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Alfred Lin To Leave Zappos, Join Sequoia Capital

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 04:20:21 +0000

Alfred Lin, the COO/CFO of Zappos, has left the company and will join Sequoia Capital. Lin was the no. 2 executive at Zappos at the time of its acquisition by Amazon, and has had a nearly flawless resume as an entrepreneur over the years. Every company he’s worked for has been acquired, and the smallest deal was $265 million. See our post “Alfred Lin Has The Midas Touch: The Man With $2 Billion In Acquisitions Under His Belt.”

Lin isn’t leaving Zappos until the beginning of 2011.

Here’s the email Lin sent to all employees at Zappos earlier today:

Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:13:50 -0700
From: Alfred Lin
To: employees@zappos.com
Subject: Life Changing Moments

First, I’m sorry for letting you know all this information in an email. If it was doable, I would have preferred to speak to each of you personally, but that is sadly not really possible. The idea of thinking through whom I should tell first and in what order was also very agonizing. Being true to our core values, it is just a lot easier to be open and honest and let everyone know sooner rather than later. Although this still feels a little weird as I write this, we don’t shy away from weirdness at Zappos, so here it is…

First, Rebecca (my wife and my true boss) and I are getting into the baby business. Rebecca’s now 9 weeks along and so far so good. I’ve learned more about the baby business than I would have even expected, like why, in general, you might not want to tell too many people until after the first 12 weeks. Or why, when a woman reaches a certain age, her pregnancy gets classified as a high-risk pregnancy. (I am probably going to get hit over the head for that.) In any case, keep your fingers crossed and we are really delighted to share this happy news with all of you.

Over the past 2 months, Rebecca and I have talked a lot more about what is important to us and what we should do as a family. It is the general stuff you talk about, but you may only talk about superficially until it hits you that you are actually going to be a parent. As agonizing as it is for us to come to this conclusion, we really believe that the right place for us as a family is to move back to the SF Bay Area and be closer to some of our extended family.

To complicate the life discussions, if you had asked me 5 or 10 years ago what I am passionate about and what my higher purpose would be, I would have said that my calling is to help interpret the visions and dreams of entrepreneurs about how the world should be and help build businesses around those visions and dreams. So to that end, I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They’ve financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos. I had explored joining them twice, but things never really worked out before. Recently, I went out to beers and then dinner with a few of their partners to catch up on life and in their inebriated state, they made the silly mistake of extending me a position on their team roster (although the envelope was actually marked “For Rebecca”).

You might be shocked to read that I have decided to leave Zappos. It has been a hard decision, and I am still in a bit of a daze myself, but I am also very excited. I have learned so much from all of you along our journey and I am excited to put that knowledge to work to help finance and help build companies in the special ways we have built Zappos. So the silver lining is that hopefully Zappos will give birth to other very special and enormously successful companies.

Tony, Fred and I have had a few conversations with some folks at Amazon and they are committed to helping us find the right person to fill my sample-size shoes (9D). As always with any Zappos employee, that person will, first and foremost, have to live and breathe the Zappos culture, and help continue the good work to build the Zappos brand, business, and culture, independent of Amazon.

Now that the news is out, I also want to assure you that I am not going anywhere anytime soon. I’m committed to Tony, Fred, Amazon, and each and every one of you to making this a very smooth transition. To that end, I plan to stay at Zappos through January 3, 2011. Of course, this timeline may change, since our business continues to grow fast and each and every one of you do such an amazing job that I am sure the transition can and may be completed sooner.

In any case, while parting is such sweet sorrow, it is not time to say our goodbyes yet. We have some work to do and always will…like taking first place in the Corporate Challenge relay tonight. Hope to see you there.

Update: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh emails employees.

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Google-Backed Life360 Acquires Lost Item Tagging Service Foundog

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:20:28 +0000

Life360, a startup that looks to help families keep their loved ones (and their identities) safe, has acquired Foundog, a lost item recovery service. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Foundog is a tagging service that allows you to track your items via a “eTriever tag.” You simple affix a tag to any item; the tag has a number and instructions for someone who finds the lost item to to go Foundog’s site and register the item. The owner can then track to see if their lost item was registered. IBM, Symantec and HSBC use Foundog’s system in-house.

