September 10th, 2011

The Job Of A CEO At A 200 Person Company

seth-sternberg

The job of CEO at a 200 person company is pretty different from the life I had 6 years ago—just before Meebo launched. It’s a lot less about what I do and a lot more about how I enable others. In today’s world, if you zoom out to a very macro-level view, there are three things I do. 1. Strategy. 2. People. 3. Resource allocation.

Strategy

You always hear that part of a CEO’s job is to come up with the “strategy”. But what does that really mean? In my world it’s listen, synthesize and communicate. → Read More

May 12th, 2011

(Founder Stories) Meebo’s Seth Sternberg On Hiring, Growth And Flying High.

Like many start-ups, Meebo has been on a recent hiring spree. In this episode of Founder Stories, CEO Seth Sternberg tells Chris Dixon, “for 12 weeks we had to hire a salesperson a week and if we didn’t we would have missed our revenue numbers later this year.”

But it’s not just new salespeople populating Meebo’s workstations. “We started this year at about 130 employees.  I think we are at 175 now, and so for us that is really fast growth” says Sternberg. From CEO to engineer, Sternberg discusses how Meebo weeds out candidates by running them though, “the sim.” This is a simulation of Meebo’s real-world working environment. → Read More

May 10th, 2011

(Founder Stories) Meebo CEO: "What If We Could Completely Change The Game?"

Should founders innovate based upon customer feedback or is it better to develop from within and let consumer adapt. In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Meebo’s Seth Sternberg discusses his philosophy: “Users tend to be very good at giving you incremental product suggestions.”  But they are not product visionaries. “They may be asking for something that would be revolutionary,” he says, “but they don’t realize they are asking for it.”

When receiving such incremental suggestions, Sternberg instinctively skips the baby steps and instead asks the question, “what if we could completely change the game?” → Read More

May 7th, 2011

(Founder Stories) Seth Sternberg On The Early Days Of Meebo: "We Did Not Get It."

Meebo, which connects users with their friends across social platforms, emerged from the ashes of an idea Seth Sternberg and his team had for “file sharing between friends that had IM in it.” Those early days of development saw more misses than hits—“kind of depressing” says Sternberg in this episode of Founder Stories.

After more than a year of tinkering, Meebo finally found its magic formula and launched in 2005. Right from the get-go they heard from their users, but admittedly didn’t totally grasp the scope of what they created. As Sternberg admits, “a lot of commerce sites were calling, bloggers were calling and we did not get it.” → Read More

April 23rd, 2011

TC Cribs: Meebo’s Headbanging, Rocket-Flinging Office (With Magical Passageways)

meebooffice

We’re back with another episode of TC Cribs, taking you inside the offices of some of the tech world’s hottest companies. This episode features Meebo, which rose to popularity as a multi-protocol web-based chat client, and has since gotten tons of traction with their Meebo Bar (not to be confused with the numerous drinking holes located in the office, as you’ll see in the episode)).

Tune in to learn about Meebo’s traditions, their giant cookies, their hidden staircase to the happiest place on Earth, and the wooden board they call a ‘rock wall’ that is much, much harder than it looks. Seriously, it’s really hard. You’ll see. And do be sure to watch til the end. → Read More

March 10th, 2011

Meebo Packs Up Your Favorite Websites And Takes Check-Ins Mobile

Last November, Meebo took a step into a new territory for them: check-ins. But instead of checking into physical locations in the real world, they decided they were going to allow users to check-in to the sites on the web they were browsing. It’s a concept that a few other startups are trying as well, but Meebo has one big advantage: scale.

But as big as Meebo’s reach is, they recognize that people aren’t always going to be sitting at their desks checking in to website. So they’re taking the experience mobile. → Read More

February 8th, 2011

Meebo Acquires Mindset Media, Prepares To Venture Into Direct Response Advertising

Meebo, the online IM service that has increasingly become known for its social toolbar that adorns thousands of websites, has acquired Mindset Media. Mindset Media targets ads based on psychographics — it uses criteria commonly seen in ad targeting systems, like gender and age, in addition to other variables that it says establish user preferences and personality, which can in turn be used by advertisers. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, though Meebo does say it will be incorporating the twelve members of Mindset’s team into its own workforce.

