Glam Media is aboutto announce that it has a new CFO, Bruce Jaffe. This signals that Glam is perhaps getting ready for an IPO, as Jaffe has a lot of experience at a big public tech company. Before he resigned a year ago, he was head of all corporate M&A at Microsoft. So he knows all the investment bankers on Wall Street pretty well.
Yahoo was rumored to be courting Jaffe also. But Glam is pre-IPO (they haven’t even filed an S1 yet), and is growing like crazy. Glam cracked Comscore’s top ten U.S. properties for the first time in March, with 80.4 million unique visitors across its network of women-oriented sites. And it still has its own $50 million war chest from its last round of funding in February. Jaffe is the perfect CFO to start spending that money on Glam’s own M&A. And an IPO would add a new currency to that war chest.
Jaffe already knows Glam intimately. He is an advisor to the company. At Microsoft, he was head of corporate development for MSN and then for the whole company, where he oversaw the aQuantive deal and tried to buy Yahoo.
Glam’s current CFO Steve Recht will step down after a brief transition period.