With the acquisition, all users of Foundog’s recovery tags will gain free access to a white-labeled version of Life360’s online safety and security suite, which includes services that provide identity theft protection, cell phone-based family tracking, emergency child identification, lost item recovery, sex offender monitoring, and an emergency messaging system to reconnect families even when some communication lines are down after a natural disaster.

Life360 just raised $750,000 and won the first Android Developer Challenge (good for a $300,000 award). The startup was also chosen to be part of last summer’s fbFund REV.

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Brizzly’s Been Busy — Buying Apps, Creating Guides, And Going On Picnics.

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:20:28 +0000

Since it launched last July at our Realtime Stream CrunchUp, Brizzly has been one of the best web-based Twitter apps. It offers support for viewing pictures inline, shortened link expansion, multiple Twitter accounts, and even some Facebook support. But they’ve been quiet in recent months. Now we know why.

The Brizzly team went into hibernation because they made a couple of acquisitions, and have been working on a new feature. First, they bought one of my favorite Twitter iPhone apps, Birdfeed. One of the earliest apps to gain Twitter geolocation support, I had been worrying that Birdfeed would go extinct because developer Buzz Andersen recently joined Jack Dorsey’s mobile payment startup, Square. But since the acquisition (which actually occurred in the November/December timeframe), Andersen has been working closely with the Brizzly team to wrap the app in its new skin.

And it’s more than just a new skin, as Brizzly for the iPhone, the app gained support for posting pictures to the service (or using Flickr), Twitter Lists, and tab editing to better customize the app. Also, if you are on a tweet page that has a photo link attached, you’ll be able to see a preview of that photo. It’s a robust client that stands among the best for the iPhone. And it has a bonus feature: News.

The News tab on the iPhone app actually ties in to the big new feature for Brizzly itself: Brizzly Guide. Previously, Brizzly’s website had an area on the side where users could explain the current trending topics on Twitter. Now, that area is a larger site, Brizzly Guide, which gives you more detail about the trending topics. This is actually quite useful as a source of news information because it can tell you both quickly and rather throughly why something is trending. For example, this page for Chuck Norris shows his name is trending because today is his 70th birthday. The page includes images (in this case, of Norris), and links to other relevant information about him. It also has an except from Wikipedia to tell you more.

These Brizzly Guides are all community-built, like Wikipedia. Anyone (with a Brizzly account) can edit them at anytime. Top contributors are displayed at the bottom of the Guide site, as are top trends this week. You can also search these guides, to look up previously hot topics.

The other acquisition Brizzly made could potentially be very interesting in the long run: Wikirank. Though the service was shut down a little while ago so that the team behind Small Batch Inc. (its parent) could focus on their new project, Typekit (which aims to better fonts to the web), it remained an interesting one. As a visualization and analytics tool for Wikipedia, Wikirank showed data in interesting ways that offered insight not seen on the face of Wikipedia itself. Though Brizzly co-founder Jason Shellen isn’t yet sure what they’re going to do with Wikirank, the idea will probably be along the lines of visualization and analytics of this Brizzly Guide information.

Shellen also notes that Brizzly signed an enterprise agreement for Typekit so that they can use it on Brizzly Guide.

Something else Brizzly has been working on: a new idea called “Picnics” (here’s an example). Basically, this allows someone to pick out tweets from the public Twitter stream and respond to them in a different, but still public, environment. Brizzly tested out the idea the other night during the hit Fox show House (frequent House director Greg Yaitanes is an investor in Brizzly parent Thing Labs), and Fox even promoted it. Actor Jesse Spencer (who plays Dr. Robert Chase on the show) responded to tweets directed at him as they came in.

While Picnic isn’t ready for a full-scale roll-out just yet, Shellen notes that it “should prove to really transformative for us in the near future – expect to see more picnics in the future.”