The acquisition sets the stage for Meebo to move into the direct response ad market. Meebo says that it’s now on over 8,000 sites, reaching some 76.6 million people in the United States (of course, these users are visiting sites with the Meebo Bar installed, but aren’t necessarily using it). With this growing distribution Meebo believes it has an opportunity to help advertisers directly reach customers. → Read More

December 26th, 2010

The Unwelcome Return of Platform Dependencies


Editor’s Note: The following guest post is written by a Silicon Valley CEO. Frank Dupree is a pen name

In the late 1990s, the rise of the browser was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented opportunity for startups. A great part of that increased opportunity came as a result of the significant reduction in platform dependencies. No longer did the users’ operating system dictate their access to services or information. Even a behemoth like Microsoft was fighting hand-to-hand combat with small startups for the first time in decades. Fast forward ten years, and it’s 1985 all over again.

But even as the risks of dependencies become better understood by startups and investors, the ascent of Facebook and Twitter seem to point to an ever increasing number of startups with significant business dependencies. Recent changes to both Facebook and Twitter show that neither startups nor their investors can assume much when it comes to support for a given API in the future. Today, even the OS seems subject to dramatic shifts in record time. One only need look to Apple’s iOS to see how dramatic and unpredictable developments can change the landscape for startups, customers and investors.

Today, most startups build with significant external platform dependencies, whether it is Facebook, iOS, Google Apps or Twitter. There are a few types of dependencies. A simple distinction might be to call a dependency on a platform symbiotic or parasitic. Symbiotic dependencies are those for which both sides agree to terms of the dependency and for which both sides seem to derive a benefit. Developers on Facebook’s platform, for example. The most successful here being Zynga, which grew completely and—probably for the team and its investors—nervously within the Facebook ecosystem. → Read More

December 5th, 2010

Social Networking: The Future

Social Networks_ Future

Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first.

In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (FourSquare). Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology.  So where is social networking headed next?  I make eight predictions below.

1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable

Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook.  There is growing pressure on Facebook to make this portable and they have made some progress on this front.  Ultimately I don’t believe users or society as a whole will accept a single company “locking in” our vital information.

Facebook will succumb to pressure and over time make this available to us to allow us more choice in being part of several social networks without having to spam all of our friends again.  I know in 2010 this doesn’t seem obvious to everybody but it’s my judgment.  Either they make our social graph portable or we’ll find other networks to join.  I predict this will come before the end of 2012. → Read More

December 2nd, 2010

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg On Why He's Pushing For Website Check-Ins (TCTV)

Now that people are just starting to get comfortable with the concept of the check-in for geo-location, it is starting to spread to other areas like product check-ins, TV show check-ins, and website check-ins. Just a couple weeks ago, Meebo introduced website check-ins as a new feature for its Meebo Bar. And before that, at our last Disrupt conference in San Francisco, two of the startups (Badgeville and OneTrueFan) launched entire companies around the concept of the website check-in.

So why would you ever want to check into a website? I ran into Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg today at SAI’s Ignition conference in New York City, who explains in the video after the jump. → Read More

November 18th, 2010

Meebo's Sternberg: The "Widget Economy" Was a Big, Fat Lie (TCTV)

“Meebo did widgets super early. Guess what we learned? Don’t build stuff that sits in a box.”

Better than a box? A bar. No, not one with hotties and booze– a toolbar.

In part two of our interview with Meebo’s co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg, we talk about the value of reach online– given the gargantuan reach companies can get on platforms like Facebook in no time. Like a diamond, if everyone can get it, it’s no longer as valuable. Sternberg pokes a big hole into one of the hottest storylines of the early Web 2.0 days– that you could build a big business off of widgets. → Read More

November 17th, 2010

$25 Million for Web-based IM? Not Exactly. Meebo's CEO Explains. (TCTV)

Pivot. It is the new buzzword seemingly taking on a life of its own ala “SUPER ANGEL” after this iconic, viral talk by Mike Maples. Ngmoco did it and cashed in big time. Instagram did it and became an app sensation. Twitter did it, and became, well, Twitter. And now Meebo has done it and raised another $25 million from Khosla Ventures to continue building its business.

Seth Sternberg, Meebo co-founder and CEO, stopped by our studio after Web 2.0 to tell us about how the site became so much more than Web-based IM and how he says the company is nailing the discovery problem in a new, more powerful way than Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and everyone that came before.

