BoomTown » Mark Kvamme

LinkedIn Raises $53 Million at $1 Billion Valuation

Kara Swisher — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:43:47 +0000

In a much-expected financing, LinkedIn has joined the big funding club (Slide, Spot Runner) of late, by raising $53 million at a startling $1 billion valuation.

Why go public when you can just pretend?

Actually, unlike a lot of Web 2.0 start-ups, the professional networking site, which had 23 million active monthly members in June, has been profitable since 2006.

According to execs, it has revenues of about $100 million a year, from premium subscriptions and job listings, as well was advertising and corporate sales.

The new slug of cash comes from new investor Bain Capital Ventures, along with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures.

LinkedIn had previously raised $27 million for a total of $80 million. Yipes!

“This additional funding will give us even more flexibility to execute on our vision for millions of professionals to increase their effectiveness by using LinkedIn to build relationships and exchange knowledge, opportunities and advice,” wrote LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye (pictured here) in a blog post tonight.

In an interview with LinkedIn’s founding CEO and Chairman Reid Hoffman (pictured here) today, he told BoomTown that the money raised would be used for corporate development and acquisitions.

“We’ll be doing small technology acquisitions to improve our service,” said Hoffman. He also noted that it was unlikely the company would be doing an IPO in the immediate future, which has been bandied about.

“We have no immediate plans” for a public offering, said Hoffman. “We still have a lot of ground to cover to grow.”

Comparing the the business-oriented LinkedIn professional network with hot social networks like Facebook, Hoffman noted: “They have page views and time on the site and are looking for a scalable economic model and we have an economic model and will focus on growing usage.”

LinkedIn certainly has been growing its coffers. It raised $5.2 million in its first round, $10 million in its second and $12.8 million in its third.

Here is a video of LinkedIn’s investors trying mightily to play down the $1 billion valuation, while also pumping it up.

You gotta love the cheerleading of Greylock’s David Sze, Bessemer’s David Cowan and Mark Kvamme of Sequoia, along with new investor Jeffrey Glass of Bain (who will join LinkedIn’s board as an observer):

Searchme: A New Visual Search Engine

Kara Swisher — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 07:03:22 +0000

[Updated with correct funding of $31 million and note that Google has a similar effort in its labs.]

Today, Sequoia Capital, which has been a key investor of search giant Google (GOOG), as well as Yahoo, will unveil its latest investment in search, a visual search engine called: Searchme.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which has been germinating for three years, has raised $31 million from Sequoia and others to further its efforts to make search look more lively.

(Specifically: $400,000 in Series A financing from Sequoia in July of 2005; $3.6 million in Series B funding from Sequoia in January of 2006; $12 million in Series C funding from Sequoia and DAG Ventures in June of 2007; and $15 million in Series D funding from Lehman Brothers, DAG and Sequoia in October of 2007.)

And, indeed, Searchme does look good, resembling a mashup of Google with Apple’s (AAPL) popular Cover Flow three-dimensional graphical user interface used on its iTunes service, with a little of Ask.com’s categories thrown in.

For now, Searchme is only going into private beta, adding users by invitation only.

To create the page-riffling effect, seen below in this screen grab (click on it to make it larger), Searchme has been working with Adobe. The top screen, after a search term has been entered, then creates a stack of pages to represent the page links on a list below.

Searchme’s chairman is Sequoia partner Mark Kvamme. Longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Randy Adams will serve as co-founder and CEO (CMO John Holland is its third co-founder).

Despite imaging billions of pages and indexing one billion pages, Adams acknowledges that results rendered are still weak, noting the site needs time to become more and more relevant.

A search of the name of my partner and well-known tech reviewer Walt Mossberg, for example, came up with some esoteric pages related to him first, well before it showed pages from this site or The Wall Street Journal.

“We are no Google, of course, but we are trying something different to provide a new experience for search users,” said Adams. “Most of all, we are trying to innovate in search, which is still largely a text and list experience.”

Adams has a point about the lack of innovation in search over the last several years by leader Google, which continues to grow its market share anyway. Google, in fact, does have a similar offering in its labs, but has not rolled it out.

So, it is nice to see some interesting ideas brought to fruition–even if Searchme really does look exactly like an iTunes copycat–in the sector.

As to the business model? It will be advertising, of course, both in text links and also in a more vibrant way on the image pages.

Here’s a video interview that I did with Adams late last week about Searchme, along with two Searchme demo videos below it:

[ See post to watch video ]

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again…

Kara Swisher — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:42:21 +0000

Was it just me or did you also get a bit of déjà vu upon reading a story today by the New York Times’s Laura M. Holson about yet another mash-up of a Hollywood talent agencies with Silicon Valley VCs.

That’s apparently what is happening with a new investment venture that includes the William Morris Agency, Accel Partners, Venrock and–filling out the unlikely foursome–AT&T (T), as a limited partner.

The focus of the investment fund will be to hand out cash–and, presumably, expertise–to digital media start-ups in Southern California.

While the Times drilled in on the presence of a big cellphone carrier–just the kind of company that my partner Walt Mossberg has dubbed one of the “Soviet ministries” for stifling innovation with overly controlling behavior in the mobile space–I am more focused on the rocky road of many such deals that have been struck in the past.

Now, I think all the players involved are very smart, including Accel’s Jim Breyer, Venrock’s David Siminoff and also William Morris CEO Jim Wiatt (as well as Morris’s Paul Bricault).