And if all that wasn’t enough, something else Brizzly has been working on recently: a new round of funding. Stay tuned.

Find the free Brizzly iPhone app in the App Store here.

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Tilera Grabs $25 Million From Chip Investors

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:20:17 +0000

Tilera, a company that develops multicore processors, has raised $25 million in series C funding from Broadcom Corporation, Quanta Computers and NTT Financing. This brings Tilera’s total funding to $64 million

Tilera says the funding will be used to expand sales operations and for product development. Founded in 2004, Tilera designs multicore embedded processors for networking, digital multimedia, and wireless infrastructure markets. The company offers multicore processors for processing and power requirements, multicore software development tools, and boards. Its products include TILEPro, a multicore processor, which delivers the performance computing for embedded applications.

Tilera investor and semiconductor giant Broadcom just closed the acquisition of chip developer Teknovus for $123 million.

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Google: Flickr Can Keep Using Picnik. Yahoo: We Have No Comment.

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:20:07 +0000

Earlier today, in writing about Google buying the photo-editing service Picnik, we noted that the most interesting thing about the buy may be that Picnik is currently Flickr’s default photo editor. Upon hearing the news, we reached out to both Google and Yahoo (which owns Flickr) to see what it means for the future of the partnership. The responses were interesting.

Google, for its part, says that it will allow third-party sites (including Flickr) to continue to integrate with it. Here’s the statement they sent us:

We believe that openness is always the best approach and will allow third-party sites to continue to integrate with Picnik. People should be able to pull photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits with Picnik and save to whatever site they choose.

That sounds good, right? Well, it doesn’t sound like anyone bothered to tell Yahoo. Here’s their statement (from OutCast Communications, which does Yahoo’s PR):

Thanks for getting in touch. At this point we don’t have a comment on the acquisition, but will let you know when and if we have information to share.

If Yahoo was going to continue the Picnik relationship, don’t you think they’d come out and say so. Or at least say something like, “at this time, we see the relationship continuing.” Instead, it looks like they may be weighing their options. Or maybe they just don’t really know how the acquisition will affect things yet.

The problem is that Picnik is currently the only way to do that majority of edits on Flickr. Without it, the product as a whole becomes less valuable. So will Yahoo have to build its own photo-editor (which they obviously were against before, or they would have done it rather than partner with Picnik)? Or will they partner with someone else — maybe Aviary?

Regardless, Google has a history of acquiring companies and then letting their products wither (Dodgeball, Jaiku, etc). Let’s hope that’s not the case here, and that Picnik is at the very least integrated into Picasa (Google’s online photo service), because it’s a solid service.

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Qype, The Yelp Of Europe, Gets A Look From Google & Nokia

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:20:10 +0000

Hamburg, Germany based Qype, a Yelp-like site that’s focused on European markets, has recently had long acquisition looks from both Google and Nokia, we’ve heard from multiple sources. A deal with Nokia in particular was looking extremely likely until recently.

The site was first launched in 2005 and today attracts 9 million monthly worldwide visitors, according to Comscore, just a little less than Yelp’s 11 million. Both likely have far more actual visitors, but Comscore is good for comparision – in December, for example, Qype told us they had 17.7 million unique visitors. A year ago the company brought in a new CEO and have been expanding rapidly across Europe.

Google supposedly took a look at the company and passed, opting instead to just import Qype’s content. Nokia made a run for the company after Google, with one source saying that a term sheet had been signed in the $50 million range.

But another source says that a term sheet was never signed and the deal negotiations broke down over both price and other contract terms.

Qype isn’t helping much with the story, sticking to their no comments. But founder Stephan Uhrenbacher did email to tell us that the site has 500,000 registered users who’ve left over 1 million reviews. They are available in seven languages and have sites in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Brazil, Ireland.

So for now at least Qype may remain independent. But like Yelp, which had its own acquisition drama late last year, Qype is in the local advertising sweet spot, where billions of advertising dollars (and euros) will be flowing over the next few years.

