Jason Goldberg and Moxie – A Story Worth Telling
Jason Goldberg burned through $336 million in investor money. His canny online fitness platform may be how he redeems himself.
The desire to work out from home has been a huge driver of digital innovation and investment this year. Well-known fitness brands, like Nike Training Club and CorePower Yoga, have increased their digital offers to meet the needs for a world stuck at home. Once-obscure startups that connected instructors to fitness buffs digitally have raised impressive investor money or been acquired by larger companies. Internet entrepreneurs have their wheels spinning, trying to concoct some platform that could be to fitness instruction what Spotify is to music.
One of them is Jason Goldberg. Dubbed a “serial entrepreneur,” the one-time Clinton White House employee seems to have checked every box of startup idea clichés: he has launched companies dealing in job searches, news aggregation, social media, cryptocurrency and even furniture. But Goldberg is infamous for the spectacular collapse of his ecommerce website Fab, a LGBT social networking site that pivoted to buy-now bargains on mostly home products and burned through $336 million in investor money before essentially shutting down in 2014. Jason Goldberg is looking to finally find his niche with a fitness instructor platform called, perhaps fittingly for his bravado, Moxie.
Moxie has a range of instructors offering group exercise favorites, including barre, cardio, HIIT, Zumba and yoga of several varieties and intensities for $8 to $20 a class. Users can just jump on and see what class is starting soon and connect to live instruction.
Goldberg told TechCrunch Moxie has a roster of about 2,000 instructors, most of whom he scooped up from Instagram (where many were no doubt trying to replicate their pre-COIVD-19 income online). He said they keep about 85 percent of proceeds. Also, the 45 employees of Moxie were apparently working on an entirely different project when the need for online fitness became visible.
The article states that Jason Goldberg has raised $2.1 million in seed money. Moxie looks like the kind of simplified at-home fitness service needed through the pandemic. It may be much for some investors to overlook Goldberg’s history. Fab has been dubbed “one of the biggest startup flops of all time,” and “the tech Titanic.”
In 2013, the New York City-based company had 750 employees, more than $330 million in funding and ambition to compete with Ikea and Target. Two years later, it was basically sold for parts to a hardware company.
That’s a tough history to live down, but Jason Goldberg has shown a penchant for honesty and self-reflection not associated with tech bros who burn through millions on Champagne lunches and Palo Alto office space. Even as Fab tumbled down, he delivered a frank assessment to executives stating in a memo that “we have a serious problem.”
“We spent $200M and we have not proven out our business model,” it stated. “We spent $200M and we have not proven that we know precisely what our customers want to buy.”
In a Medium post after the company collapsed, he responded graciously to an unflattering Bloomberg article stating, “I am sorry to our investors, our employees, and everyone involved with Fab. I failed and I take full responsibility for the failure.”
He was also game to be interviewed in a 2017 article in the Hustle which again chronicled Fab’s downfall. He said one of his flaws was a “make everyone happy” attitude that prevented him from keeping the company at a proper scale. He said the same attitude created a bond with investors that would last. “Give some of those early investors a call and ask him what they think of Jason Goldberg,” he said. “I’m sure they would invest in a Jason Goldberg company again.”
Moxie shows some of them indeed would.