That said, a lot of sharpies have gotten sucked up in the past into the this-has-to-be-a-marriage-made-in-heaven dreams of the perfect Hollywood-Silicon Valley pairing.

Today, there are a number of interesting efforts, such as Comedy Central’s deal with the creators of “South Park” to create a joint-venture digital studio, as well as the better-known pairing of Sequoia Capital with the Will Ferrell-led Funny or Die comedy site (see my video interview with Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme about the site below).

And, of course, although nothing was actually settled, the recently ended writers’ strike was all about content revenues that might–or, perhaps more accurately, might not–be coming from digital sources in the future.

But if the past is prologue, this new group of investors might have to learn to be a bit patient.

Breyer acknowledges as much in the Times’s article. “There is always a fear, I know, that the bubble is about to burst when a parade of actors and actresses comes through my door,” he said, before noting, “this time the discussions are much more rational.”

I guess that is why the funding is in the tens of millions of dollars, the article noted, rather than the larger sums that have been spent in previous attempts to forge these kind of tech and entertainment alliances.

In fact, Holson herself penned a very good piece in 2002 about the failure of one much-touted experiment in such an integration–LivePlanet–between celebs Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Redpoint Ventures.

That company was supposed to be a multimedia wunderkind, straddling the tech and media worlds with all sorts of gizmo-content wonders. One of its debut press releases in 2000 was, in fact, titled: “LivePlanet Unveils Integrated Media Concept–Entertainment Experiences that Span Traditional Media, New Media and the Physical World.”

Now, it is a shadow of that. According to a January article in Variety about the shuttering of its film unit, “LivePlanet evolved into a satellite company that [partner Sean] Bailey, Affleck and Damon would return to when not engaged in their own projects.”

In the 2002 piece, after a series of problems, including the bust of the dot-com bubble, Affleck himself got it dead right.

”If we stick around long enough and convince people we can do these things, we will matter in the new economy. I’d like to slip to the last page to see how it ends. But who knows.”

And, even six years later, who knows?

Here is the Kvamme video, in which he discusses Funny or Die:

[ See post to watch video ]

Jerry O'Connell Channels Tom Cruise

Kara Swisher — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:01:41 +0000

Until the writers’ strike in Hollywood is over–who knew it would go on this long?–BoomTown has decided to offer periodic suggestions about cool new stuff to watch.

Today, it is this gem from online video comedy site Funny or Die, in which Jerry O’Connell (who knew he was so hilarious?) does a mean and spot-on imitation of the recent wacky video and Web phenomena of Tom Cruise espousing the virtues and power of Scientology.

Along with the maniacal laughing, the best line: “For me, it’s all about KFC. It’s just good chicken. Poof.”

This is exactly the kind of content the Web is perfect for.

Here’s the spoof:

Also, here is a link to an interview that I recently did with Funny or Die investor Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital.

Sequoia Capital's Mark Kvamme Speaks!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:23:41 +0000

We at BoomTown are very interested in content on the Web these days, especially given the ongoing writers’ strike in Hollywood and its wrangling over digital (and a whole lot of other) issues.

The intersection–or perhaps collision is a better word–of the entertainment and technology industries continues at an ever more frantic pace.

And it’s clear the strike is putting into fast-forward efforts by writers and other “talent” to do an end run around the traditional studio system of funding and distribution.

There has been, no surprise, a lot of noise recently about writers looking for funding coming up to meet with venture firms in Silicon Valley, the results of which I remain wary still.

Nonetheless, such marriages are inevitable, as the entire content distribution system shifts to new paradigms in a likely-to-be painful transformation whose end result is decidedly unclear.

To get some clarity, I decided to pay a visit to Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital to talk about his nascent efforts in the arena with his investment in the online comedy video site, Funny or Die, which was launched last April.

Starting with a small $17,000 seed round, Sequoia and others have recently sunk a more serious $15 million in the effort. The site has yielded a few Web hits, mostly done by Kvamme’s partners and the site’s co-owners–actor Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (Chris Henchy is the third leg of the entertainment stool, although the trio has wrangled in a plethora of Hollywood’s hipper comedy elite to contribute to Funny or Die).

Mixing professional content with user-generated material makes for a pretty lively site, where videos are voted up (funny) or down (die).

Results for Funny or Die are still mixed, with big success for one with Ferrell and McKay’s daughter, called “The Landlord,” which has garnered more than 50 million views. Its follow-up, “Good Cop, Baby Cop” (see here), is also popular.

But those are the exception, of course, with several million monthly unique visitors engaged for about five minutes a visit.

But Funny or Die is definitely doing a lot better than some other failed efforts in the genre, such as NBC’s DotComedy.com, Time Warner’s This Just In and Time Inc.’s Office Pirates. Current competitors include sites like CollegeHumor and the Onion, although each one has a taken approach.

Funny or Die’s will be to expand to new areas, such as a recent site on skateboarding and other extreme sports fronted by Tony Hawk called Shred or Die and another one called MyBlueCollar, focused on redneck comedy. Eat or Die–using famous chefs–is next.

But who knows what tomorrow will bring–as the song kind of goes–in a world where few online video sites survive?

Here’s Kvamme to talk about it:

[ See post to watch video ]

"Good Cop, Baby Cop"

Kara Swisher — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:00:38 +0000

Here is the second “baby” comedy video from the Funny or Die archives with Will Ferrell and a very tough toddler, played by Pearl McKay, called “Good Cop, Baby Cop”:

And here is the post and video of FOD investor Mark Kvamme of Sequoia Capital talking about the online video space.