We’ve all by now heard about how Yahoo is trying to get some “cool” with a supposed $1 billion purchase of hip blogging platform Tumblr, but it may be a moot point if Tumblr’s users fail to stick around post-sale.

Microsoft and Facebook may be trying to make a move ahead of Yahoo, Tumblr may be inching ever closer to running out of cash, and (despite that) may not be afraid to play a little hardball. But here’s something you’re not hearing much about: Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo. And they may let their fingers do the talking, and the walking.

Do a search on Tumblr for “yahoo” and you get a stream of distress, interspersed with the occasional bit of helpless resignation, and some calls for activism. The voices of reluctant acceptance (usually because of the aforementioned cash situation) or anything like positivity are few and far between. No outright enthusiasm.

(Daddy!) See for yourself.

It’s a problem that extends to some of Tumblr’s oldest users.

“If Tumblr goes to Yahoo, I will seriously consider moving my personal blog to Medium, if that’s possible,” Alexia, co-editor over here at TC, told me. She’s had a blog on Tumblr since June 2009, and, while not part of that coveted 18-24 age bracket, is a significant representative of that other cadre of important users: digital influencers. “I don’t know exactly why, but my Tumblr is a part of my identity. And for whatever reason, I don’t want to identify with Yahoo.”

Some have tried to start a petition, with a goal of 5 million signatures although others are cynical about whether this will actually have any effect.

User attrition is not something to be dismissed, especially when it appears to be underpinned by wider usage trends on the site.

When I wrote a post in January about what might come next for Tumblr as a business (it focused on how it could make money; not how it might need to get sold because it doesn’t), I noted that in the prior month, December 2012, it had 167 million visitors and nearly 18 billion pageviews worldwide (Quantcast figures). The trend over the last six months are down, however: in the U.S. page views are down 21% to 5.3 billion, and uniques down 5% to 76 million. Worldwide the picture is better but still not growing: pageviews are down by 4%; uniques are down by 3%.

Not a sinking ship, but not a zippy little speedboat, either. Yahoo’s MySpace, indeed.

Image via Tumblr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How much is your car worth?

It’s an easy enough question to answer. Punch in the details at Kelley Blue Book, hit submit, and bam — question answered, ego stoked (or not.)

But how do they know how much it’s worth? For the most part, even the tried-and-true sources like the ol’ Blue Book are kind of a black box.

PriceHub wants to make the process more transparent. They’ll tell you how much your car is worth, and give you a mountain of data to back it up.

Update: Whoops! Looks like we crashed their server. The PriceHub team says they’re working on getting it back up ASAP.

Like many a car valuing service, PriceHub pulls its transaction data from all sorts of sources. Some of it comes from users; some of it comes from dealerships, or used car auctions. The vast majority of it, says the company, comes from DMV records.

Unlike most other services, though, PriceHub makes a ton of this data available directly to the user for their own perusing. Want to see the transaction details for 10,000+ Honda Civics sold in the past 18 months? Sure. Want to limit it to just 2009-model Civics sold in California? Hey, why not.

PriceHub actually came into existence with little to no fanfare a few years back, built as something of a hobby project by Myron Lo, then the VP of Innovation at ZipReality. It lived the first few years of its life in a rather humble form; black text spilled across the white background, with a modest data set of around 50,000 transactions.

Over time, however, it became clear that this lil’ pet project could be something more. As the site naturally grew toward its 50,000th registered user, the team behind it decided to dive in headfirst. They applied to Adeo Ressi’s Founder’s Institute, got in, and have spent the last few months being “whipped into a start-up by Adeo” (their words!)

In that time, the team has added all sorts of new tricks to PriceHub’s repertoire:

• The old, Geocities-tastic design has been overhauled into something significantly more modern
• They’ve bumped their data set up 10X, from 50,000 records to 500,000
• They’ve added model research records, bringing in things like recall alerts, safety ratings, cost estimates, and service bulletins.
• They’ve added depreciation charts for each model year of a car, giving would-be buyers/sellers a rough idea of how quickly the car in question is losing its value
• The team has grown from one to three: the aforementioned Myron Lo, as well as Telly Chang (former Product Marketing lead at Yahoo! Autos) and Sandy Lo (currently also Marketing Lead at the Salesforce-backed Financialforce)

Speaking of depreciation, the company mentioned a work-in-progress feature that I find particular interesting: depreciation alerts. If you’ve told PriceHub that you own a certain car and their data starts to suggest that its value is startin’ to turn, they’ll soon be able to fire off an alert to let you know that it might be good to sell sooner than later. Also on the roadmap: mobile apps (of course), and Zillow-esque sale price vs. time-on-the-market data.

