StumbleUpon’s Garrett Camp Speaks (About Being a Born-Again Start-up)!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on April 20, 2009 at 12:00 PM PT
Last week, StumbleUpon announced it was buying itself out of its much-vaunted previous corporate buyout, by being born again as an “investor-baked start-up.”
The Canadian-born social-bookmarking company, which was launched earlier, had come to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy angel investors, who ponied up a couple of million dollars. It soon became a traffic-generating hit.
Then, StumbleUpon was bought by eBay (EBAY) two years ago for $75 million in one of Web 2.0’s high points.
End of a fairy tale? Um, nope.
Soon enough, due to both buyers’ and sellers’ remorse, rumors of the San Francisco-based company being sold by its new owners swirled around it, although there was no sale.
Instead, last week, StumbleUpon announced that a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital, would return it to its roots.
Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith were included, with Camp as CEO.
In a video interview he did with BoomTown, here’s Camp talking all about the latest shift for his start-up, including discussing some more changes on the site, such as an even more personalized Webification of the content discovery service.
Here’s the video:
