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History of our approach

Not wanting to disappoint our friends, we decided to learn from the people in the business who clearly knew what they were doing: the top tier Internet companies. We decided to mimic their strategy of losing as much money as quickly as possible. We publicly committed ourselves to doubling the amount of money we'd lose each month, anticipating losses of $1M per month by year's end. We confidently began plans for our initial public offering with a stock valuation of a billion dollars.

Hindsight proved that, like many other Internet companies, Streetplay was overly optimistic in its initial financial targets. Although Wall Street darlings like Pets.com, Kozmo and E-toys were able to ramp up operations and achieve incredible losses, we achieved a somewhat slower performance (see our 1999 real vs. projected losses). We learned from our mistakes, remained hopeful and predicted bigger and better results in the future.

Fine-tuning our Strategy

Perhaps Streetplay should have done more market analysis before adopting this approach. Our freshly minted SP$7, SP$23, SP$52, and SP$86 notes lacked the production quality of conventional currency, much less counterfeit bills. Furthermore, we were forced to recognize our competitive disadvantage to the U.S. Treasury Department, the dominant player in the American money printing business. We contemplated bringing an antitrust lawsuit against the Treasury, but counsel advised against it (even though we were paying them with Streetplay money).

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Rivals in the "Internet money" marketplace, like Beans and Flooz, bested us by eschewing the physical realm. They gave away virtual money and had some big corporations give it away too. Much more Flooz changed virtual hands than Streetplay dollars. Most importantly, Flooz could be used for all kinds of real products (our money didn't actually buy anything).

Eventually, all Internet money giveaways failed. But while our competitors endured messy legal procedures (like bankruptcy), our initial vision and low expectations shielded us from such ignominy. There were no venture capitalists to mollify, nor a board of directors to pull our plug. We're happy to report that though many others have crashed and burned along the information superhighway, Streetplay survives. We're still skipping down our own slim dirt road, kicking up dust. With integrity in hand and levity still the goal, we restate our theme: Time passes quickly. Go out and have some fun.