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
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Damn, there goes another 30%!
30% out of 42 employees… umm, doesn’t sound too bad. Let’s just hope there won’t be more companies out there that will need to lay off employees… and, let’s hope that there will be more freelance work available for retrenched staff when companies reduce the number of full-time employees
In the email he says burn rate, not headcount.
Called my PowerReviews rep and he assured me they only laid off a few non critical role employees and they were cutting the fat around expenses. Within hours of this post I received a canned email from BazaarVoice trying to solicit my business citing this article. Shame on TechCrunch for making it look like PR had laid 30% off.
I guess their VP of sales and Marketing is a non critical role.
stanford lol
What is up with 30% is that the magic number?
That’s a good question, why is that?
$21mill? Does “crowdsourced reviews” tickle the same nerve in VCs that regular people get from the idea of chocolate? There are too many of these types of companies (info-ponzi) for me to think there isn’t some Achilles Heel in the VC community for certain go-nowhere buzz-concepts.
never heard of… now I do.
Mike you owe these guys an apology.
I’m attempting to restructure also. 20% reduction in headcount and 20% reduction in base salaries across the board. This yields substantial savings (36%)…I wonder whether salary reductions work. Any feedback?
Salary reductions only work when (a) the employees have more at stake (equity, options, etc…) or (b) the job market is such that there is no place else to go.
if you were a struggling company in a good economy, employees without a stake in the company would be out the door in a heartbeat.
if PowerReviews left development, support and IT alone….sounds like marketing and sales got kicked to the curb. If anything I would think PowerReviews should be adding sales people to track down each and ever deal. I’m not sure where the contractors came from…must have been development related.
I have read a load of stuff about this… I dont see the big deal. The VP S&M had done a great job and got them up and running… over 3000 retail sites in less that 2 years… He is a God and gave them the credibility to get started!!! These guys charge on a pay for success model - for retailers, there is no other choice. We bought it anyway, removed their competition and saved over $120k per annum from our bottom line. And we get an extra channel to market through Buzzillions..
These comments (there was one in an earlier article) have to be the weirdest comment spam I’ve ever seen.
To be honest, I can’t quite tell if that’s pro McCain or Obama. I want to help Kenyans, but the last line suggests that we shouldn’t.
Yes, it is weird. Just got back from London; while there I heard a brief comment on the BBC related to the medical group “medicins sans frontiers” I think that they are doctors who work in Africa. It seems that they are helping groups of patients witn HIV to be flown and treated in the US starting in January.