There aren’t many startup founders that have done what Garrett Camp has done. After selling content discovery service StumbleUpon to eBay for $75 million in 2007, Camp and investors decided to buy it back for a reported $29 million in 2009.
After the initial Series A that was folded back into the spinoff, Camp raised $17 million from August Capital, Accel, and others in a Series B just last week, making StumbleUpon the most rare of comeback success stories.
Thus far buying yourself back after an acquisition is a feat that’s only been accomplished on a large scale by Webshots (which bought itself back from Excite@Home and resold itself to Cnet) and Skype, which also bought itself back from eBay. Andrew Dreskin, the founder of TicketFly, who sold his former company TicketWeb to TicketMaster and proceeded to directly compete with his former owner, also deserves an honorable mention here.
I sat down with Camp during SXSW to talk about the process of reacquiring your company, what he plans on doing with the StumbleUpon’s rare second chance, and which startup he likes better, StumbleUpon or Uber (of which he is a co-founder).
Highlights:
On the motivation behind the acquisition: “A desire for flexibility. I think bigger companies require more approvals, it takes longer to get stuff done. So I thought we would grow a lot faster if we were a smaller company.”
On the advantages of being part of a larger company: “The great thing about eBay is that I could totally focus on product, totally focused on engineering, I didn’t have to deal with fundraising, I didn’t have to deal with all the operational issues you have at a company. Because I was focused on that we actually grew really well. We tripled in size during out time there. We were there times bigger when we left than when we came in.”
On whether he’s more excited about StumbleUpon or Uber (the company he co-founded with Travis Kalanick: “That’s like saying ‘which is your favorite kid?’ I mean that’s hard to pick. Uber was basically a side project …”
Advice to other founders that find themselves bored post acquisition: “The decision you want to make is ‘Do you want to keep working on what you’re working on?’”
Pulling a phoenix from the ashes is that simple, except when it’s not.
StumbleUpon is the easiest way to discover new and interesting things from across the Web. More than 25 million people turn to StumbleUpon to be informed, entertained and surprised by content and information recommended just for them. In addition, more than 80,000 brands, publishers and other marketers have used StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery platform to tell their stories and promote their products and services. Explore more at http://www.stumbleupon.com.
Garrett is the founding CEO of StumbleUpon.com, guiding its development from inception to over 25M registered members. StumbleUpon is now the largest discovery engine on the web, delivering over 1 Billion personalized recommendations per month. Over 75,000 advertisers have used StumbleUpon to get their content discovered. Garrett also co-founded Uber.com in 2009 with Travis Kalanick, to improve the efficiency of on-demand car service. Uber now provides on-demand car service in 16 cities across North America and Europe. Garrett completed his Masters...
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
