hires
The chaos at Technorati and PodTech, two startups which saw outside CEO searches end in failure last week, should be instructive to company founders everywhere. If you're asking yourself if it's time to step aside, it's too late. Entrepreneurs are often excellent evangelists — the peculiar Silicon Valley breed of marketer who seeks to create fervor for a product few even understand, let alone think they need. Sifry and Furrier are both typical of this kind. But the career of evangelist bears a particular occupational hazard: The risk of starting to believe your own preachings, and of thinking that no one else is fit to deliver them.
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technorati
Dave Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati, is
immediately stepping down from the role of CEO as the blog search pioneer continues to burn cash and fails to find a working business model. CFO Teresa Malo, VP of engineering Dorion Carroll and VP of marketing Derek Gordon will govern by committee until they find a new CEO. The company's search for an outside leader, which began last spring, has failed to find any takers. Eight other Technorati employees were also fired "to adjust our expense structure to be more appropriately aligned with our priorities moving forward." In other words, they're running out of cash, despite several small rounds of funding meant to keep them afloat. Technorati pioneered and had an early lead in blog search, an area where Google should have excelled. Since then, Google's Blog Search has improved while Technorati's has gotten worse. And as the lines between mainstream journalism and the blogosphere continue to blur, dedicated blog search has increasingly become irrelevant — a fact that's surely not lost on any CEO candidates Technorati might find.
technorati
- Man, this is not the New York Times's best weekend. Their latest gaffe: calling Peter Hirshberg, chairman of blog search company Technorati, the CEO. Poor tech blogger Om Malik was afraid CEO Dave Sifry had been ousted. But Sifry replied on Om's blog that he's still in charge. He tells me the mix-up was probably an innocent mistake by the Times; no one interviewed Sifry for the article. [GigaOM]
- The campaign blog to free imprisoned medical marijuana dispenser Sparky Rose says that his prosecutors claim he had "no previous work history prior to the pot club." Rose was a high-rolling dot-com founder — same thing? [Free Sparky]
- CNET launches a new title called Crave, because the world needs yet another gadget blog. [Crave]
- Who wins the battle of YouTube vs. MySpace, now that the latter is aggressively moving into online video and breaking YouTube vids embedded on MySpace? Google wins, of course. [BusinessWeek]
- NY Times columnist Joe Nocera says Carly Fiorina's memoir of her time heading Hewlett-Packard is a revisionist history — she lies about earnings, he says, and her book should be called "It's All About Me." [NY Times Select]
- Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner will pay all his journalists to run their own blogs — presumably so no one else leaves like B2 writer Om Malik to start their own media empire. [I Want Media]
technorati
Dave Sifry examines Robert Scoble's
"brrreeeport" experiment. (Scoble asked everyone in the world — no, really — to write "brrreeeport" in a blog post and let the search engines race to catch the posts.)
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napster
After the New York Post reported that Google would buy Napster, a Google spokesperson
denied any such plans. Looks like someone's trying to float a rumor and sell their stock. Meanwhile, Technorati's looking to sell its search tools, Six Apart might stay solo, and Digg.com is fighting lucrative sale rumors.
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Valleywag
Draper Fisher Jurvetson's big blog mistake
Technorati has raised another $7.5 million from existing venture-capital backers, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company has raised $30 million to date. Anyone know the valuation? Given Technorati's fall from Web grace, and the loss of founder Dave Sifry, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a "down round" — an investment that values the company at less than previous rounds did. [PEHub]
