eBay Stumbles on StumbleUpon
Another cool Web 2.0 gets suck into the M&A vortex as eBay has apparently acquired StumbleUpon, one of the most useful discovery services around, for $40-million to $45-million. First blush, I don’t get it but, then again, I didn’t get eBay acquiring Skype so what do I know. Om Malik suggests eBay could turn jump-start Skype by bolting on StumbleUpon’s toolbar, which lets you kill hours of time online by randomly looking at new Web sites.
“By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business,” Om writes. “A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take. It is not that far fetched: Skype has been slowly integrating various different services (including PayPal) into its client, and slowly becoming eBay’s desktop backdoor. Now this is just a hypothesis, and I would love to hear what you folks have to say about the logic behind this deal.
Not sure that I agree with Om’s theory but I do know this is a huge score for StumbleUpon’s investors who sunk $1.5-million into the start-up. (These investors include Google advisor Rajeev Motwani, Google advisor; Ram Shriram, an early Google investor and a board member; and Lotus founder Mitch Kapoor.) StumbleUpon’s acquisition is yet another indictment on the Canadian venture capital community’s unwillingness to finance Web start-ups given the company started in Calgary but moved to Silicon Valley after failing to attract any financing north of the border - not even some of the oil bucks flowing around Alberta these days.
April 18th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
[...] in the first place, so that’s par for the course, I suppose. My friend Mark Evans says he doesn’t really understand it [...]
April 18th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
You might say that Alberta VCs are hiding their heads in the oil sands.
Or… ooo… that they have oil sands in their eyes.
Oh, here’s one… they have their heads stuck up their oil holes.
Boy, the possibilities are endless.
Great news, anyways. Congrats to the StumbleUponers!
April 18th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
[...] like the rumors were true.  eBay has acquired StumbleUpon for a price of $40-45 million [...]
April 18th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
For a long time, I have believed that eBay should have spent money on advertising venue oriented companies, and thought that the Skype acquisition was a stupid move. Only now, it seems to me that eBay’s leadership is coming to the same conclusion! Read the rest of my thesis.
April 20th, 2007 at 7:33 am
[...] we chat about eBay’s $40-million to $45-million acquisition, which I use as a way to rail against the Canadian VC market. As a former [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
[...] a thought about eBay’s apparent acquisition of StumbleUpon: what if eBay plans to expand the Skype platform so it has a bunch of other features beyond making [...]