Back in June, Xobni co-founder Adam Smith wrote a blog post announcing he was moving on from the company, and handing over the CTO reins. We’ve just confirmed that fellow co-founder Matt Brezina has also left the company.
The timing of Brezina’s departure isn’t fully clear, but we hear it was also a few weeks ago — he just didn’t have the big blog post about it. Obviously, having both co-founders leave so closely to one another is a bit odd. It was only this past April that they raised a large $16.2 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures. Talk was that this put their post-money valuation at around $65 million. The company also recently moved into a new office in the SoMa area of San Francisco (Twitter’s old offices, actually) and crazy mural spending aside, it would seem that things were fine on the surface.
But before we confirmed the Brezina news, we had been hearing whispers of growing discontent within Xobni. The direction of the company and current management was cited as being two issues of concern in particular.
Initially a Y Combinator company, Xobni launched at the first TC40 conference in 2007. In 2008, the company was about to be acquired by Microsoft for something in the $20 million-range (they had only raised about $5 million at the time) but they walked away at the last second. At the time, they were focused on improving Microsoft Outlook, but they’ve since taken their tools to everything from BlackBerry to Gmail.
Update: I’ve now spoken with Brezina who confirms his exit but says it’s only because they’ve hired good people to run the company — of course, they always tend to say things like that, and in fact, Smith said the same thing. That said, Brezina did confirm that he and Smith are still on the board and involved.
As for what’s next, Brezina is working on it. Stay tuned.
Xobni (the word inbox spelled backwards) makes your inbox and address book smarter. First launching to the public in 2008, Xobni and its’ Smartr product suite, discover all the people you’ve ever emailed, called or texted, and creates complete and social profiles that are instantly searchable. Profiles include a photo, job title, company details, email history as well as updates from your contacts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Products for Gmail, Android and iPhone are available under...
Matt Brezina is the co-founder of Sincerely.
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