TechCrunch
YC Partners Taggar, Tan And Reddit Co-Founder Ohanian Raise $39M For Initialized Capital
YC Partners Garry Tan and Harj Taggar along with the early-stage firm’s “Ambassador to the East” and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have raised $39 million for a separate fund called Initialized Capital, according to an SEC filing today.
All three of them have been investing on their own for a couple years and Initialized Capital isn’t formally tied to Y Combinator in any way. It is their own fund.
They look for high-quality founders first and then try to see if they can help or understand the market a company is attacking in any way. The fund is open to all companies, regardless of whether they have been part of the Y Combinator program or not.
It’s their second fund, following an earlier $7 million one that has backed companies like Zach Verdin’s New Hive.
Y Combinator has historically taken a two to 10 percent stake in its companies in exchange for $11,000 plus $3,000 per founder, which is ideally is enough to get a startup to a decent first prototype. The firm sometimes invests more than that. But it historically hasn’t done serious follow-on funding, and has instead left that to the broader community of angels and venture capital firms.
Employer Tipped Off Police In Pressure Cooker/Backpack-Gate, Not Google
In what might be Medium‘s first widespread Twitter moment, music writer Michele Catalano used the platform to blog details of an unexpected visit to her home yesterday, from six men she identifies as members of the “joint terrorism task force.”
Catalano asserts that the visit was likely prompted by her husband searching for the term “backpacks” in close conjunction with her searching for the term “pressure cookers.”
Turns out the visit was prompted by the searches, but not in the way most speculation asserted – by a law enforcement-initiated, NSA-enabled dragnet of the couple’s web history. It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer. And that employer, “a Bay Shore based computer company” called the police on their former employee.
The Suffolk County PD has just released the following information related to the case:
Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”
After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.
Any further inquiries regarding this matter should be directed to the Suffolk County Police Department
This should be a teachable moment to anyone who thinks that their workplace computers are somehow not being tracked.
Updating.
Wall Street Darling LinkedIn Beats Estimates Again, Revenue Booms 59% To $363M, Now At 238M Members
LinkedIn continues to be on of the few companies that can do no wrong on Wall Street, continuing to beat estimates and display growth curves that consistently move up and to the right. Amazon would perhaps be one of the few other exceptions, as Jeff Bezos’ short-term-loss-for-long-term-gain continues to confound the status quo.
The professional network announced its second quarter earnings results on Thursday, and it was another good one, as the company grew to 238 million members and saw revenue increase to 59 percent to $363.7 million from $228.2 million in Q2 2012. Meanwhile, net income also jumped to $3.7 million from $2.8 million in Q2 last year, while non-GAAP net income was $44.5 million, compared to $18.1 million in 2012.
“Accelerated member growth and strong engagement drove record operating and financial results in the second quarter,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in today’s statement. “We are continuing to invest in driving scale across the LinkedIn platform in order to fully realize our long-term potential.”
To build that scale and to follow through with its ongoing plans to build out the go-to professional content network, LinkedIn’s investments have included those like the $90 million acquisition of Pulse and startups like Maybe to dig deeper into mobile.
LinkedIn’s adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $88.6 million (24 percent of revenue) compared to $50.4 million for Q2 2012, and GAAP diluted EPS for the second quarter was $0.03, while non-GAAP diluted EPS for Q2 was $0.38.
Meanwhile, as most of LinkedIn’s class of tech IPOs continue to struggle (namely Zynga and Groupon), the company has put together a string of victories. While some questioned its ability to diversify its revenue streams, Linked has been seeing continuing growth in each of its three revenue buckets. This quarter, as per usual, talent solutions took the cake, representing the biggest slice of LinkedIn’s business, as revenue from its talent solutions products hit $205.1 million, up 69 percent compared to Q2 2012.
Talent solutions’ share of revenue grew slightly to 56 percent of total revenue, up from 53 percent last year. Marketing solutions, on the other hand, came in at $85.6 million, an increase of 36 percent when compared to last year and premium subscriptions hit $73 million, representing an increase of 68 percent over Q2 2012, and 20 percent of total revenue.
Other highlights from the quarter included the addition of some big names to its growing “Influencer Program” or roster of Super Awesome Motivational Bloggers, as I like to call them, including Bill Gates, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, the Burberry CEO, Japan’s Prime Minister. These new influencers helped LinkedIn “more than double” its homepage traffic over the last year.
The company also “revamped its mobile phone experience” with new iOS and Android apps, saying in its report that “mobile activity has increased, with mobile homepage engagement rising over 40%, and increasing levels of social actions, article views, and mobile profile edits when compared to the past version.”
The company also released a new version of its flagship Recruiter platform for Talent Solutions customers and also launched CheckIn, which “enables student members to engage with recruiters at on-campus hiring events.”
LinkedIn Wants To Ramp Up Ads With An Advertising API Like Twitter's And Facebook's; A ‘High Priority' Says CEO Weiner
LinkedIn, now with 238 million registered users on its social network for the working world, wants to follow in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter and turbo-charge its advertising effort. Speaking during the company’s quarterly earnings call, LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner said that the social network will be introducing an advertising API, so that brands and agencies can more easily make bigger media buys on the social platform. An exact date was not named, but Weiner said an ads API was a “high priority.”
“Introducing a robust set of APIs for social marketing agencies to best leverage the platform is a high priority,” he said. “We’re not pre-announcing a date but it’s high on our list.”
Launching an advertising API is a sign of how LinkedIn is looking to get more serious about how it makes revenue from ads on its platform. An advertising API will also allow companies to more easily make media buys, and will specifically mean that third party social media marketing and advertising agencies will be able to link up with LinkedIn, which can then get incorporated into larger media buys made through those agencies.
And, following from Facebook’s introduction of an advertising API in August 2011, and Twitter’s in February 2013, LinkedIn introducing an advertising API will also be a sure sign that we will start to see more ad units as a result.
Right now, LinkedIn does not break out how much money it makes from advertising. The company tells me that it roughly categorizes those revenues in its “Marketing Solutions” division (one ad unit, where companies can advertise to “Work with us”, goes into Talent Solutions). In LinkedIn’s Q2 earnings reported earlier today, Marketing Solutions made up 24%, or $87.36 million, of the company’s $364 million in total revenues. With LinkedIn’s user numbers and features growing — including enhanced home pages for users with more news and other information, as well as a revamped search — there is room for ads to grow, too.
And that’s before considering mobile. The company has only recently started to introduce advertising on mobile, which now makes up about a third of all of LinkedIn’s traffic.
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