for the benefit of creditors” (ABC) — a process by which insolvent…