Anecdote time! Around half a year ago, I sold the first car I’d ever owned: a 2002 Honda Accord, which I’d more or less driven into the ground. I sold it to the first person with a stack of cash and a pretty smile, letting it go for a bit over $2.5 grand. According to PriceHub’s records for cars of that year with similar mileage, I probably could’ve gotten another two thousand bucks out of the car if I’d been patient. Whoops!

PriceHub isn’t alone in this space, of course. Transparent or not, legacy offerings like Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds have held the throne for decades, with relatively new folk like TrueCar chipping away at their lead for a few years already. What do you think: is data and transparency enough to make PriceHub standout?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If  Skit had existed in the early 1970s, there is a chance that the career of Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam could have been stunted, because Skit can produce videos reminiscent of the aforementioned great one’s seminal work. And that example is what comes to mind as the easiest way to describe how this TechCrunch Disrupt NY Startup Alley participant’s new app works and looks.

Skit is an iOS app that allows you to import images from your mobile device,  social network, or elsewhere on the Internet and string them together into fun little animated cut-out movies that you can share and export back to the social network.

It is different from other web-based concepts out there, like JibJab, in that once you create your first video, you can share the “author-able” source file back and forth with your friends. That source file can be re-edited and re-posted by those friends who are also using the app. The read-only version of the video can, of course, also be shared out to the usual places like YouTube and Facebook.

Making funny movies together is fine by me, but in terms of real value, where is the business model?

The app plans to monetize through sponsored product placements as items for animation in the app. Additionally, they have the ability to measure metrics and views to detail how often those placed products are engaged and viewed.

Just watch the above video to get the gist.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zenefits, the free, YC-backed “set-it-and-forget-it” service thats helps small businesses worry less about employee benefits, made a pair of announcements at Disrupt NY 2013 this morning: They’ll soon be able to handle payroll duties, as well, and they’re expanding the service to New York.

Zenefits takes pretty much all of the paperwork out of getting group health coverage. If you need a new plan, it’ll fetch a bunch of quotes for health/dental/vision services. If you hire a new employee, Zenefits handles getting them covered. If you terminate someone, you click one button and Zenefits pulls them from payroll, terminates their coverage, and helps the employee get rolling with COBRA coverage. Even if you’ve already got coverage, you can start using Zenefits — they’ll sync all of your employee coverage data, and take over as your insurance broker.

It’s all 100 percent online, no old-school faxin’ nonsense required.

Until today, Zenefits was a strictly Californian company. This is because Zenefits is, at its core, an insurance broker. When a company buys a new plan through Zenefits, they get paid a commission by the insurance company. This allows them to be completely free to the small business, but also requires Zenefits to get approval on a state-by-state basis. With today’s news, the company will be expanding to New York for the first time.

Simultaneously, the company has also announced plans to get into payroll services.

“Health insurance is a headache,” says Zenefits Co-Founder and CEO Parker Conrad, “but by solving that we’re really only solving half the problem. Many of the clients we’ve spoken with today want us to manage their payroll as well, instead of just syncing with it. Starting with TechCrunch Disrupt New York, we’ll actually take it over and manage it for them.”

With the new payroll services, an employer can just tell Zenefits of a new hire and provide them with the employee’s name, email address, salary, and — if applicable — the stock options they’ll receive. Zenefits will generate the offer letter and the standard intellectual property agreements, as well as reach out to the employee for the standard onboarding details — their Social Security number, their tax information, etc. The new employee will then be added to the payroll system, and the aforementioned benefits enrollment process will begin.

The YC-backed company has raised $372,000 to date, backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, General Catalyst, Garry Tan, Justin Kan, Alexis Ohanian and a bunch of others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s a gold rush going on these days, or a Bitcoin rush, at least. Driven by the recent swings in the value of a Bitcoin, more and more people are learning about and becoming interested in the currency. While they could just buy Bitcoins at the current market rate, others are looking to try their luck at mining Bitcoins. And like prospectors who traveled west during the Gold Rush of the 19th century, many Bitcoin miners will find that they spend more on chasing the Bitcoin dream than they’ll ever hope to win back.

