divine

divine inc, was a Chicago-based company that started out as an Internet Incubator named divine interVentures. The company was founded by Andrew 'Flip' Filipowski in 1999. Like many other "dot-com" companies, divine had many tales of excess. The board of directors once had over forty members and included luminaries such as NBA star Michael Jordan. divine was one of the last Internet companies of this era to go public. Their much-ballyhooed IPO in July, 2000 landed with a resounding thud and never closed more than a few percent above the initial offering price. When the Internet stock bubble burst, divine switched business models. Its management decided to become an enterprise software company offering an extensive array of products and services. Now known only as divine, it took the most viable of its incubator businesses and purchased other companies with stock values deflated by the collapse in the stock market. Many of these businesses were unprofitable, leading to cash-flow problems. The whole premise of the original divine interVentures was a concept known as an "Internet Zaibatsu".