They reach 180 million uniques world-wide every month. How’d they get there? Moving from a product the founders wanted to build to a product other sites and users wanted them to build, and an emphasis on “building a product for normal people, not Silicon Valley.”

Sternberg explains what he means in the video below. Tomorrow, we’ll be posting part two of our interview with Sternberg where we talk about the value (declining value) of “reach” in an age of huge platforms with instant distribution. I also pry a few revenue details out of Sternberg. You won’t want to miss it. → Read More

November 14th, 2010

Raid The MiniBar: Meebo Gets Into The Site Check-In Game. But Don't Call It A Game.

With the rise of Foursquare, the “check-in” has become fairly commonplace. With the launch of Places, Facebook will only make it more so. It shouldn’t be surprising that we’re seeing dozens of other startups spring up to do check-ins for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK. Media check-ins were a pretty obvious extension. But now we’re seeing a number of companies pop up that are doing check-ins for websites. A couple of these, Badgeville and OneTrueFan, launched in September at TechCrunch Disrupt. Now they’re about to get some very big competition: Meebo.

Specifically, on Tuesday, Meebo is launching a new browser extension, the Meebo MiniBar, in alpha. This extension, which will be available for Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, will allow people to check-in to the websites they’re browsing on the fly. And this extension is just the first step. Once it’s fully up and running, Meebo plans to add the functionality to their popular toolbar. A toolbar which spans some 8,000 partner websites and reaches 180 million unique users a month already. → Read More

November 9th, 2010

Bebo Adds Meebo In Belated Effort To Win Over Chat-starved Users

Bebo just launched Meebo’s web-based instant messaging client across the social network and the company says a million messages have been sent already

This is Bebo’s first step towards a much more real-time, interactive platform since they sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. Right after that AOL let the platform languish, eventually shutting it down for tax purposes and selling it for about $10m to Criterion Capital Partners. True story.

The new team of 20 or so employees has – surprise surprise – made the site profitable and it’s now coming back in user numbers. Mike Arrington’s recent interview with CTO Akash Garg suggested they’d be going for “Self expression, mobile and video will be strong components.” Clearly IM and Meebo is part of that. → Read More

July 28th, 2010

Toolbar Developer Wibiya Takes On Meebo As Traffic Soars

Watch out Meebo, there’s a new kid on the block. Israeli startup Wibiya, which publicly launched its web-based, customizable toolbar to publishers in January of this year, is seeing impressive traffic for a year-old company.

According to Quantcast, Wibiya is seeing 151 million monthly visitors to its toolbars. In contrast, Quantcast also reports that Meebo is currently seeing 143 million monthly visitors. Currently, Wibiya has more than 70,000 active websites using its toolbar, including TheStreet, TheOnion, Playboy, Philly.com, JellyBelly.com and more. Wibiya says that nearly 1000 new websites are adding the toolbar per day. → Read More

July 21st, 2010

As Facebook Looms, Meebo's Bar Gets A Big Speed Boost, Shares Strong Growth Figures

To most people, online chat service Meebo is best known for its multiprotocol webchat, but for over a year now its primary focus has been the Meebo Bar — a persistent toolbar that third party websites can embed on their pages to facilitate sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, and email. That bar now reaches nearly 150 million people per month through dozens of large third party integrations. Last week CEO Seth Sternberg swung by TechCrunch headquarters to discuss the current status of the Bar, and how it’s turning a single ad unit into some serious revenue.

We last did a deep dive on the progress of the Meebo Bar in December, when Quantcast figures showed it reaching nearly 100 million unique visitors across Meebo partner sites. That number on Quantcast is now up to nearly 150 million, and since August, comScore says that Meebo’s uniques are up nearly 300%. In terms of functionality the Meebo Bar hasn’t changed much since I last spoke to Sternberg, but the amount of money it pulls in certainly has: Sternberg says that the Bar is doing 4x revenue growth year over year, and that revenue is 4x right now what it was in January. In other words, things are picking up quickly (though it’s worth pointing out that Meebo declined to share any concrete revenue figures). → Read More

April 18th, 2010

Spearheaded By Meebo, XAuth Looks To Make Social Sites Smarter

If you’ve ever tried using one of the many sharing widgets available on the web, you know that there are a lot of web services out there that support sharing. That presents a challenge for publishers, who often wind up showing widgets for the big players like Facebook and Twitter, while neglecting the smaller services their users may be members of. Now Meebo, in tandem with a roster of partners including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, JanRain, Disqus and Gigya, has developed a new open standard called XAuth designed to put an end to this problem. And it has the potential to do much more.

