Valleywag
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Max Levchin
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widgets
VH1 and Slide sign deal to create Facebook's killer app -- Flavor Flav SuperPokes
On Wednesday, Facebook and MySpace users who have installed Slide's near-ubiquitous SuperPoke widget — the one that lets you throw sheep — will be able to send messages branded with characters and slogans from VH1's stable of reality series such as Flavor Flav from Flavor of Love. It's all an effort to promote the new series I Love Money — which, surprisingly, does not star hypercompetitive Slide founder Max Levchin. Who knew?
venture capital
$35 million round wasn't enough for RockYou
Online widgetmaker RockYou is still looking for another $5 million to $15 million in funding, even after it took $35 million last week, at a $300 million valuation. That money was for doubling its staff, moving to a larger office in Redwood City and acquiring more widgets — those annoying add-ons to social-network profiles — for its portfolio, RockYou CTO and founder Jia Shen told Silicon Alley Insider — but it's not clear what the extra cash is for. In March, rumor had it RockYou's lastest funding round would set its value near $400 million, but thanks in part to a sliding ad market and a developer-unfriendly Facebook redesign, investors are said to have turned skeptical, sending the startup's paper value down by $100 million to $150 million. More »
yelp
New details on Yelp's New York expansion
Social reviews site Yelp isn't nearly as popular in New York as it is in San Francisco and management has been planning to do something about it. "They're gonna pump up efforts to conquer NYC, renting an office in Gramercy area and assign [an] East Coast community leader," a source with new details tells us. Yelp already has an ad sales office in New York's West Village, but our source says those people will move to the larger office further uptown by September as well. Yelp is a cousin to widgetmaker Slide, with Slide founder Max Levchin on Yelp's board. With Slide's own upcoming move to New York and Yelp's city expansion, we'd expect to see a lot more Levchin around the Alley, except, well, we hear he never leaves the office. (And if he did, we'd prefer he say hello to his bride to be first.)
online advertising
Slide comes to New York, cap in hand
Widgetmaker Slide hired AOL's former director of national sales, Jason Bitensky, and opened a New York office in the West Village, Kara Swisher reports. Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin says his company followed the bright lights to the big city because More »
your privacy is an illusion
Facebook's widget security? You could throw a sheep through it
Linking up social websites, as proponents of "data portability" would have us do, can be hazardous to your privacy. And Paris Hilton's, and Lindsay Lohan's. But even the widgets on a single social network can leave us exposed. SuperPoke, a popular application made by Slide, will show you who's thrown a sheep at anyone, as long as you have their Facebook ID — the unique numeric identifier which shows up in the URL of their Facebook profile. Mark Zuckerberg's SuperPoke feed is here; substitute the number of another Facebook user for Zuckerberg's "4", and you can see every last sheep he or she has been involved with. More »
max levchin
Start a company now, says Max Levchin -- so he can buy it
Slide founder Max Levchin believes Web 2.0 is about to bust. Funding will evaporate and revenues won't materialize; companies will fold and employees will lose their jobs. The lucky few that can will sellout to larger companies. All of which means "this is the perfect time to start a company," Levchin told the Financial Times. Why does Levchin believe this? You know, other than the fact that he's a well-documented masochist who works 15 to 18 hour days and, despite a fear of the water, forced himself through a triathlon? More »
d6 live coverage
Security ejects Valleywag from D6 conference
CARLSBAD, CA — I wasn't just eighty-sixed, folks. No, I was eight-D6'd. There I was, charming my way through the crowd at the Wall Street Journal's D6 conference — why hello, Sir Howard Stringer of Sony! Oh, was that Steve Case? — when a woman announced herself as "in-house security" and informed me that "the client" had asked that I be shown the door. "The client" being Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, the conference organizers, and "the door" actually just the way to the hotel bar, where I'm having a lovely fruity beverage. And Swisher and Mossberg were too late with the bum rush. I'd already been working my camera for hours. While Bill Gates bores attendees with a preview of Windows Seven, Microsoft's latest attempt to annoy the majority of computer users, you can enjoy the snapshots I took. Among the nerdspotting: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Max Levchin of Slide. More »
poll
What should Max Levchin do with his forgotten $100,000?
