Layoffs, Reshuffle at OneRiot

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Jul 30, 2010

Social search site OneRiot just announced layoffs and staff restructuring on its company blog, in a post entitled “Welcome to the future, it’s coming fast.”

Now, being agile also necessitates making some tough decisions too, if they are the right thing for the company right now. Unfortunately, today, we have had to let a handful of well respected colleagues go. This is a pragmatic decision based on a strategically focused go-forward plan for the company. It’s in no way a reflection of the talent of the people concerned.

While OneRiot’s post does not reveal how many employees or what percentage of staff was cut, it does announce the following executive changes: CEO and Tesla board Director Kimbal Musk will now take on the role of company Chairman and Tobias Peggs, formerly President in charge of Strategy, Sales, Distribution and Marketing, will replace him as CEO. Co-founder Robert Reich will be leaving the company.

OneRiot’s search results are ranked to reflect the realtime social conversations around any piece of content. The company recently tapped both in to the Google Buzz firehose and Facebook’s Open Graph API.

CrunchBase Information

OneRiot

Kimbal Musk

Information provided by CrunchBase

JAB

They were hiring senior engineers as recent as 2-3 months ago. Wonder what happened?
http://www.filtize.com Filtize

They are not getting enough traction. Check traffic scores .. far from break even ..
markus

Perhaps its because no one uses the service directly as theres no real consumer use for it. You want real time search from twitter, go to google and choose Latest in the time period on the sidebar.

All their traffic came from addon partners that were basically paid per search to include OneRiots results. Without that payola, no one would think to include their results.
Master Yoda

Having fun with investor’s money they are, i think
http://blog.oneriot.com tobias

Hey guys, you might want to read our blog post http://blog.oneriot.com/content/2010/07/welcome-to-the-future/ which explains the movement today.
The bottom line is this: our Riotwise Ad Network for the Realtime Web has absolutely exploded this year – and we’re really excited to focus on that product and drive it forward as fast as possible.
It’s really unfortunate that this focused go-forward plan required a pragmatic look at the burn rate of the company, and we’ve said goodbye to a handful of really talented people today. This always sucks.
So while today is tinged with sadness for former colleagues, we’re fast forwarding to an extremely healthy future. That’s the focus now.
Thanks, Tobias, CEO OneRiot
http://sco.tt scodtt

I know that Robert Reich is one of the great guys in Colorado. I look forward to whatever comes next for him.
Chris Finke

Agreed; Robert is a class act.
markus

yea, just like Me.dium did…good luck with that
josh

Maybe just some leftover job posting from years ago that nobody bothered to take down.
http://bit.ly/9SpIxI rikki

They ran out of money probably hehe..
http://bit.ly/9SpIxI
g4t

I think probably their traffic is not what they expected at this stage. It is easy to be optimistic and start spending a lot of money early and then realize that things are same as before. It is probably good idea to trim down costs fast early.
Jp23

Let go of talented people? What r u nutz? It’s obvious that their biz is not working out and running out of $$.