As explained here, Bitcoins are “mined” by unlocking blocks of data that “produce a particular pattern when the Bitcoin ‘hash’ algorithm is applied to the data.” It seems simple enough, but the cost of Bitcoin mining is greater than one might expect. The more Bitcoins are mined, the more difficult it becomes to find the next block. Unless the miner is using the latest specially-designed mining rigs, the computers used often sport high-end graphics cards (since the GPUs are more efficient than CPUs for mining application). And running those computers requires a lot of power.

Blockchain.info, which tracks Bitcoin-related data, estimates that miners are using 1,005.59 megawatt hours of electrical consumption each day in their pursuit of new blocks of Bitcoins. That ends up costing about $150,000 in power costs each day to mine the currency. [Hat tip to Bloomberg for reporting on the data.]

That may sound like a lot, but miners on average are making money. According to Blockchain, miners are generating $470,000 in Bitcoin-related revenue per day. In fact, due to the recent interest in the virtual currency and its popularity, operating margins for Bitcoin miners are close to record highs.

While it might be easy to look at those numbers and think it’s NBD to just like, extract value out of thin air, Bitcoin mining isn’t as lucrative as it seems. Regular users hoping to use their regular computers to mine shouldn’t expect to just start making money by setting aside a few compute cycles to dig up Bitcoins. That’s generally reserved for special mining computers that do nothing BUT mine for Bitcoins using custom encryption processors.

As Biggs points out in his article, “While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual Bitcoins are worth.” That’s been confirmed by my colleague Matt Burns, who wrote in our internal message board that “after mining for a few days, the energy required to run my computer at full tilt was far greater than the Bitcoins I mined.”

Even if you do choose to pool your resources to mine, it’s a fairly complicated process, even for tech-savvy users. Check out the aforementioned article by Biggs for how he connected his home PCs into a Bitcoin-mining pool.

The alternative is to just buy specialty hardware designed to do nothing but mine for Bitcoins. Like any other investment, the return isn’t assured, and likely will be based on how Bitcoin market takes shape as time goes on. But right now, as with most gold rushes throughout history, it’s those who are supplying the miners that are finding the real riches.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This week Japanese tech giant Fujitsu acquired an obscure French company called RunMyProcess for an undisclosed amount. This “integration Platform as a Service” (iPaaS) company offered a platform to allow businesses to build and deploy business workflow apps in the cloud using simple drag and drop functionality. It sounds mundane enough, but the acquisition looks like being yet another pointer to a future where business applications are integrated in the Cloud, in much the same way systems integrators using creaky old servers would do the same with software. But one small startup, GetApp, is quietly building both a vast archive of these cloud-based business applications and the means to make them work together in a simple enough way that means that millions of small businesses can access business apps previously only available to large enterprises.

Earlier this century when Barcelona-based entrepreneur Manuel Jaffrin (pictured, on the left) ran the now non-existent ‘Web 2.0′ section of Sun Microsystems he got a glimpse into the future. “While interacting with startups I saw how cloud apps would eventually replace the software used by businesses,” he tells me. Meanwhile, Christophe Primault (pictured), at the time the founder of a software security startup, was having trouble getting distribution for his application. The two met and realised there was an opportunity to create a startup to act as a marketplace for business applications.

According to Forrester, business-focused SaaS apps are the leading and fastest growing segment of the cloud computing industry in the main because small businesses see it as a way of accessing enterprise-class applications that are normally out of reach. Take for example Base which brings a really good looking and powerful sales and CRM application to small businesses.

Jaffrin and Primault realised that closed app ecosystems would not serve the needs of the huge proliferation of SaaS startups. The Salesforce App Exchange, for instance, would always be limited to the Sales Force ecosystem.

What was needed was a ‘vendor neutral’ marketplace.

So together they launched GetApp in 2010, positioning the startup as a vertical search engine for software, SaaS and cloud-based business applications on one side and a means for application providers to reach qualified buyers and lower the cost of acquiring new customers on the other. Business buyers would be able to shave off weeks from the purchase cycle of new applications.

