Former teenage dotcom millionaire confronts past in BBC doc

As part of the BBC Radio 4 series Loose Ends, Cohen confronts his past, and revisits the feverish days of British dotcom mania.

Back in 1998 he founded soJewish.com at the age of 16, a dedicated Jewish 'community portal'. Figures of five million pounds were quoted for his personal stake in the business.

When the company merged with the London Jewish News on the AIM market, Cohen was, for a day, the youngest ever director of a publicly-quoted company. But he was in for a swift fall from grace.

His second company CyberBritain hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons, a pre-Google search engine, it had a version dedicated to adult content. Cohen was labelled the "unlikely porn baron". The late John Diamond wrote that he was worse that someone who’d sell arms to Saddam Hussein.

No longer a dotcom millionaire Cohen is on the other side of the fence, a technology journalist for Channel 4 News. He recently interviewed the billionaire founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and found it strange that he was now the older journalist interviewing a 24-year-old whizzkid who has revolutionized the way many use the internet.

In the programme he tracks down the investors who lost everything in his ventures and former employees to work out why things went so wrong. Along the way he also meets founder of lastminute.com Brent Hoberman and the writer Jon Ronson, who covered his story at the time.

I Was a Teenage Dotcom Millionaire will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 4pm today (Tuesday 9th February 2010).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qhrpk

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