Glassdoor.com has taken $3 million Series B in a round led by Benchmark Capital.
Not a lot is known about the Sausalito, CA based company. CEO and Founder Robert Hohman was previously the President of Hotwire.com, and the team includes Richard Barton, CEO of Zillow and Tim Besse, previously in senior management at Expedia. PEHub suggests the company is a “social networking company focused on employment conditions in the workplace,” where as Rent Bits suggests that it may be Real Estate related.
The company is still very much in stealth mode and gives no hints on their site aside from saying that “except that we think it’s pretty unique and going to be a lot of fun to build.” The company may already be struggling with bringing the mystery product to market, with their site saying that they “expect to have something live in early 2008,” yet are still displaying a holding page.
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Maybe both PEHub and Rent Bits are right - It could be a social network for real estate agents.
Is it just me, or are there a ton of new money-based (career, earning money, whatever) social networks popping up all over the place now?
it always amazes me that a company that is in stealth gets funding and its news. we should we care unless they are announcing a product. I am not raging on this article just the fact that this is news.
how is barton running two companies, where the commitment? maybe this is a zillow spin-off.
Maybe it’s kind a real estate thing but for sure social networking company such those company will also be focusing on their employment conditions. It will be unique for the site to earn such money and should have an extra careful when they are announcing their new products.
Good luck, Tim!
Your story calls Rich Barton “ex-CEO” of Zillow, which is incorrect. Rich is still the CEO of Zillow and still runs the company.
“social networking company focused on employment conditions in the workplace”
….so this is a social network for professional women of sorts….
The glass door. You can see what’s in the next room, you want so badly to be in there but you can’t get there until you figure out how to work the handle.
Can I ask what’s the rationale behind this post? We know nothing about the “mystery” product. So, is it about the founders? But even then, why not talking about some less known guy who might actually need the buzz to get out of his obscurity?
Hint….’Glass Ceiling’.
If it were going to be anything related to Real Estate, Rich would be doing it under the Zillow brand. My guess is that it is something in the employment space. BTW: this is news because 3 experienced players are starting a new company/brand. They are very experienced with successful startups…so I’m interested to see what they come out with.
If Zillow doesn’t find a business model Richard will be the ex-CEO pretty quickly.
Zillow does have a business model: Selling ads. I used to think that they did between $10-15 million in 2007. Now, I think they did less than $10 million. Maybe less than $7 million. This blows me away.
I would have to agree about the business model of zillow. Seems that even though they are bringing in some cash from ads, but they have some hefty overhead. And they have tens of millions in VC backing that they are burning through. I also heard that this is a real estate type site. I heard it is an online brokerage. Will be interesting.
How much longer will Zillow have to prove itself?
I think they ultimately fail. Keep in mind that Expedia was never a start-up, it was hatched inside of Microsoft. It’s hard to give Richard Barton credit for Expedia because it only became successful by tapping into the massive traffic firehose known as msn.com
Are these guys connected to Kelly Rodriques ? He of mobile failure http://www.mfoundry.com and movie startup http:www.blowtorch.com ?
They all share the same office space.
it offers a new way to compete with salary.com, but what is going to be their business model? A free site http://www.salarylist.com publishes some interesting salary data as well. Seems that they get it officially from government. Salary is really complicated topic, depending on experience, location, etc. In the future I expect, AI is going to be applied
Read my interview of Tim Besse, co-founder and VP of product and marketing: http://blog.seattleinterviewco.....under.html