GetApp would garner revenues from revenue shares on the use of the apps or from charging app providers to promote and advertise their apps on the site.

The site now lists 5,000+ apps from 20,000 vendors making it arguably the largest business app marketplace today.

Vendors now include the likes of Basecamp, Salesforce, Dropbox or Zoho, among many others. Available app categories range from CRM to marketing automation solutions, HR and project management tools to accounting and business intelligence applications.

To date over two million businesses have now used GetApp to discover the SaaS product they need from a catalogue of 5,000 cloud-based business apps, with the vast majority of its users in English speaking countries like the US. Every month 150,000 new businesses turn up to use the platform and 100 new SaaS vendors sign up.

GetApp has managed to turn the chaos of the business cloud apps in into order. Instead of spending hours trying to good for the right sales tool or CRM product, customers simply put in a detailed query into GetApp and can search 200 categories, read reviews for 300+ products and 2,000+ user generated reviews.

For instance you can get it to search for an email marketing tool connected to Salesforce which also has an iPad app. This is the kind of search that Google just can’t handle.

Customers can also browse “how to guides”, infographics and eBooks about the apps.

But, Jaffrin and Primault were not satisfied with simply being a marketplace. They realized small businesses would want to connect these apps together to automate tasks and break data silos. The alternative would, for example, mean laborious cutting and pasting between a contact database and a CRM product. Small businesses needed, as the SMB Group recently predicted, real integration.

So October 2011, GetApp secured $1.1 million from Spanish-American investment firm Nauta Capital to achieve this.

Thus, in October last year they launched CloudWork, after acquiring Portuguese startup Tarpipe. This meant GetApp could integrate the apps in their marketplace and offer their own service.

CloudWork’s competitors include Zapier, OneSaas, itduzzit and the aforementioned RunMyProcess. Zapier is targeted largely at technically competent users who need to do a lot of customisation, but this is unsuited to small businesses. OneSaas is more oriented towards accounting processes. Itduzzit.com/ meanwhile concentrates on “pre-packaging” apps. But all are quite different.

Since launching, CloudWork has added 30 apps to the platform including, Google Apps, Mailchimp, Zendesk and Evernote, and released over 250 packaged integrations which don’t reacquire a small business to have in-house technical skills to integrate these apps.

Although CloudWork is still in Beta and is not yet being actively marketed by the company it has already attracted over 4,000 business users that have executed over one million integration tasks. Companies can also ‘daisychain’ apps using CloudWork, opening up a world of possibilities.

And what of the future?

Jaffrin says that despite raising their last round of funding in 2011, GetApp doesn’t need to raise funding again as it’s profitable. The majority of the investment has gone instead into CloudWork, which has created a new opportunity in its own right.

Prior to using something like CloudWork, app vendors had no way of knowing where their best sales might come from due to the difficulty of tracking the use of their APIs. Instead, CloudWork has become a way to hack into another vendor’s ecosystem.

So, for instance, an app vendor could now tell that 50% of their users are also integrating their app with another app from Saleforce force. This means partnerships and alliances can be forged where non previously might have existed. It means the app vendor could do specific campaigns within another vendor’s ecosystem. In some circles this is known as ‘growth hacking’.

Is it possible that a small, 13-staff startup in Barcelona in an office over-looking a children’s playground could be on the cusp of a new wave for business applications? If the move by Fuijitsu recently is anything to go by, the answer might be yes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sometimes, the business you should be building is hidden beneath the one you already are.

Back in early 2012, four friends set out to build TapIn.TV. As one of many competitors in the crowded live mobile video broadcasting space, TapIn.TV focused almost entirely on video. After months of development, they noticed something rather troubling: building video stuff — the uploading, the recording, the playback — is too damned hard. So they’re setting out to fix it.

Over the past few months, the company (part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 class) has quietly been changing directions. What was once TapIn.TV is now Framebase, an infrastructure service meant to make adding video functionality to a project a matter of dropping in a few lines of code. Development on TapIn.TV, meanwhile, has been halted.

I generally try to avoid the “Company X is like Company Y, but for Z” trope, but it’s just too accurate here. What Twilio is doing for telephony, and what Stripe is doing for credit card payments, Framebase wants to do for video.

