Other News Angel Investor Less Angelic to Children, Employees, Waiters, Wife Corporation Celebrates Itself Aging Hipster Trying Hard To Like Ol Dirty Bastard

In Wake of Massive Losses, Mysticism.com Closes Its Doors STAMFORD, CT –Mysticism.com, the website that promised to "spread awareness of the opposites latent in being," will shut down and file for bankruptcy-protection, despite capital investments that have totaled nearly $50 million over the past two years. Mysticism.com was the first site on the web to offer nuts, robes, and metaphysical tracts for sale online, as well as extensive chat-rooms where mystics could become acquainted and develop plans to form isolated rural communities. The announcement is a slap in the face both to investors and to Internet analysts, who long touted the privately-held company as a bellweather tech stock that promised explosive growth in a unique e-tail niche, even in the face of persistent questions about the viability of its business model. "To the extent that serious mystics are online at all, they tend to object to the commercial nature of the web," said Ravi Harad, an analyst for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. "And advertisers tended to be suspicious of the niche in general. Who wants to try to sell to a group of dirty, ascetic intellectuals who have taken a vow of poverty? Not me." Mysticism.com was born in Stamford, CT in 1998, only the most recent in a long line of enterprises founded by Matt Nelson and Larry Govinder, college roommates who had first gone into business together as freshmen at the University of Connecticut. The pair began with a hot dog stand, before going on to an on-campus textbooks business, and then finally dreaming up the idea that they thought would make them rich: selling no-iron shirts via fax. An initial presentation at a venture capital convention yielded little interest, however, and the duo was forced back to the drawing board, with nothing to go on but a piece of sound advice from the more experienced investors. "They told us that we needed to think big, to use the web in a way that would change everything," Govinder said. "And coincidentally, it was about that time that I picked up a copy of Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments With Truth, and a lightbulb just went off. I thought 'Hey, we could sell this!'" After spending a few days refining the idea with Nelson, Govinder made a second V.C. pitch that lasted only about 10 minutes, and the offers began pouring in. Mysticism.com eschewed an IPO in hopes of landing a massive capital injection, and ultimately the company garnered its capital windfall in 3 successive rounds of financing. "And then we did what anyone who'd basically been given $50 million without any real accountability or way of paying it back would do," Nelson said. "We went out and partied like motherfuckers." Mysticism.com underwent a period of explosive growth, in which losses shrank from $15 million in 1999 to only $5 million in the first 6 months of this year. But the small spike in sales was too little, too late to save the beleaguered company. The London and Tel Aviv offices were closed in early May in the wake of the April Internet shakeout. "So it was after April that we took a step back, took a deep breath, and did some soul-searching about what we were really doing, what we were really all about. And what we ended up doing is using the remaining cash on hand to buy out our friends and family on favorable terms, and then went out and partied like motherfuckers some more," Govinder added. The 55 employees remaining in the Stamford, CT office are expected to be fired today.