What goes around...

Isn't a mantra something you repeat over and over again? No matter.

Reading this week's PR Week I got an incredible sense of deja vu...I was transported right back to the heady days at the end of the last century, to the gold rush of the dotcom boom, to networking events bursting at the seams with two-bit entrepreneurs with haf-arsed ideas for online business and half-wit cash-laden venture capitalists only too willing to load them up with millions of dollars.

And what took me back? The story (paywall, boo, blah, blah) about Mantra, one of the many agencies that used to boom to kick-start its business and one of the few that managed to ride out the bust and keep on going. It was a rising star back then, but had gone quiet for a while.

Well, it's back, with a new spin-off called Fundamental. PR Week reports that Mantra MD Debbie Wosskow will be heading up the new agency, of which she said:

"Fundamental is for those tech start-ups that are in the very early stages of their development. We will not be looking to work on a retainer, only on a project basis from one day to six months at the most."

The plan then being to feed them into Mantra as longer-term clients. Sound like a familiar model? It was tried by a few back in the boom and it's tricky...clients get attached to people and don't necessarily want to be moved from one agency to another. My feeling is that if Debbie gets it right (and I hope she does) Fundamental will soon grow into a healthy, but traditional, PR consultancy.

But what really freaked me out was news of Fundamental's first and only client..."a networking club for VCs and dotcom entrepreneurs called Second Chance Tuesday..."

Whooooaaaaaa....