Idealab offspring goes public

Call it Bill Gross' second chance. Internet Brands, which is a collection of Web sites controlled by his Pasadena-based Idealab, has filed to raise as much as $100 million in a public offering. The company said that its various sites, including CarsDirect and WikiTravel.org, drew 24.5 unique visitors in June - and it's profitable, with first-quarter net income $1.4 million on revenue of $19.1 million. You might recall that Idealab was the brainchild of Gross, who hatched successful start-ups like Citysearch and busts like eToys. Idealab has 77 percent of the voting power at Internet Brands, partly because it is the sole owner of a special class of supervoting stock. (DealBook) Here's some background on Idealab, from a 2005 Fortune piece:

Many of its startups had failed, and Idealab had canceled a long-planned IPO. It soon shuttered newly established satellite offices in New York, London, and Silicon Valley, and fired scores of people--headcount fell from 250 to below 100. In January 2002, investors who had bought into a private placement of Idealab shares at the peak of the boom sued to get their money back. The private placement had valued Idealab at $9 billion, but the plaintiffs estimated its remaining value at a mere $500 million. (The suit was eventually dismissed and the two sides came to terms.)

Gross, who still owns about one third of Idealab, talks about that period with downcast eyes. "I never expected to lose shareholders' money," he says. "I never want to be in a position to do that, or cut people's jobs, again." The setbacks forced him to slow down and reflect for the first time in a career that had begun before he was old enough to drive. Gross had his first entrepreneurial epiphany as a highschooler in Van Nuys, Calif., during the energy crisis of 1973, when he founded a business that sold solar-energy products. The profits helped pay his college tuition at the California Institute of Technology. There he started a loudspeaker company (with his younger brother Larry) that helped support him through graduation.