It is only Monday, but Canadian seed investor and serial entrepreneur Austin Hill is having a pretty good week. Two of his portfolio startups were acquired this week. The biggest exit was BumpTop, which Google snapped up for a rumored $25 million to $35 million. Hill was one of the first seed investors in BumpTop, which raised less than $2 million total. BumpTop’s 3D desktop interface and multitouch gestures may appear in teh future in Android phones, Chrome OS tablets, or maybe even a GPad.
Hill had another exit today with Standout Jobs a company where he was chairman which helps HR departments with social recruiting. The company isn’t saying how much it was acquired for or even who acquired it, but it is most likely a mid-tier jobs site looking to ramp up its social features. Standout raised only about $1.6 million (Canadian), but investors were lucky to get their money back and not much more. So Standout Jobs was more of a sideways deal. But at a time when recruiting sites are hurting all over, that is not the worst outcome.
The company launched right before the last recession, which wasn’t a great time to be selling stuff to HR departments. But now as everyone is getting ready for the job market to come back, older sites are scrambling to reinvent themselves and add social juice. Standout basically replaces the job section of a company’s site with a more social set of widgets, and ties into Twitter and Facebook as well.
Go, Canada.
Austin Hill is a Canadian entrepreneur and angel investor. As the founder of a number Canadian startups he is active in the Canadian Venture, Angel and Startup communities. He is currently a founder & CEO of Akoha, Chairman and co-founder of Standout Jobs and was previously a co-founder of Zero-Knowledge Systems, Total.Net, Infobahn Online Servives. In 2001 Austin was awarded the 2001 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Emerging Entrepreneur in Quebec. In 2002 Austin was named...
Standout Jobs provides a [Recruitment Communication Platform] (http://www.standoutjobs.com), to power companies’ online recruiting efforts. The core is a do-it-yourself, interactive Career Site that helps engage and attract candidates, and build on-going relationships with them. As well, the Standout Jobs platform provides a candidate tracking tool, easier job marketing and candidate sourcing functionality.
BumpTop provides users with a personalized desktop interface that they are able to customize.
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