Here’s how the official site, XAuth.org is describing the platform:

XAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web.
Participating services generate a browser token for each of their users. Publishers can then recognize when site visitors are logged in to those online services and present them with meaningful, relevant options. → Read More

February 15th, 2010

Meebo's Multi-Chat iPhone App Hits iTunes

If you are one of the millions of people who use Meebo to bring together all of your buddies from different chat services across the Web, you can now do that on your iPhone as well. Meebo’s iPhone app is now available on iTunes The iPhone app lets you chat via AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, MySpace IM, ICQ, Jabber, Facebook, and other chat services, delivering new messages vis push notifications. → Read More

February 11th, 2010

Preview: Meebo's Simple, Quick, And Slick iPhone App

Though they’re not planning to unveil it until next week, Meebo has given us a sneak peek at their iPhone app. My immediate reaction? This will be my go-to messaging app on the iPhone.

While there are no shortage of apps that now allow you to connect to a wide range of messaging networks, Meebo’s is great because it’s very, very fast. It might not have all the bells and whistles that some others contain, but its brilliance is its simplicity. The app itself contains only three main areas: Buddies, Chats, and Accounts. Buddies obviously shows you a list of all your contacts. Chats keeps track of who you are actively chatting with. And Accounts allows you to set status messages, and toggle settings such as being visible. From here you can also add accounts, which is the key to Meebo. → Read More

February 9th, 2010

Meebo Eyes A New Market For Its Chat Bar: Online Retailers

We’ve been covering the growth of Meebo’s chat bar extensively since its launch: after a fairly slow ramp up in 2008, it’s since been deployed to 130 partner sites and now has a reach of 100 million unique visitors. Now that the company has landed partnerships with a number of large publisher sites and social networks, it’s settings its sights on a new target: shopping. The company has been approached by various online retailers to see how they could help make shopping sites more social, and now they’re making an effort to expand into the market.

From a functionality standpoint, Meebo isn’t changing much about the bar to suit retailers — you’ll still drag and drop items to share them with friends, and you can chat with buddies using integrated services like Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and AIM. The big differences will lie in the monetization strategy and the level of analytics retailers will be able to take advantage of. → Read More

Real-Time
Crunchbase

Media Armor — Received $1.53M in Series A funding from iNovia Capital and Greycroft Partners
2.10.2012
MyAutoZap.com — Company added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Greycroft Partners — Invested in Media Armor.
2.10.2012
Cidade Internet — Acquired by Populis.
2.1.2012
Jive Software — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:JIVE.
2.3.2012
Cidade Internet — Acquired by Populis.
2.1.2012
2.1.2012
2.9.2012
LetsBuy.com — Acquired by Flipkart.
2.9.2012
Cocoafish — Acquired by Appcelerator.
2.9.2012
Media Armor — Received $1.53M in Series A funding from iNovia Capital and Greycroft Partners
2.10.2012
rollApp — Received $243k in Series A funding from TMT Investments
2.7.2012
GCI Com — Received £10M in Unattributed funding from Business Growth Fund
2.9.2012
Stripe — Received $18M in Unattributed funding from Sequoia Capital
2.9.2012
BoardProspects — Received $650k in Seed funding from Mike Verrochi
2.9.2012
Greycroft Partners — Invested in Media Armor.
2.10.2012
iNovia Capital — Invested in Media Armor.
2.10.2012
TMT Investments — Invested in rollApp.
2.7.2012
Business Growth Fund — Invested in GCI Com.
2.9.2012
Sequoia Capital — Invested in Stripe.
2.9.2012
Jive Software — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:JIVE.
2.3.2012
MyAutoZap.com — Company added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Repairhub — Company added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
WineMob — Company added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Alcoa Inc — Company added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Media Strike — Company added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
2.12.2012
Metier HR - Cloud Based HR Process Automation Suite — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
TweepsMap — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Wupbox account — Product added to CrunchBase
2.11.2012
Pocketbook (Mobile app, coming soon) — Product added to CrunchBase
2.11.2012
CrunchBase