The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘hiring’

Palm has hired the smallest SVP in the world, Jeff Zwerner, to be in charge of its branding initiatives.

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Palm hires Apple guy to do its branding

Everyone, take notice: Sprint is very serious about not letting any tantalizing details leak about the upcoming Palm Pre.

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Sprint employees fired for talking about the Palm Pre

MySpace parent company News Corp. continues to leak, off record, that Owen Van Natta is in the final stages of becoming the new CEO of MySpace (one of the more obvious candidates on our list yesterday). Van Natta certainly has the experience on paper to run the company - he was a business development executive at Amazon, the chief revenue officer at Facebook and most recently the CEO of music startup Playlist.com. If the leaks are correct, he’s in the final stages of contract negotiation and his hiring will be announced shortly.

He knows social networking, music/media and the Internet in general, and will certainly be able to get his hands around MySpace’s business. But his hiring is leaving many scratching their heads nonetheless.

Van Natta owns a significant percentage of Facebook stock and is of course intimately knowledgeable about their business. At the very least it’s bad form for him to join Facebook’s primary competitor. At worst there may be legal issues since it will be extremely difficult for him to continue to protect confidential Facebook information in his new job. But it’s widely known that Van Natta feels betrayed by Facebook for not making him the CEO and has a deep dislike of Mark Zuckerberg. The revenge factor in taking the top job at Facebook’s biggest competitor must be making him feel somewhat vindicated.

But…what about Playlist? He took the job just last November, less than six months ago. Investors are relying on him, as are employees, many of which he’s recruited since he joined. To walk away from that job so quickly doesn’t say much for his character. Perhaps there are unknown facts that mitigate the situation, but it doesn’t look good. As bad as Playlist’s business looks right now, the CEO has an obligation to investors and employees to see it through to the end and try to create a good outcome for the company.

At least Van Natta has tried MySpace, and even logged in a couple of days ago. He has six friends on the service and has uploaded a few pictures. His presumed new boss, Jonathan Miller, has yet to create a MySpace profile of his own.

This is actually the third time recently that Van Natta has interviewed for a MySpace-related job. He was a top candidate to lead MySpace Music, but his attempts to sell Playlist to the company as part of the deal left a bad taste in DeWolfe’s mouth. Van Natta also interviewed for the CEO Digital Media job that eventually went to Jonathan Miller.

The whole circus around MySpace this week settles a lot of scores: News Corp execs, long dismayed at DeWolfe’s close relationship with Rupert Murdoch, are gleefully leaking news around DeWolfe getting fired. The fact that they effectively announced Van Natta as the new CEO may have given them some immediate gratification, but it also puts him in a very strong negotiating position - if talks break down now News Corp. looks even more ridiculous than they already do. Van Natta gets his revenge on Facebook, but leaves his current company in terrible situation. And the MySpace executive team sits in stunned silence as they await news on which of them will still have a job next month, and who their new CEO will be.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

LookStat, an analytics platform for photographers that sell their work online in micro-stock marketplaces, has closed a $500,000 Series A funding round led by Founders Co-op.

Lookstat is a tool for photographers that allows them to track their earnings across online stock photography sites like iStockphoto, Shutterstock, and Dreamstime, with support for Fotolia, 123rf, and Stockxpert coming in the near future. The site can automatically identify when the same image is being sold at multiple sites, and can aggregate all sales for that image into one place. Lookstat is also currently tested a workflow platform designed to help photographs distribute their content.

While the site is currently free, it will eventually begin to charge a subscription free, though it will likely remain free for any photographers who earn less than $100/month.

While LookStat may be addressing a niche market, it’s one that is growing steadily. In February we saw Fotolia reach one million registered members, with 1.5 million paid downloads a month (Comscore currently reports that they have over 2.8 million unique visitors). Competitor iStockphoto, which was purchased by Getty Images in 2006, gets over 4.8 million monthly visitors.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute, a seed stage incubator and mentoring program that we first covered last month, is set to release a set of legal documents this afternoon that promise to protect startup founders from, as he eloquently puts it, the “atrocities of investors.”

The new documents, created by Wilson Sonsini attorney Yoichiro Taku, are posted publicly on the website. They have a variety of novel rights and privileges:

• Creation of a Class F Founders stock that has 2:1 board votes per founder and 10:1 voting power over normal common stock. These shares vest monthly without a cliff and have single trigger acceleration. Class F holders get acceleration on change in control and approval rights on new investments, liquidity events, Board size, and dividends.
• A clause that requires the payment of $100,000 to the Founders Institute in the event a founder leaves the board of directors to give a disincentive to firing founders down the road.
• Grant of a warrant to the Founders Institute to buy 3.5% of the fully diluted stock of the company in the form of the equity sold in the first round of financing, which is pooled for participating founders and mentors.

The stock grants and any penalty fees paid are put into an exchange fund that all participating founders have ownership in. Therefore, all companies participating in each class have some stock in all the other companies - a great way to reduce overall risk. One big winner in each class means everyone gets a little bit rich. 60% of the warrant stock goes to the founders, the institute keeps the other 40%.

There’s a risk that these extremely favorable founder terms could create problems when the companies try to raise outside funding. Ressi says they won’t let a financing die from these terms and will likely waive rights if forced to. His reputation will require that - if these agreements protect founders he’ll be a hero, but if they kill financing deals the program will collapse.

Applications for the first startup class are open until May 10.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Who is the champions? You is the champions! As you may well remember, Harper Collins and Andrew Gross have teamed up to offer you, the fine readers of TC and CG a Kindle 2 and/or a copy of Don’t Look Twice, Gross’ latest thriller chiller.

To that end, I am proud to announce the winners of a signed copy of Gross’ book, suitable for framing, reading, or reading then framing. The runners up are:

Rita Hall
Tom Lothian
Chris Valley
Kevin Lyons
Charles Blumenthal

And the big chicken dinner Kindle 2 winner is…