Serial entrepreneur Farhad Mohit is at it again. Back in 1996, Mohit founded BizRate, one of the first consumer review sites, and then shopping search engine Shopzilla. He sold both to E.W. Scripps for $570 million in June 2005.
Now he has a new super stealthy startup called DotSpots. The startup raised a seed round of $300,000 last September from Mohit and HitForge, the angel fund run by engineers. (HitForge is also an investor in WeGame and Mesmo.tv). In his LinkedIn profile, Mohit hints that DotSpots:
will make my other ideas to date look like child’s play…
Not much else is known about DotSpots other than that it wants to apply crowd wisdom to every piece of information out there, beyond shopping and product info. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one.
“Not much else is known about DotSpots other than that it wants to apply crowd wisdom to every piece of information out there”
Does techcrunch afford reporters any kind of budget to research a story before publishing it?
For the love of God get this guy’s face off of the front page of TechCrunch
yap
Did anyone try and contact Mohit for more info before writing this free advertising piece that essentially tells me nothing other than the name of the new company.
Arrington is part of Valleywag now?
This has got to be the most meaningless post. ever.
I’m gonna update my linkedin profile with “will make dotspots look like child’s play”..will you cover me if I do that?
@6 Did you sell a .com for half a bil? Then NO.
So he got $570M and goed shopping for a 300K investment?
Yeah, why give away a part of your new company for $300k when you got $570M?
@8 @9
It seems like it’s a seed round, funded by Farhad and HitForge (from the crunchbase article), rather than solely by HitForge. The entry doesn’t say who gave what out the of 300k tho.
While this post admittedly is very light on real information, there are a couple of things worth clarifying in the comments.
$570 Million is (about) what Scripps bought Shopzilla for, not what Farhad made. I’m sure he did very, very well, since he was one of the two original founders and he is a scary smart guy.
I’m certain he didn’t need to raise money from another source, but he might have wanted to get some other people involved. HitForge can bring some trusted human capital to the process.
If I had the opportunity to invest in Farhad, I would do it.
Would have liked to have seen more info, but Farhad starting up is legitimate news. The guy is a genius with a real track record.
For all of the coverage that gets devoted to quarter-baked entrepreneurs, companies, and ideas this is hardly that offensive…
Hey, i can recommend a really good photographer.. he’s got the tom cruise crazy eye look in that pic
Nice!
Good to see a fellow Iranian in the pool
Hmmmm……watch out for those Persians with their grand ideas of crowd wisdom….
Need more info on this one !
Why would he only raise $300,000. What kind of operation does he plan on running. He gets 570 million and his new company is working out of a garage with plywood desks – hilarious.
I wonder how his business tactics and strategies for success align with non-traditional tactics, Quantum Physics laws…
http://www.read...ex.php?rta=blog
“wants to apply crowd wisdom to every piece of information out there.”
I’ve stumbled across a company that does something similar. It’s called wikipedia.
So he gets 750 million a few years back, presumably there was still a big chunk of money in his pocket after taxes and investors and everything else was said and done.
Which begs the real question that wasn’t explored in the post…. why chase such a small investment? 300k won’t even cover the salaries for the jobs they’re posting. I can’t help but think there’s a lot more to this story than was revealed.
Ugh. The Unibomber can get his second site near completion and I cannot even get my first one up.
Harry “needs to lose the day job” Wang
racist bastard
You are obviously a racist loser that hasn’t amounted to anything and probably never will since $$ is not what motivates him
@Ben
I don’t think Farhad would have trouble raising another large round with his reputation. With the right team, 300k can go a long way.
Oop. Misread that, I guess he has more than two under his belt.
Harry “and he’s doing this from prison” Wang
@19: Yet covered extensively in the comment section. Investors bring a lot more to the table then just the money — especially a place like HitForge.
@11 Michael & 12 Ben
Multiple personalities?… watch your cookies… they show how st*pid you can be.
Amazing research guys.
Interesting post for the following reasons:
1. Founder has survived the first dot com era with big payout, interested to see the followup in this progressive landscape
2. Only $300K – if the idea is legit look for them to get more funding, or if not, interested to see why not.
3. @11 calls the founder ’scary smart’. combination of the 3 things I mentioned peak my interest
@20
Unibomber? not funny. assmunch.
$300k goes a long way these days people.
$570m was the acquisition, not Farhad’s cash out. Either way, I look forward to his next project.
Also, I can’t get past DotSpots, without thinking of the CBS acquisition of DotSpotter.
@Darrin,
You take less money early because it costs you more in equity per dollar raised. There is more risk, so the investor wants more in return. Later, when you need additional funds, the idea is that you get a nice step-up in valuation, and also give out less equity per dollar than you did in previous rounds, since there is less risk.
And on the right I see a bunch of Shopzilla jobs. Is Shopzilla getting ready to pull a Friendster?
I love the logo
A few things to clarify:
1) We could have raised more money straight out the gate, but wanted the discipline of keeping a focus on the core product and ownership in the hands of the people who are building the product (i.e. the founders / employees). So, we’re running with a small team until beta launch and then we will add people / $ as justified by the product / growth — might be a little more organic / slower, but, we’re not in a rush. Imho, raising too much money and adding people / infrastructure too early (as we did with BizRate / Shopzilla), sounds like fun, but could have a defocusing influence. It also brings in a bunch of people (read: investors) who want to steer management to run the company to their priorities, which may not quite line up with ours.
2) I have changed my Linkedin profile to say: “could,” not “will make all my other ideas look like child’s play.”
3) Sorry about the pic… I was unusually happy at my cousin’s wedding, but I assure you that I am not a Scientologist or the second coming of the unibomber.
Your cousin who is proud of you and so happy to have hadyou at her wedding. Don’t ever appologize for who you are. You ROCK!BTW you look so handsome in the picture
Despite all the comments, I still don’t get why a successful entrepreneur like this guy would need to go raise money.
Yes, investors bring more to the table than just cash. But you mean to tell me this guy hasn’t built enough connections and respect to do it without the help of angels/vc’s?
Its just weird….
dotspots spelled backwards is Stops Tod. Can we just apply the wisdom of crowds to finding out who the hell Tod is and put this mystery to rest?
Scary smart, product focused, and he has a sense of humor. One to watch.
@26: everything is funny given time
@31(Farhad Mohit ): I like your style, pal! I wish you luck in your latest endeavor!
Harry “has a better sense of humor than trenety” Wang
@farhad: *lol* i’m hungover from last night’s Lakers debacle and needed a good laugh. hysterical, but come on, Scientology is the sh** in LA
@Ali Sabet: I love the logo; well done (good karma for dotspots).
Awesome. Some guy is doing something that nobody knows about.
If you’re short on posts I’m watching paint dry! I can send a photo.
The name isn’t even exactly inspirational. What the heck could the relevance of DotSpots be?
can you please reverse the order of posts on your techcrunch email. You have to read the email from the bottom up and it’s annoying.
300k can go a long way, specially if they plan to do this with no office.
In beta mode they don’t need expensive hardware, he could fund it himself, but in order to get people really vested in your idea, you want them to feel like they own part of it, otherwise you’ll get people that are just there for a salary.
Yet another TC post about absolutely nothing except pissing distance bragging rights. If several months from now, dotspots turns out to be a big nothing, this post will be long forgotten. But if they are the next Google, then rest assured, every dotspots post will start off with a breaking of the arm self pat on the back about how TC broke the story. Just look at about 1/5th of their posts now, they start out with an unabashedly self promotional dump about how they were first to break the story… sadly, that seems to be their predominate MO nowadays.
- @25=Sycophant
- Harry Wang, you are neither funny, cool nor interesting, kindly piss off.
- @31, being compared to Tom Cruise ain’t all that bad, don’t justify/explain.
@41=smart arse
@41: Thanks, you validated the fact that my plan is working. I am sorry if you have had loved ones affected by the unibomber – my condolences. If not, then you are taking things a bit too seriously.
Harry “notices that people are getting crankier and crankier the worse the world’s economies gets” Wang
Hmmm. LA and *Calgary* based huh? That wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain Calgary-based crowdsourcing startup would it? You know, the one that got recently deadpooled by TC?
If the Calgary connection is a coincidence then I’ll eat my mouse.
Seriously, he exited his previous 2 startups at $570M, why even bother with $300K seed?
As a sector analyst, I’ve spoken to Farhad about this, and it’s an unusually fresh idea in a market where two-bit start-up ideas with massive investments behind them are paraded across my desk all the time.
The biggest trap inexperienced entrepreneurs fall into is thinking investment = credibility = success. None of that is true. We’ve had one bubble burst already because of that mentality, and during a period of economic instability, it’s all about tight focus on cautious investment until a product has found its footing (and only investing as much as you need to get a project off the ground after which the business itself will justify further investment). It’s called sensible product development – something you don’t often see. Product development doesn’t begin with throwing a pile of cash at a wall. This is investment common sense.
So the fact the initial capital is $300k doesn’t mean anything. As the English say, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. So I suggest everybody waits and sees the product, then judges for themselves at that point.
Mobarak Farhad!
So many trolling flamers on this comment thread have nothing better to do than talk about $300k…Wish you the best.
I don’t care, it’s tom cruise in a beard
Looks like it involves some web crawling:
http://www.goog...h?q=DotSpotsBot
Anybody with a popular site see what these guys are crawling for?