You see, the challenge of developing a video-centric site (or even just integrating a single video-centric feature into an existing site) isn’t just the initial building process. That’s maybe half the battle. Most developers worth their weight in hoodies and Red Bull could hack together an upload form, patch in something like Zencoder, and find a decent open-source HTML5 player to embed. It might not be pretty, but it’ll get the job done.

The bulk of the challenge comes in supporting video for the long term. Once you’ve amassed a small mountain of video, where do you store it? When new playback formats emerge for new devices, how do you support them? If video isn’t a core feature of your project, it’s enough work that you’ll probably have to bring in another full timer.

Thats where Framebase comes in. Their API handles the recording (if you want users to be able to record on-the-fly from their webcam) and the uploading (for videos stored on the user’s hard drive), transcodes the videos to all sorts of different formats, stores them, and hands you back an unbranded player that should work across almost all devices and browsers. Most importantly, they’ll make sure it all keeps working for the long haul.

While they (smartly) avoided naming names before the contracts were dotted and crossed, Framebase’s founders says they’re already working with a bunch of “companies that you’ve actually heard of.” Meanwhile, they’ve received enough interest from investors that, while the company isn’t actively fundraising right now, our conversation suggested that they’ll have their pick of the lot when they do.

Framebase is currently web-only, though they tell me that native mobile frameworks (for, say, adding video uploads to your iOS app) are in the works.

It’s worth noting that this space isn’t without competitors, nor is it without its sacrifices to the deadpool. A similar service, framey, recently shut the doors and killed the lights without much fanfare. Their most lively competition is probably CameraTag, though CameraTag focuses on capturing and uploading webcam videos as opposed to those that have already been recorded.

Pricing for the product varies widely, from a free package (allowing 5,000 minutes of playback and 150 minutes of uploads per month) meant for developers to test with to a $199 “Traction” package (100,000 minutes of playback and 3000 minutes of uploads). Of course, they also offer the classic “Call us and we’ll work something out” enterprise package for the big guys.

With their current pricing structure, it seems Framebase is focusing on targeting projects where video is something of a secondary feature, rather than the core of the business. If you’re aiming to be the next YouTube, for example, you’d be hitting the aforementioned big plan’s 3,000-minute monthly upload limit every 90 seconds. But this approach makes sense: if video is the No. 1 focus of your site, you’ve probably (hopefully) already got all the video infrastructure you need being built in-house.

Whatever the case, the possibilities here are beyond exciting. Without Twilio, there would be no GroupMe. Without Stripe, companies like Exec would have to spend weeks focusing on how to take payments. What becomes possible once video is easy for everyone?

You can check out Framebase here, or find them on Twitter here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You’ve all heard stories about the infamous dot-com bubble burst of the early aughts. It wasn’t pretty, a lot of people lost a lot of money – and their livelihoods to boot. There will always be talk of whether we are close, or ever could get close, to a similar situation again.

I spent some time with an early employee of everything-you-can-think-of-on-demand-delivery-service Kozmo.com, Micah Baldwin of Graphicly, which was a poster child for early dot-com excess. The company raised $250 million before it shut its doors in 2001, since it had only become popular with college students and young professionals, they said. In 1999, its revenues were only $3.5 million, leaving the company with a net loss of $26.3 million. Ouch. This service was a lot like hot companies of today Postmates and TaskRabbit. The difference was that Kozmo didn’t have the social Internet, mobile devices or apps to spread the word about its free delivery service. Mind you, being a free delivery service makes zero sense, so no wonder why it flamed out.

Baldwin and I discussed an early commercial campaign that the company was super proud of, spending millions upon millions of dollars to produce and air. It starred an older version of the Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors. It got me to thinking, and this is exactly why Kozmo fizzled:

It was a cute commercial, but since it cost so much money to hire the agency to come up with the concept, cast it and air it, it was already an incredibly wasteful idea before it was complete. However, what was Kozmo to do? There was no Facebook, no Twitter and there certainly wasn’t YouTube for something like this to go (ick) “viral.” There were no Facebook pages to like, no accounts to follow and no apps to download. Kozmo had a few choices to get its name out there to the world, and all of them were expensive. This is why so many companies crashed and burned: There were no ways to do things cheaply. Failing and going back to the drawing board was impossible.

To hit yet another demographic, Kozmo paid to have a different commercial created, but this one never hit the airwaves:

Again, cute and not awful.