Before PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin moved from Illinois to Palo Alto in 1998, he'd started three companies and sold the last for $100,000 — not a tiny amount of money, especially for a young entrepreneur. But after selling PayPal to eBay for $1.54 billion, these days Levchin is worth around $100 million. Six figures no longer merit that much of his attention. It's such a paltry amount that in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy reports Levchin actually forgot about the money until 2006. "In just four years," Lacy writes, "$100,000 would go from being unfathomable riches to pocket change." Levchin is no longer interested in the purchasing power of money, but we are. So let the young multi-millionaire know how he should spend that $100,000 in "pocket change" in our poll. More »
party report
Photos from Sarah Lacy's book party
Web 2.0 was hot last night. And I mean the kind of heat determined not by Technorati rank, but by the thermometer. Despite the stifling weather, San Francisco's Web stars turned out for a party Sarah Lacy threw for her new book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good at Otis off Union Square. The hole-in-the-wall, two-story bar couldn't handle the crowd, which spilled out on Maiden Lane. Slide CEO Max Levchin, the star of the book, stopped by with fiancé Nellie Minkova to congratulate Lacy, and then immediately left. Runner-up Jay Adelson, whom Levchin beat on page count, stayed longer, as did Twitter's Ev Williams, who came with his wife, Sara Morishige. Also in the crowd: August Capital VC David Hornik, who didn't even rate a mention in the index, despite inviting Lacy to his exclusive Lobby conference. A gallery of photos, after the jump: More »
keith rabois
Slide exec on widgets: Fun is where the money is
This decade's greatest Internet hits — Google and PayPal — make so much money because they help money change hands more efficiently. The next great wave of moneymakers on the Web won't be nearly so utilitarian, Keith Rabois, VP at widgetmaker Slide, argues in a guest post to AllThingsD. Rabois says the Web's next mint will be made on fun — a very underrated commodity, he says. To demonstrate his point, he harkens back to the week of April 21 and the electoral contest that captured all of America's attention. Not the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, Rabois writes. "I'm talking about American Idol." Then he lays down some convincing numbers: More »
venture capital
Hyped widgetmaker explains the widgetmaker hype
Union Square Ventures funded Mark Pincus's casual games maker Zynga with $10 million not long after Max Levchin-founded widgetmaker Slide raised $50 million. Competitor RockYou wants a round of funding that would value it at $400 million. We like to scoff at these purveyors of online sheep-throwing tools, but that's serious scratch, people. In this excerpt from a longer interview with Kara Swisher, Zynga's Mark Pincus explains what widgetmakers see in our future — and shows us exactly what kind of pitch VCs are going for these days.
once you're lucky, twice you're good
L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
Max Levchin, the cofounder of PayPal and the CEO of Slide, measures nearly everything, down to the optimum price to pay for an engagement ring. If he needs a metric for self-importance, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's new book about Web 2.0, provides one. He occupies 78 out of 294 pages, more than anyone else. Here are the index pages for "F" through "M": More »
geek love
Slide CEO Max Levchin soon to wed Nellie Minkova
Hidden in Fortune editor Andy Serwer's stream-of-capitalism blog was this nugget: Slide CEO Max Levchin will soon wed longtime girlfriend Nellie Minkova. Minkova, pictured here with Levchin, works at Clarium Capital Management, the hedge fund of Peter Thiel, Levchin's cofounder at PayPal. For more of Minkova, see this excerpt from a New York Times video where she discussed domestic life with a boyfriend who works 18 hours a day: More »
online advertising
Slide's Max Levchin: It's time to shift away from advertising
Worried about an upcoming recession, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin told News.com that his company, Slide, is "trying to shift away from advertising partially" and go "direct to consumers" for its revenues. "It cuts out one more party from the equation," Levchin said. "During a recession time you don't have to worry so much about building an enormous scale, you just have to build up a loyal base of fans that pay you a little bit." Slide's revenues today are generated mostly from ads on mini-applications embedded on Facebook and MySpace pages. Levchin is not the first to have come up with this idea, but having just raised $50 million from large investors for an ad-supported business, Levchin's shift in thinking is either a wise caution — or a brilliantly devious headfake for rivals who have yet to raise a big round of venture capital. More »
deals
Is Slide worth half a billion? Only if Facebook buys them
In January a pair of money managers, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, bought 9.1 percent of Slide for $50 million. Fortune asks, "Are these widgets worth half a billion?" The mag doesn't come up with anything more than "maybe," but I'm willing to go a little further. Slide worth $550 million? No, despite its huge traffic numbers. While it's true that advertisers are desperate to reach the 18-24 market, I hardly think SuperPoke is what they had in mind. More »
10:40 AM on Mon Mar 24 2008
By Jordan Golson
2,145 views,
6 comments
Latest by DaveMcClure500Hats: party @ Alaska's place! woo hoo! more »
social networks
Max Levchin's guide to luring developers
Max Levchin's widget maker Slide just took on funding that set its value at $550 million. And the company's user base grew 142 percent in a year to 150 million users, giving it the ninth largest "reach" on the Internet. Maybe this means its worth paying attention to Levchin's ideas on "How to successfully launch a social networking platform? Maybe. But not for more than 100 words. More »
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