Yesterday, BoomTown checked in with Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar about the document sharing start-up.
Today, it’s Trip Adler, CEO of its much larger rival, Scribd.
Launched in early 2007, the San Francisco-based online publishing company allows customers to share a wider range of documents, including books and manuscripts. It now claims to have 10 million documents.
According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought in late 2007 for $350 million.
Zimbra is only one of the many assets of Yahoo that are now on the block, including its personals business, its HotJobs online classified unit and more to come.
The effort to unload Zimbra is yet another sign that the company is trying to slim down its diverse portfolio, even as it strives to redefine itself this week with a new, pricey marketing campaign that seeks to position Yahoo primarily as a consumer company.
Little known factoid: Every time a penny drops onto a start-up, a venture capitalist gets his wings.
Well, OK, not so much, but it’s one way to look at it.
An example of that, though, is this video interview I did with serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj, who has been on the ground floor of a number of tech start-ups, sold one (Zimbra to Yahoo for $350 million in late 2007) and has now made his first investment as a new VC.
More musical chairs at Yahoo, which BoomTown predicted recently, as top execs at the company move in and out of jobs, and new ones from the outside move in.
Perhaps the most important change to occur is the replacement this week of SVP Scott Dietzen–who had been in charge of all communications and communities products at Yahoo–by former Adobe Systems exec Bryan Lamkin, several sources said.
And there’s even more…
Former top Yahoo advertising exec David Karnstedt, who has been parked at a Silicon Valley venture firm since he left the company, has been named president and CEO of Efficient Frontier.
Interestingly, another former Yahoo exec, Ellen Siminoff, has also been CEO at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based search engine marketing firm. She is now chairman.
Another former Yahoo exec has landed at a Silicon Valley venture firm. This time, well-regarded serial entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj will become a partner at Redpoint Ventures, according to sources.
The move of Dharmaraj is interesting, given that he is not starting a new company or taking a post as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm, which many operating execs do after leaving a company.
Sources close to the situation said Dharmaraj would focus on business software, the enterprise arena and infrastructure at Redpoint.
Last night, I was the master of ceremonies, as I have been for several years, at the laudable annual Astia Awards Dinner, which celebrated venture firms that support women-led companies.
And VC Tim Draper really went above and beyond in showing–quite literally–his support.
Last Friday, BoomTown paid a visit to James Joaquin, who has just been officially appointed the new CEO of Foxmarks, the Mitch Kapor-backed start-up that makes a free bookmarking and password syncing add-on for the Firefox browser.
The San Francisco-based company had also has gotten $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures earlier this summer.
With the arrival of Joaquin, Foxmarks is trying to move into a mode of carving out a business with its assets, including using its data and expanding beyond the Firefox browser.
Here’s a video interview with Joaquin about it.
After the news broke that former Microsoft exec Joanne Bradford was headed to Yahoo as the head of its U.S. ad sales and more, I got to talk to both her and her new boss, Hilary Schneider, on the phone this morning about the move.
Bradford left her job as national ad sales chief at Spot Runner, where she arrived just six months ago, to take the position of SVP of U.S. revenue and market development at Yahoo.
In what is both a surprising and not-so-surprising move, Yahoo has replaced its top U.S. ad sales exec with one from Microsoft.
The departure of Dave Karnstedt, who took over last year when longtime Yahoo ad sales exec Wenda Millard left Yahoo in the first of many controversial partings, has been long rumored internally.
Karnstedt will join Redpoint Ventures and is being replaced by Joanne Bradford, a longtime and well-known Microsoft exec who decamped from the software giant to helm national ad sales at the trendy start-up Spot Runner just six months ago.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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