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Fred
Mercaldo (the owner of Scottsdale.com
who was elected
President of Associated
Cities last week). Mark Burgess,
the founder and original registrant of
SanDiego.com, asked for Mercaldo's assistance in
handling communications about the SanDiego.com
situation.
Mercaldo
wrote that, according to Burgess, this is what
happened Friday: "Jim Fitzpatrick who
just bought San Diego Magazine
back from CurtCo and Randy Frisch,
former CFO of the San Diego Union-Tribune,
both showed up, but Robert DeuPree, the
investor holding the notes used to foreclose,
met them in the lobby and told them they had to
have a check ready to fill out and that the
bidding started at $3 million, which is
about $50,000 less than the combined notes he
held. Neither had the ready check, so both
bidders left. Deupree then presented the
foreclosure notices to James, the manager of the
LLC (that held SanDiego.com), and took
possession of the assets and asked us all to
leave."
Mercaldo
went on to quote Burgess as saying, "So
now, the LLC we created last September, in which
I had ownership, is assetless and owes thousands
in payables and hundreds of thousands in
unsecured loans - including my severance and $100,000
note which was the other half of what I was to
be paid for selling. That company will just die
in place. So it's over for me with
SanDiego.com, except for my history as founder
for the last 15 years."
"In
early 2008, I had other offers that would have
taken me out of control of the domain but left
me with nearly $500,000 in free cash. I
allowed this deal to take 16 months (June 2008 -
Sept 2009) because I thought I was
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Fred
Mercaldo
Mark
Burgess |
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bringing
on a partner to work with to grow SanDiego.com
faster than I had done alone with slim resources
in the past. Turns out he wanted the company for
himself. While I believe relationships are the
fabric of business, he told us "don't take
it personally, it's just business."
Mercaldo said that Burgess told him the LLC
started with $1.4 million in
debt and that the debt had grown by an
additional $1.6 million by the time the
foreclosure took place Friday.
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Mercaldo noted, "Mark and I both served on
the Associated Cities Board of Directors
the past three years and he has become a very
close friend of mine. Surely Mark would have made
different decisions in retrospect, but there is no
denying the sadness that is shared by many of us
in the GeoDomain industry regarding Mark's fate
and his loss of control and ownership with
SanDiego.com. I can tell you Mark is
blessed with a terrific mind, work ethic, family,
fiancé, friends, and spirit. Mark will move on,
learn from this, and no doubt thrive. Mark can be
reached at [email protected].
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