At Yahoo, they don’t have golden parachutes, they have purple ones. Yahoo’s vice president of social search, Jeff Bonforte, is among the thousand or so employees being laid off. (The picture at left is of him skydiving with the parachute Yahoo gave him as a signing bonus when he joined the company a few years ago). His last day is today. But Yahoo’s loss is startup Xobni’s gain. On Monday, he plans on accepting an offer to become CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes Outlook e-mail smarter. (Disclosure: I’ve known Bonforte for a long time. We once lived in the same house).
As head of social search, Bonforte oversaw Yahoo Answers and Delicious before those businesses were recently absorbed by other groups. His real accomplishment at Yahoo, though, was prior to that, as the VP in charge of Yahoo Messenger!, working for Brad Garlinghouse. Under Bonforte, Yahoo Messenger! surpassed AIM in number of users for the first time, revenues went up sixfold, and he also introduced all those funky avatars to the product. Before Yahoo, he did a stint as president of Michael Robertson’s SipPhone, where he developed the Skype-like Gizmo Project on the sly. And during the go-go 1990s, he founded i-drive, one of the first online storage services (it went belly up—a good idea that was too early). At Xobni, his experience with both Yahoo! Messenger and search should serve him well.
Xobni launched at TechCrunch40 (read our review). It is a 14-person YCombinator startup that raised a $4.2 million Series A last year from Atomico Investments, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures. The VP of engineering, Gabor Cselle, worked on Gmail and did his Masters thesis on inbox organization (I’m not joking). Xobni offers a plug-in for Outlook that helps you sort through your inbox. Click on a person, and you can see all your threaded conversations with them, as well as any attachments they may have sent in the past. “It makes email, in general, work the way your brain does,” says Bonforte. Bill Gates is also a fan.
When Bonforte first met the Xobni founders a few months ago, he brought them into Yahoo to talk to other executives there. They made a lasting impression on him at least. “We weren’t looking for a CEO,” says co-founder Matt Brezina, “but any time we find good people we ask, How can we get them?” Co-founder Adam Smith will relinquish the CEO title, but both he and Brezina will remain very much involved in running the company.
Although Bonforte has only good things to say about Yahoo, I haven’t heard him sound so excited in years. “Just fixing Outlook is a huge opportunity,” he says. “The inbox is still fatally flawed. It is hard to find stuff, hard to find people, hard to understand the network of relationships in your inbox.” Xobni addresses all of those issues.
And what about Xobni’s business model? It is still up in the air, but there are many avenues to explore: selling premium services on top of Outlook such as file transfers, adding people search, adding voice, integration with enterprise apps like Salesforce, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. Bonforte is a creative guy. He’ll figure something out.
Thanks Eric. We wrote an official announcement with more details on our blog: http://www.xobn...s-xobni-as-ceo/ .
We’ve been working on recruiting Jeff for several months, and it’s awesome to have him finally join the team full time!
- Adam Smith
A number of companies have tried to tame the outlook beast (Neo Pro was a client I used a lot – http://www.emailorganizer.com) – will be interesting to see if Xobni makes it. They could make a lot of people’s lives better, that’s for sure…
ouch, so harsh.
be a little nicer to the Yahoo!
after all, Y! is one of the grandaddies of the internet.
hmmm…. the big Yahoo guy becomes the CEO of a company whose main (and big) competitor is Microsoft… I hope he will think several steps ahead of M$ in offering these new add-ins to Outlook users.
Don’t forget that M$ is quick at copying good ideas and will be more than happy to include them in its new versions of Outlook – at a potentially lower price than Xobni will ask for.
Being ahead of the game will be the winning strategy here and boy you have to move quick with M$ chasing your business…
Xobni is an outstanding product and their team is only getting stronger. Well done guys.
what is the business model? looking to sell to MS? or waiting for outlook to clone it?
There is a typo in the URL for Xobni on its logo. .com not .xom
The real question is: Does he get to keep the parachute?
Seems to be tied up with the popularity of outlook….hmmm…and I am not sure what’s the email usage analytics mechanism is for, for checking how busy users’ve been?
Good luck Jeff! iDrive was MySpace 10 years too early. Hope Xobni takes off.
A parachute as a signing bonus? Wow that’s pretty cheap.
Xobni appears to be much more than just Outlook… it has great potential for things like Salesforce or Peoplesoft, etc. From what I’ve seen of it, it’s pretty powerful stuff.
Escaped one MS acquisition only to land another one?
For me, although I used gmail as personal mail, continue using outlook for the professional, agend, all contacts info, to synchronize with blackberry, tasks… we go, that are practically for me an essential tool, so nobody plugin for outlook comes to me wonderfully.
All the best.
the name of this company proves that all the good domains have been taken!
Looks like the company is spending FAR more then its making.
@4 – Outlook is the first target of Xobni. As far as I know from their blog and website, they are aggressively trying to develop similar product for other mail mail apps also like Apple Mail Gmail etc. If that takes off then MS can’t chase too many. Also, this is not a competition to MS. MS should be happy that some third party is developing cool stuff for them. They don’t have to do anything. I still don’t know how it exactly works because I don’t have it installed on my outlook. Apparently, it needs you to have admin rights to screw up the inbox
. I don’t like that.
Jeff is one of the coolest people I know. He often gives ride to others, and I had the privilege to carpool with him one night many moons ago. We chatted about everything from the weather to his plan for his honeymoon (he spent part of his honeymoon where I was born and raised). This couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. I wish him the best of luck with everything!!
Yahoo really needed less VPs anyways. Too many chiefs.
Maybe have a look at MailItSafe.com, another Outlook plugin from a company based in Montreal.
The title of VP at Yahoo is rather discretionary. Considering the number of VPs and the roles of each, it is closer to a dev manager role than a vice president. VP at Yahoo maps nicely to a senior development manager or in rare cases director of engineering at about 99% of software companies.
It sounds like this departure is Yahoo!’s loss from what little I know. I have been playing around with Xobni for the past 2 weeks and can see the value. While I like NEO (Nelson Email Organizer) this add-on may be easier for people to use and understand. As a user, I do wonder what the business model will be. I don’t want to fall for a beta product only to find out I will have to pay through the nose to continue the benefits.
Good luck to the Xobni guys. Not sure if a laid of Yahoo VP is really CEO material, especially one who disappointed after he was hired with high expectations by Yahoo.
There was Lookout – a fast search tool for Outlook that was acquired by Outlook.
How’s it different?
I meant – acquired by Microsoft.
Business model is so web1.0… just do something fun (cf., YouTube, Twitter, MyBlogLog, etc.) and forget about business models — a thingy so passe…
After you read this two times it comes across as self serving.
Hmm, a VP?
He was canned…..
LOL
http://www.i-gu....ro/blog/Ro/en/
excellent photo choice, btw.
Bill Gates wouldn’t have spent time giving Xobni air time if he was going to crush it.
so happy to see such a person left yahoo.
good luck for yahoo.
it destroyed yahoo social network and it is time for it to destroy xobni? let us check
Xobni will be the next Google.
Give them about three to four years to further develop their technology and engineering team.
a great tool. However the amount of overhead it puts on yahoo on a 2gb desktop is scary and it has to be uninstalled at that point because of crashing and trashing outlook mailboxes. Not fun. can’t wait till they find what’s doing that as it is a cool tool.