In a bit of fallout from Dalton Caldwell’s decision to refocus his company App.net on building a real-time social platform, as well his subsequent open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticizing the company’s “bad-faith” acquisition practices, investor Marc Andreessen (pictured) is leaving the startup’s board.
Andreessen will be replaced on the board of Mixed Media Labs (the company that Caldwell co-founded to launch photosharing service Picplz, and which now operates App.net) by Scott Weiss, another partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen is a Facebook board member, so the swap is supposed to avoid the conflicts of interest likely to arise as Caldwell builds his own alternative to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Weiss isn’t quite as big a name as Andreessen, but he’s an experienced entrepreneur, having co-founded and served as the CEO of IronPort Systems. (He’s also an occasional TechCrunch columnist.)
The news was first reported in AllThingsD, and Caldwell confirmed the story to me via email, telling me, “This was not unexpected.”
Caldwell first announced last month that he’s taking App.net in a new direction by building real-time social service and API “where users and developers come first, not advertisers,” and that he wants to raise $500,000 for the initiative through crowdfunding. Then yesterday, Caldwell offered a little more of the backstory. He wrote that he’d been meeting with Facebook executives to discuss a new app that App.net was building on the Facebook platform, allowing users to see which apps their friends were using. However, Caldwell claims that the meeting took an “odd turn”, with the executives saying Caldwell’s product would compete with the Facebook App Center, and pressurizing him to sell to Facebook instead.
His reaction? “I told your team I would rather reboot my company than go down that route.” And here we are, mid-reboot.
Mixed Media Labs goal goal is to build smartphone applications. They are the developers of picplz.
Dalton Caldwell is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mixed Media Labs, a position he has held since February 2010. Mixed Media Labs is a startup whose first product is picplz, a photo broadcasting application for iPhone and Android mobile devices. Caldwell co-founded imeem in 2004 and served as its CEO, responsible for imeem’s strategic vision and guiding its overall product direction. Under Caldwell’s guidance, imeem pioneered and helped popularize the advertising-supported streaming music model. In 2007, the company...
Mr. Marc Andreessen is a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. He is also co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter. He is an active member of the blogging community. Previously, Andreessen developed Mosaic and co-founded Netscape. Mosaic was developed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications, on which Andreessen was the team-leader. Andreessen co-founded what later became Netscape Communications which produced the ‘Netscape Navigator’. Netscape Navigator...
Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Formerly, he was co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. While at Cisco, Weiss was the vice president and general manager of the Security Technology Group. Previously, he was also a managing director and entrepreneur-in-residence at IdeaLab, where he met IronPort co-founder Scott Banister. Prior to IdeaLab, Weiss was employee no. 13 at Hotmail and was responsible for all partnership and revenue generating...
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