It was only seven months ago that video chat startup TokBox sent a taco truck to meet newly laid-off Yahoo employees in an effort to cheer up and recruit a few of them (the startup was kind enough to send the truck over to our office afterwards to let us in on the action). Now, it sounds like someone should be sending the taco truck in TokBox’s direction. We’ve gotten word that the company just fired six of its twelve engineers, or around 30% of the company’s total staff, and that all of the company’s founders are now gone.
TokBox offers a great product that allows for multi-user video chat from the browser, but it hasn’t really managed to take off, much to the chagrin of the company’s investors who include Sequoia and Bain Capital (TokBox has raised $14 million to date). That’s a lot of money for a video and chat startup, especially when there are a number of similar sites that have begun offering some of the same functionality.
So the company is beginning to make some major changes. TokBox recently got a new CEO — the third in the company’s brief history. Founder Serge Faguet was replaced by Nick Triantos last July, who in turn was replaced in May by former Mark Logic exec Ian Small.
TokBox VP Marketing Micky O’Brien says that this week’s firings were part of Small’s plans to restructure the company, and that as of this morning the vacant positions are being shown on the company’s Jobs page. She also says that TokBox’s last remaining co-founder, CTO Ron Hose, left the company on his own accord around four weeks ago.
Disclosure: TokBox is a sponsor for tomorrow’s Real-Time CrunchUp.
what was sequoia smoking funding this in the first place?
I’ll give you two guesses, three if you’ve never heard of “YouTube” before now.
What are you smoking? Tokbox has NOTHING to do with YouTube. YouTube has NO video chat capability. Hello?
one of the first funders was jawed karim(cofounder of youtube), i think.
Youtube had every thing to do with the funding. The only received funding because of Jawed. It was almost a personal favor/thank you to Jawed.
Why has there been no post about Seesmic changing its model away from video conversations?
Because Mike’s an investor and he doesn’t like to showcase his mistakes.
I’m sure they’ll cover it once Seesmic kicks the bucket in few months.
good; the french guy was arrogant to think he could come to america an be “BIG” just cause he’s a blogger from france that no one cares about.
14 million lol
A great product that noone uses … hmmm
Precisely. Another solution looking for a problem.
The Serge Faguet “replaced” link is broken.
Fixed, thanks.
But the real question is, does Lauren still work there?
Yes! She was so “office hot”. Great question.
Yeah, Lauren is a hottie:
http://www.tokb...x.com/view/team
http://tinychat.com – We are giving tokbox a run for there money!
http://traffic....tokbox.com&
Why is your graph a scaled up version of the Tokbox graph? Is there a standard pattern in video chat usage?
tried tokbox and lost interest, didn’t think it was better than skype
Tokbox sucks. HAHAHAHAHA
and the funny part is…?
There are tons of chats out there, another player in trouble.
mebeam is better
How they hell did spend so much money in such a short amount of time? $14 million? Really?
Thats alot of money ploughed into this startup and now the founders are gone and 6 employees fired thats absolute madness.
I might have to send the http://www.appgiveaway.com bus over to TokBox to pick up the remaining engineers and come work for me (voluntary of course)
I didn’t click on your spam bait link.
Wow! Since they’re going down the toilet so quickly, I’m surprised they were even able to raise $14 million to begin with.
There was always too much hype about this.
Rumor even has it the founders made millions of dollars selling their equity to Bain
This is actually true. They exited a while ago.
not a rumour. Serge Faguet earned several million dollars selling his equity to Bain and to some investor in Russia
Good!!
They were incompetent!!!
With a change of team, they need a name chnage!!
TokBOX! — gotta be the worst company name in history!
that Taco truck outside Yahoo was bad karma…. what goes around, comes around…
Very true. Who is laughing now?
Ron got shitcanned about a month ago, he didn’t “choose to leave”. Or at least he chose to leave by sprinting out of the building with his company laptop after he was canned. It is pretty hilarious though that he still owns the url tokbox.com.
about time to change the name? tokebox sounds like something out of a smokeshop. sounds like the balance of the VC funding got reposessed. talk is cheap.
Again, if they had your company’s name, it would be all good and they’d get more funding, just like you got, right?
http://l.pr/a47...Tokbox_is_toast!_hahahah!
If it smells like a scam, it must be a scam! Crap from the start!
was a good product but tough to compete as a standalone when other competitors bundle it in. hats off to the team for giving it a go. too bad to see all these negative comments from people who most likely are not entrepreneurs and feed on negative news to justify their lack of cojones to go out and try to build something.
One helluva headline. Definitely attention-grabbing. Regardless of the changes at TokBox, it’s always tough to see resources (cash and talent) be under utilized or used ineffectively under immense pressure.
It seems that sending taco truck was the only good idea they had up their sleeves.
too many toks
Give them some #moonfruit!
How many more Flash video chat programs do we need on the market. The tech is roughly the same, lame stuff.
I can’t imagine that they raised $14M for this. When will the VCs learn that for a real product with a real business model you must build a native client application (Skype, WebEx, etc.) for video or voice, collab.
I tried and couldn’t raise money for my own product, but glad I didn’t know that my product is profitable and growing.
I meant ‘now that my product is profitable and growing’. We have more employees, customers than TokBox and never raised a VC dime. VC Losers – $14M hahaha.
What is your product? Domain name?
Put up or gtfo
U like what u see
I think its bullshit.net
They should have just changed their name to TacoBox and started selling tacos, at least they’d be profitable. TheN they could start paying off those investors for blowing 14m on technology that a single engineer could have built.
FCUCK, just when I am looking pimp out and max their API now this. WTF is going on over there?
I happen to like it, know quite well that the assholes fcucked a glorious opportunity. Can you Imagine a TokBox + Twitter integration? I can that is exactly what I am working on.
No one said it openly till I did. So it means I better give them a call soon and unfcuck their sad situation
of course that is if it can even fcucking work.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
These guys should have gone in the same direction as Woome and given the technology some context. Woome seems to be rockin…
Video chat as a utility is about 5 years late, but video chat as part of a broader proposition makes sense.
You’re right about chat utility being an old model. But taking solid ideas and integrating them into new concepts, that’s creativity, an essential ingredient to growth and success.
At WooMe we added live the ability for users to watch and share their video introductions to help stimulate growth and interactions on the site. For those who remember our initial launch, that was not an original aspect of our site.
Talkbox has a great idea and could add functionality in a number of ways. I hope they find the right team to do that.
I think they can use this product in the “adult” business
>We’ve gotten word that the company just fired six of its twelve engineers, or around 30% of the company’s total staff, and that all of the company’s founders are now gone
I’d presume, when you said 50%, that included the founders too.
Sorry to hear tokbox being in trouble. Yes, there are lots of flash chat sites, tokbox is different because it lets you video or voice chat with yahoo or msn users, thats where their strength lay. That becomes very handy when you’re in your office or a restricted machine which won’t let you install extra apps. If i were tokbox management, i’d probably look into segmenting the market more carefully.
What’s going to happen to their interns???
Tokbox is actually really super cool.. I use it for a bunch of stuff.. video thank yous to customers.. Family messages.. etc.. I sure hope they dont go away