Cambrian House
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Cambrian House was a Calgary-based startup that pioneered crowdsourcing for software innovation. Founded by Michael Sikorsky, it built a community where the crowd submitted, rated and collaboratively developed ideas for websites and software products, growing to more than 50,000 members and 7,000 ideas. It also developed Chaordix, a crowdsourcing platform designed to power open innovation for other businesses.
02 / Cambrian House FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Cambrian House failed because its crowd-based model never produced a sustainable business. Convincing users to read and rate a rapidly growing pool of ideas proved difficult, idea quality was uneven, distributed development was complex to manage, and duplicate submissions piled up — weaknesses that rivals like InnoCentive and Threadless overcame. After failing to raise a new round of capital, the company sold its intellectual property, assets, website and remaining community to Spencer Trask Ventures in a fire sale for a fraction of the $7.75 million investors had put in, and the site was wound down.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Liquidation
TechCrunch (12 May 2008) reported Calgary crowdsourcing startup Cambrian House, after failing to raise a new round, sold its platform/community in an asset purchase TechCrunch called a fire sale to Spencer Trask Ventures for a fraction of the $7.75 million previously invested; VP Jasmine Antonick confirmed the sale and that the site would dissolve in three months. CEO Michael Sikorsky disputed the 'fire sale' label and said the corporate entity would continue licensing remaining IP as Chaordix; CLASSIFY treats the sourced fire-sale/asset sale of the main site as a failure ending.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Raised approximately $7.75 million from investors.
- 02
Failed to raise a new round of capital in 2008.
- 03
Negotiated a fire sale of its intellectual property, assets, website and community to Spencer Trask Ventures, structured as an asset purchase and speculated at under $1 million.
- 04
The assets were rolled into VenCorps, a Cambrian House project applying crowdsourcing to venture capital; the original site was wound down.
- 05
No reliable disclosed figure exists for the realized financial loss; investment and sale-price estimates are not reported as losses.