The Telegraph mentioned the recent company accounts of Mydeco, the interiors website set up by Brent Hoberman. The article suggests that Brent and Martha Lane Fox, who sits on the board of Mydeco, “had the magic touch at lastminute.com” however it's “a very different story at mydeco.com”. But does a loss always mean failure? Or have we already seen their “magic touch” go from multi-million loss to billion dollar exit?

As outlined by The Telegraph, MyDeco has lost over £11M since it was founded in 2007. But as Leon Bailey-Green observed in his Blog, if you refer to a BBC’s article from 2000, you can see that LastMinute.com had made a loss of over £11M in just three months, and in another article from 2005 you can read about the business' $1Bn take over bid by TraveloCity.
The deal came after seven years. Mydeco has only been going for three so we could still see that “magic touch” revived. Mydeco seems to be at the heart of the online interiors space despite losses, and since the appointment of Nicole Vanderbilt as CEO, the company has been improving its online presence and establishing new partnerships with retail giants, building a promising role between media and retail. There is probably more magic to come from the Brent-Martha combo with Vanderbilt on the lead.

Losses might indeed be recurrent, if not typical of successful web business cycles, making venture capital so important in the web innovation space.

"Annual losses are to be expected in the early days as the technology, audience, growth, sales and all aspects of the market align themselves." Steve Purdham, We7 CEO, when asked about his company's £3.6m loss