Qype has raised around £8 million in venture capital.

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FriendFeed Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed.

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:20:11 +0000

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).

That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down.

It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it). But since the acquisition by Facebook, it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither, but that seems to be exactly what is happening.

If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too.

Update: FriendFeed is still down over an hour later. Their official Twitter account blames a “major power outage.”

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Sellaband Not Quite Dead Yet, Waiting For White Knight’s Signature

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:20:11 +0000

Dutch startup Sellaband, which enabled music fans to invest in their favorite bands, last week on Friday requested provisional suspension of payments in their home country. It was promptly granted by an Amsterdam Court, and was this morning changed into full bankruptcy. The news of the bankruptcy led to a flurry of reports about Sellaband calling it quits for good – or as we like to say, hitting the deadpool.

Now it appears that there’s a chance the startup may live to fight another fight after all.

A message that was very recently posted on the Sellaband website claims that an acquisition of the business is imminent, and merely a matter of a “few technicalities” at this point.

The full note:

On Friday February 19th, SellaBand AG requested provisional suspension of payments (moratorium). This was granted by the Court in Amsterdam on the same day. Yesterday, Monday February 22nd, this moratorium was changed into bankruptcy, with appointment of, Mr Paul Schaink, an amsterdam lawyer, as trustee. The trustee wishes to inform the ‘Sellaband community’ that, apart from a few technicalities, the completion of a transaction with a potential buyer of the business, is to be expected soon, in order to make a fresh start, safeguarding both the rights of Believers and Artists. More news will follow shortly.

On behalf of the trustee,

Johan Vosmeijer
CEO SellaBand

From what I can gather, Sellaband was close to breaking even, after raising $5 million in venture capital back in 2008. That on itself is not an easy feat to accomplish in the cutthroat business of online music and crowdfunding services. If a buyer does step in and manages to reboot operations without too much damage, Sellaband might still have a shot.

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Pownce Founder Leah Culver Leaves Six Apart

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 02:20:07 +0000

In December 2008, Six Apart acquired Pownce, a microblogging service that never managed to attract a large following. Pownce was shuttered after the acquisition, but its two-person team joined Six Apart to help integrate the technology into Six Apart’s blogging services. Today Pownce founder Leah Culver has written on her blog that she’s leaving Six Apart, where she spent the last year working on its TypePad and TypePad Motion products. Culver writes that her next project is developing an iPhone application for Plancast.

Despite reports to the contrary, Culver isn’t joining Plancast full time (at least not yet). Plancast founder (and TechCrunch alum) Mark Hendrickson says that she’s joining on a contract basis to build the iPhone app, but that the long-term future is uncertain. Culver’s blog notes that she might continue working on Leafy Chat, a web based IRC client that’s in private beta.

One thing worth pointing out: Culver and Mike Malone were Pownce’s only engineers, and they were absorbed into the Six Apart team as part of the acquisition. Malone left Six Apart just over a year after the acquisition to join SimpleGeo, and now Culver has left just a few months later. It looks like they had a one-year post acquisition cliff, and given their departures soon thereafter, it’s possible the integration of Pownce’s technology didn’t work out as they might have hoped.

Image by hyku

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Aardvark Continues Running At Full Steam After Google Acquisition, Joins Google Labs

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:20:22 +0000

Yesterday we broke the news that Aardvark, the social search engine, was being acquired by Google for $50 million. Aardvark confirmed the acquisition to us yesterday (though they didn’t comment on the amount), and now Google and Aardvark have publicly announced the deal with posts to their official blogs, along with some more details about how Aardvark will be integrated with Google.

Unlike some of Google’s past startup acquisitions that resulted in services shutting down or restricting new user signups, Aardvark is going to continue running at full steam. New users can still sign up, and it’s already featured as part of Google Labs (though it hasn’t been integrated with Google search at all — it’s just a link to Vark.com).

As far as changes to the service, a Q&A on the Aardvark blog says that they’ll be able to move faster as Google puts its support behind it (some Googlers will be joining the Aardvark team).

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