Khosla Ventures likes social advertising startup MyLikes. The VC firm is leading the startup’s $5.6 million Series A financing. Lightspeed Partners also invested and Metamorphic Ventures, which participated in the all-Googler $600,000 seed round, ponied up again.
Additionally, seed investor Paul Buchheit is joining MyLike’s board of directors. Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, recently left Facebook to become a partner at Y Combinator (although MyLikes is one of his private investments). Alex Kinnier, a partner at Khosla Ventres and formerly a Google advertising product executive, is also taking a board seat.
MyLikes tries to match social influencers with advertisers. Anyone can sign up to endorse products and brands to their social networks via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or blogs. MyLikes calculates your social influence based on how many followers you have, how often they click on your endorsements, and other factors. The more social influence you have, the more money you can make.
Today, the company is also launching a mobile app on both iPhone and Android, which allows users to endorse products by uploading and sharing photos or by checking into a business location.
MyLikes is a social media advertising platform. Social publishers choose to write and recommend sponsored Likes to their audience through their blog, website or Twitter account. Publishers earn money for themselves or a charity of their choice whenever there is a click from a Sponsored Like to the advertiser’s website. Likes are based on the simple principle that the publisher is the expert when it comes to understanding their audience. Publishers can tailor the Sponsored Like to speak to...
Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm started in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems. The firm focuses on environmentally friendly technologies in addition to the traditional venture areas such as the Internet, computing, mobile and silicon technology arenas.
Paul Buchheit co-founded social network aggregator FriendFeed, along with three other former Google employees. He is also an investor in FriendFeed and participated in a $5 million Series A round in February 2008. He was the 23rd employee at Google, where he created Gmail and implemented many of its innovative features. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense, and was responsible for Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto in a meeting.
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