How has Deskmag been affected by the insolvency of Deskwanted?
Recently, we have been asked this question a lot. At one point Deskmag was connected to Deskwanted. The two were founded by the same team. Two years ago, an investor (Immobilienscout, a branch of Deutsche Telekom) made Deskwanted a part of its incubator program. As a result, Deskmag was separated from Deskwanted by establishing a new company for Deskwanted in November 2011. However, the investor had shown interest in merging it with Deskwanted again, making it difficult for Deskmag to be developed under those circumstances.
In October 2012, a new contract was closed between Immobilienscout and Deskwanted. Again, Deskmag was not a part of the contract. For Deskmag it was crucial to guarantee editorial independence. For this reason, Deskwanted and Deskmag were also separated spatially and a new team for Deskmag was built at the end of 2012.
Deskmag is therefore not directly affected by the insolvency of Deskwanted. However the founders, who were once an integral part of Deskmag, are certainly affected. By German law, they have been committed to work for Deskwanted without anything in return. This development and the long-term trouble with the investor has decreased the working capacity of Deskmag over the past year. As one result of the insolvency, a founder of Deskwanted sought to get rid of this responsibility and decided to work with the investor again. Unfortunately he decided to do this without helping his own company to clean up the mess the investor had created. This founder does not work for Deskmag anymore.
We don’t regret the end of Deskwanted. The site could not never been developed with the investor in a way that it could offer real value for users. However, the manner in which the investor failed a start-up by cancelling a contract within hours, only to to create an insolvency for the other side, is not the responsible way to end a business relationship. Deskwanted had longer-running contracts with its team members and most of its contractors. As part of their social security (including health insurance and pension tax) set up by law, these contracts cannot be cancelled within a day, a week or even a month. This has caused the insolvency. The investor wanted to avoid this kind of standardized social security with its construction of an incubator program. For this reason, it also took a significant amount of time to take legal steps against the investor.
Deskmag has taken steps forward to make these actions transparent, so other startups do not have to go through the same thing. With your support of the crowdfunding campaign, we like to jump the lost time for Deskmag which the insolvency has created, by supporting our core competences.
Some others have also asked: Why don’t you just collect money for your many years of work at Deskmag?
We don’t want to ask our readers for donations to pay for the past. We want to create good value for our future. Therefore, we have combined the crowdfunding campaign with new projects which can ensure the future of a new and improved Deskmag.
Where does the money go if we donate to this crowdfunding campaign?
The money ends up in an escrow account and will be used only for the projects described in this crowdfunding campaign.
Thanks for your support of our crowdfunding campaign!!!