However, both of the commercials are something that companies are creating quickly and cheaply these days, passing them around to networks of millions of people thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Google searches and YouTube. I can’t imagine a company like Justin Kan’s Exec even discussing paying millions of dollars to come up with an advertising campaign for television, the idea is now that prehistoric and ludicrous. But that’s all companies like Pets.com and Kozmo.com had. Their ideas weren’t awful, but their operating costs, especially when it came to distribution, were astronomical. In 2013, a company like Kozmo comes out of Y Combinator every batch and raises nothing more than a $250K seed round to see if it has what it takes to succeed. If it doesn’t, then the smallish teams usually scrap the product and build something else, using their learnings from the previous letdown.

While Facebook might not have hit the sweet spot for offering advertising options to brands yet, it’s light years ahead of what used to be available. More startups are being formed because there are simply fewer hurdles for distribution thanks to these social platforms. It means that there are way more companies and ideas to weed through to find the gems, but it means that no real financial or industrial damage can be done. Facebook has been around for nine years and Twitter just celebrated its seventh birthday and Apple’s App Store is almost five. These are good things that will get in the way of another crash. Fewer companies going public will help that, too.

We’ll never hear about another Boo.com, a company that spent $188 million in six months to sell fashionable clothing online or a Freeinternet.com that cancelled an IPO after generating only $1 million in yearly revenues. There are just too many metrics and social signals on the web these days, in real-time, to find out if a company is successful enough to warrant funding anywhere close to what the aforementioned companies raised.

Having said all of that, what if Kozmo had YouTube? That Lee Majors video would have blown up on Twitter, and who knows…maybe it wouldn’t have gone out of business. Okay, it probably still would have, because “free” anything is never a good idea when it actually costs a company something. The web has grown up around businesses, for a reason, to protect entrepreneurs from raising stupid money to do stupid things with it.

We’re safe for now, but Twitter and Facebook won’t cut it for social distribution forever. That means that there is plenty of room for moonshot thinkers to come in and build a service that can get the attention of hundreds of millions of users, something different, something fresh, something that smaller companies can leverage to build up their own businesses. That ongoing distribution channel evolution is important to protecting our industry from a crash ten years from now, and that’s what excites me about technology.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

From Yamtrader to Das Keyboard, the SXSWi trade show floor is a mixed bag. While not everything lent itself to a detail visit with the TCTV camera, we did find a few interesting companies in the mix.

The trade show is an interesting admixture of media companies (WordPress had a nice presence) and apps alongside hardware and software startups. Visiting the trade show is sadly often an afterthought for most of the SXSW crowd – the lines to get into the keynotes are huge this year and you spend most of your time in them – so it was nice to get away from the show floor and see what was up.

I don’t want to add any spoilers but let’s just say we get to meet a few weird characters including the aforementioned yam and a very lost interstellar traveler.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re very excited to announce that we added Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and Addepar, to our roster of Disrupt NY speakers. After a stint as an intern at PayPal, Lonsdale shook up Silicon Valley twice in a row with the aforementioned companies, and he now invests in and advises startups through Formation 8. Enough said.

Lonsdale is also the chairman of BackPlane, the social media platform co-founded by Troy Carter who will also be speaking at Disrupt NY. The man is a trusted figure in the Valley, and we’re looking forward to his insights on global finance security and how startups can maximize their impact in Asia.

Lonsdale joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, and David Lee, with many more to be added in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Tickets are currently available, but the early bird discount ends today.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Joe Lonsdale
Formation 8 Partner

Joe Lonsdale is a Partner at Formation 8, a fund which invests in top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and connects them with Asian conglomerates in order to give innovation a global impact.

Before that, Joe co-founded Palantir Technologies, a multi-billion dollar software company which develops mission-critical analysis systems used by government and financial organizations around the world.

He is also the founder of Addepar, a leader in private wealth management technology. Previously, he worked with the financial arm of PayPal while still a student, and then joined as an early executive at Clarium Capital, and was a key player in growing Clarium into a $5-billion AUM global macro hedge fund.

On the side, Joe is Chairman of both ONEHOPE Inc, a charity-focused wine brand with partners such as the Mondavi family.

Joe has a variety of philanthropic pursuits, including the board of cacs.org. He earned a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2003.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch