San Francisco based PowerReviews, which has raised over $21 million in venture financing, has let 30% of staff go, say multiple sources. Among those that left is VP Marketing Jay Shaffer.
The company let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites, for free. PowerReviews then aggregates reviews from their client retailers on their own customer-facing site called Buzzillions.
The company had at least 42 employees before the layoffs. We’ve contacted them for confirmation and have added them to the Layoff Tracker.
Update: email from Andrew Chen, CEO:
Hi Mike,
Thanks for contacting us…although I wish that we had time to respond before the post. However, since our clients/partners will be asking the same question, this is a great opportunity to diffuse any inaccurate rumors.
The truth is that we just enacted a series of actions to reduce our BURN RATE by around 30%, not headcount. This was achieved primarily through reductions in contractors and administrative expenses. It is true that Jay Shaffer is no longer at the company full-time, as we have consolidated the marketing activities of Buzzillions.com and our Retail Solution. In fact, no development, IT, product, or client support staff were affected, and we have hired several engineers in the last couple of months.
Thanks…and please feel free to contact me directly if you ever have questions!
-Andy
P.s. If you’d like to know why we are so optimistic, we just relaunched Buzzillions.com with 3.5M+ reviews (up from 1M in Jan) and are getting amazingly positive feedback from users