SecondMarket Confirms Layoffs To Have Leaner Cost Structure, Become “Break-Even”
SecondMarket’s CEO Barry Silbert just confirmed that the company had layoffs this morning. From a tipster, we had heard it was as much as one-third of the company’s headcount but SecondMarket says it was less than that. The rationale? Basically, Silbert said that the company had grown a “bloated cost structure,” from when it had a model that was based on transaction fees. SecondMarket offers liquidity to privately-held companies by letting shareholders sell equity in a manner that’s largely controlled by the companies and compliant with SEC rules. He called the decision “gut wrenching” and “stressful,” but said that the move would enable the company to have $25 million in cash in the bank and function on a break-even basis. SecondMarket Org Changes I admit it, I screwed up. While the transition of SecondMarket from a telephone broker of illiquid assets in 2005 to the technology-driven reinvented stock market that we are today has been quite successful, I have done a poor ...
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Shuttleworth Calls Ubuntu Performance Art, Calls Out Critics
darthcamaro writes "Mark Shuttleworth has taken a lot of heat for Ubuntu's decision to use Unity, to move away from Wayland and about its stance on the community distros like Kubuntu. In a new interview Shuttleworth shoots back claiming no matter what he does people will always find fault due to...'competitive pressures.'"
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Mining the Series A Crunch with CrunchBase
Back in November, rumblings of a Series A Crunch took hold and speculation began about the number of seed funded companies destined to close. Fast forward a few months and we are now seeing lists of companies that may be imminent victims of the crunch. While these are purely speculative, the information can prove valuable for corporate development teams, recruiters, and those in search of interesting IP. One list announced last week has gone on sale for nearly $5,000! At CrunchBase, we aim to be the free and open resource of information about companies, people, and investors. Data about companies, whether they are skyrocketing or struggling, helps us all identify new markets, refine products, find great partners, and generally make better decisions. Therefor, we are publishing our own list of companies worth watching and it’s free for anyone to download. Is this a definitive list of companies in trouble? Absolutely not. It’s hard to judge a company’s health through public ...
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Luxola Raises Series A, Pulls Former PopSugar Director Christine Ng To Singapore
Singapore beauty e-tailer, Luxola, just raised its Series A round from GREE Ventures. The amount was undisclosed, but has been rumored to be in the region of $2 million. The company carries about 60 brands of cosmetics and beauty products on its website, and ships to countries in Southeast Asia like Singapore and Malaysia. Its site was launched in September 2012, and it had previously raised a seed round of about $596,820 (S$740,000) from Wavemaker Labs and Singapore government fund, the National Research Foundation. Its initial angel round was about $423,460 ($525,000), according to CEO and founder, Alexis Horowitz-Burdick. Besides its latest funding round, the company has also managed to pull over former PopSugar Director of Affiliates and Social, Christine Ng. Prior to that, she was product manager at Sephora, where she led the beauty store’s social media and interactive product efforts. She joins Luxola as its chief marketing officer. “We’re grateful for Christine. The sort of ...
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Brian Pokorny Returns To SV Angel As A General Partner After Airbnb Talent Deal
Brian Pokorny, who led photo-sharing service Daily Booth and Batch into a talent acquisition by Airbnb, is returning to SV Angel as a general partner. He has a long history with the firm. He’s been a strategic partner of SV Angel since 2009, before he left to be CEO of photo-sharing site DailyBooth. He has also worked with Ron Conway on angel investing since 2006. Pokorny personally has stakes in companies like Twitter, Square, OMGPOP, Milo, Chomp, Tweetdeck, Circle, Bump, Posterous, Milk, Couple, Elepath, and MessageMe. “Investing feels very natural for me,” Pokorny said. “You get to see a variety of things and you get to be very close to startups at an early-stage.” Before working with SV Angel the first time, he worked at Google. Through that, being CEO of Daily Booth and being acquired into Airbnb, he says he’s seen companies at every phase from early-stage, to the hyper-growth period and then into becoming a large, mature corporation. “My passion kind of lies with early-stage ...
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