Inside the airy brick building hidden off Blake Street in Denver, there are telltale signs that something fun is going on.
There’s a giant shower curtain of chief technology officer Michael Clark as a pink and purple unicorn. In the lounge area, a scooter and rainbow-colored hula hoop lean against the wall next to a steel barbecue grill. There’s a foosball table, free drinks and as many bagels as you want.
But this is no startup.
It’s Photobucket, which has been around since 2003. Like nearby dot-com contemporaries, such as eBags and MapQuest, Photobucket once generated major buzz. But in a world where the ZIP code was never important, it’s often a surprise to people that these companies are still around — and headquartered here. They’ve become wallflowers in a ballroom of shiny startups and fast-moving accelerators.
Or have they?
Photobucket, which was arguably the biggest name in photo sharing 10 years ago, still gets 60 million unique visitors a month, according to the company. After raising $6 million last year, Photobucket raised an additional $3.6 million this month for its new mobile strategy. It bought mobile-app Lasso — a way to share photos and chats privately — which, not coincidentally, brought back co-founder Alex Welch as an adviser.
Photobucket is still no longer a startup. And that’s OK with the company.
“You see a lot of startups struggling because they’re trying to get traction with a user base,” said Tom Munro, Photobucket’s CEO who took over after his company Ontela bought Photobucket from News Corp. in 2009. “We don’t have that problem.”
Maturing dot-comsDot-coms may seem like has-beens, in the current age of mobile apps and crowdfunding. But life after the early days has been about settling in — and surviving. The high-growth phase is over. Making incremental changes, as Photobucket has done, doesn’t attract attention.
“We’re all caught up with unicorns and gazelles and startups,” said JB Holston, executive director of Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network, which helps potentially “high-growth, high-prospect” companies get to the next level.
“They’ve been around for a long time and not necessarily growing at phenomenal rates,” he said. “But they are still substantial.”
Denver’s dot-coms have come of age. In the tech community, they are the staples, the mentors, said David Cohen, a managing partner of the Techstars accelerator.
“These companies are all very engaged in the startup community,” he said. “They’re examples of success and heroes to many of us. Many of their leaders mentor and give back to the startup community regularly. I think they just attract a different set of talent, those looking for more stability versus equity. The process is natural: You become big, and you mature. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just a natural progression.
EBags, which started in 1999, still lands on Internet Retailer magazine’s Hot 100 list. Last year, the company was honored for having one of the best mobile-commerce sites, right up there with QVC, Foot Locker and several other brick-and-mortar retailers.
“In 2000, it was eBags all day long,” said Rob Cassidy, eBags’ CEO. “Now, it’s the next-generation of startups. I love that the new guys are getting that attention. It’s the nature of the space.”
Survival also has been about solving a problem and having a sound operating model, Cassidy said. The Greenwood Village retailer found its niche of offering lots of photos and details about bags, plus it has attracted a community willing to leave millions of reviews — 3,082,336 as of March 19.
And eBags focused on its home community, sponsoring Interstate 25 highway cleanup near its office and helping nonprofits like the Denver Race for the Cure.
“We’re kind of quiet and not trying to do it for PR reasons. But we’re always donating backpacks to local high schools,” said Cassidy, a Colorado native. “People who go to the Race for the Cure rush to the eBags booth because they know we’re giving out 2,000 bags. They used to last until noon but now we’re out by 9 a.m. Part of it is just raising your hand. You have to be out there and spend time in your community.”
Staying freshMapQuest, once the preferred method computer users figured out how to get from Point A to Point B, still ranks in third place for popular travel sites, according to Nielsen, a market research firm that tracks Web traffic. According to a Nielsen report last fall, MapQuest had 6.2 million unique visitors compared with Google Maps’ 25.3 million and TripAdvisor’s 9 million.
“Despite the fact that we’ve been around for 18 years, we still believe we’re a startup,” said Nate Abbott, vice president of product for the AOL-owned company just off 16th Street in Denver. “We move fast. We’re very agile. We foster an office culture that’s autonomous and results-driven, which startups value as well.”
Commute, its newest app, debuted publicly last fall five months after an employee pitched it at an in-house hackathon, he said.
But, he added, there are also benefits to not being a startup.
“At startups, you’re living from funding to funding. Your company is on a runway that is sometimes less than a year. One thing that’s comforting for us is we are highly profitable. You’re not going to be concerned about having to find another job in nine months,” Abbott said. “And we have a real 401(k) instead of paper-stock options that you hope will be worth something someday.”
One dot-com took the startup mentality to an extreme: It changed its name and Web address. And when the bulk of its new customers couldn’t find it on the Web, the gamble hurt.
HomeAdvisor, which spent last decade as ServiceMagic, changed its name in 2012. Growth was stagnant, even with annual revenue of $205 million, said Chris Terrill, HomeAdvisor’s CEO. The change was also to focus on home services and avoid being confused with ServiceMaster.
“It was painful. We took a massive SEO (search engine optimization) hit. I think we were one of the biggest companies to switch a domain like that. And Google doesn’t have the structure to let you switch over 10 million pages. But we made all the changes in an eight- to nine-month period. Not only are we back but we are ahead,” he said.
Last year, HomeAdvisor reported $300 million in revenues, 32 percent growth from the prior year. And it currently has 1,500 employees, up from 1,200 three years ago.
Even so, Terrill said not a lot of people realize how big the company is.
“We’re the largest consumer facing company in Colorado that nobody knows about,” he said.
Tamara Chuang: 303-954-1209, tchuang@denverpost.com or twitter.com/Gadgetress