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Tinder's Sean Rad To Speak At Disrupt Europe About Expanding Overseas
Sean Rad’s Tinder is growing rapidly and looking to Europe for new opportunities. With that we’re excited to have him speak on expanding to international markets in a few weeks at Disrupt Europe.
In 2009, Sean Rad co-founded Adly, a marketing platform that connects brands with celebrities and influencers to help them increase their footprint and reach their customers on social media. The company has since gone on to raise $7.3 million and work with some of the biggest brands in the world. Tired of the rejection and creepiness of most dating sites, Rad decided to start his own.
He and co-founders Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen, and Christopher Gulczynski launched Tinder to create a mobile-centric, modern dating experience. Incubated and backed by IAC — the same Barry Diller-led media giant that today owns OkCupid and Match.com — Tinder’s addictive Hot or Not-style discovery and flirting experience seen it catch fire since it launched last October.
Today, users are making one billion profile ratings and 15 million matches every week, and looking to capitalize on this growth, Tinder has big expansion plans. The LA-based company has begun to move into Europe and Asia, with plans to expand its scope beyond dating with professional matchmaking and is going cross-channel with media partnerships.
Sean will be at Disrupt Berlin to share the latest from Tinder, and how he plans to turn a hot dating app into a worldwide business.
Europe offers its own opportunities for startups. But also pitfalls unique to the region. We’ve lined up some of the best entrepreneurs, founders and investors to speak at Disrupt Europe on the challenges and potential rewards about running a startup in Europe. Tickets are currently available.
Organic Food Delivery Service Good Eggs Raises $8.5M Series A From Sequoia Capital
Good Eggs, the startup that brings farmers markets online, has closed a $8.5 million Series A round from Sequoia Capital with participation from Harrison Metal and others. Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier will join the Good Eggs Board of Directors.
The funding will enable Good Eggs to launch in “dozens more cities in the near future.” The startup, which has 80 employees and works with 350 local vendors, currently operates in the San Francisco Bay Area and has pilot programs in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and New Orleans.
Good Eggs allows customers to order locally sourced, organic and sustainable produce, meat and other food by aggregating goods from multiple farmers and creating a delivery system that can bring together a single order of food within two days. This gives shoppers a wide range of options, including seasonal produce, meats or fish, breads and cheese, as well as pre-made snacks and meals.
Some might see the startup as a competitor to neighborhood co-ops and farmers markets, as well as CSA (community supported agriculture) programs, where consumers buy subscriptions to regular produce deliveries from a local farmer. On the other hand, Good Eggs could be a boon for these same farmers because it gives them a new distribution channel to people who might otherwise by big-agriculture produce at their local grocery store.
Good Eggs was founded by Rob Spiro, a co-founder of social search startup Aardvark (which was acquired for $50 million by Google in 2010) and Web development agency Carbon 5 co-founder Alon Salant. Its current investors also include Baseline Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Westly Group, Correlation Ventures, New Island Capital, Max Ventilla and Mitch Kapor
HTC To Sell Back Its Remaining Stake In Beats Electronics For $265M
The writing was on the wall. It was bound to happen. HTC has sold its remaining stake in Beats Electronics for $265 million. This is likely nothing more than a desperate bid to improve the battered phone maker’s cash balances.
According to Bloomberg, the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. By selling beck the 24.84 percent stake in Beats, HTC stands to gain a NT$2.52 billion ($85 million) pretax profit. Beats will also repay a $150 million promissory note, plus accrued interest.
Word of this deal started circulating in August. Since HTC bought into the hot audio brand in 2011, the phone maker’s stock price plummeted 90 percent on the back poor sales. The stock price almost hit an eight-year low this month.
HTC originally purchased 50.1 of Beats in 2011, but sold half of that stack in mid-2012, which reportedly resulted in a net loss of about $4.8 million for the Taiwanese gadget maker.
As of right now, HTC is a perilous situation. The company’s sales revenue is down, profits are down, operating cash flow is now negative and more than a few pundits have already written the company off (or are close to doing it). Worse yet, the HTC One is nearly universally praised as the best Android phone available, yet the sales numbers do not reflect the title. They built the phone everyone wanted, yet can’t get anyone to buy it.
By selling back its remaining portion of Beats, the company bought a little more time out of the deadpool.
HTC Corp closed down 2.99% on the day, ending at NT$130 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Liftopia, An E-Commerce Platform For Ski Resorts, Raises Additional $5 Million
Last year, online ski marketplace Liftopia, which previously focused on offering skiers discounted lift tickets, launched an e-commerce platform for the ski resorts themselves called “Cloud Store by Liftopia.” Things have been going well since, it seems. At launch, the company started 10 resorts testing the platform and ended up with 15. Last season, that number grew to 50. And this season, the company is expecting 100 resorts will be using Cloud Store. The growth on this side of the business has allowed Liftopia to hit another milestone as well: $5 million in new funding.
This round, technically a Series D, was led by Industry Ventures, and saw participation from a number of other new investors including Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelmen, and Zillow CEO and co-founder of Hotwire Spencer Rascoff, Walter Winshall, and ru-Net. Existing investors First Round Capital, Erik Blachford (former CEO of Expedia and IAC Travel), Lowercase Capital (Chris Sacca), and SK ventures (Paul Kedrosky) also joined in.
Adoption of Cloud Store has led Liftopia into a new growth phase for the business. On the bookings side of the business, the total revenue last season was more than the previous six seasons combined. “It was a really big forward step for us,” says co-founder and CEO Evan Reece. “It’s been an interesting 18 months for us. Twelve months ago, we had maybe seventeen people here, and twelve months before that, we had seven,” he says. Today, Liftopia has 35 and expects to grow to 65 over the next six months.
Founded in 2005, San Francisco-based Liftopia has been selling lift tickets and other mountain resort activities online and on mobile, for years. But its platform was consumer-facing: consumers went to the Liftopia homepage or downloaded and app to gain access to discounted lift tickets and other deals for resorts across the U.S., and later, the world.
But last April, the company decided to try another angle by giving its technology to the resorts themselves, allowing them to have more control over ticket pricing on a daily basis. “Resorts had said, ‘why don’t we do this ourselves, through our own sites?,’” says Reece of the Cloud Store launch. “And the answer was, well you should. We were in a unique position to use the underlying technology that powered Liftopia.com – the inventory management system and business intelligence layer – to also power Cloud Store.” Now, any resort actively participating on Liftopia.com can be onboarded into Cloud Store in an hour or two.
When Cloud Store first launched, e-commerce in the ski industry was still in its infancy – many resorts either didn’t have an e-commerce presence (and definitely not an m-commerce one), or they had a basic site with little sophistication. Instead of variable pricing, it sites would sell inventory with fixed prices. Cloud Store changed that, allowing them to instead sell for specific dates, with highly variable pricing strategies. And thanks to Liftopia’s length of time in the business, it has years of historical data to lean on, in order to help inform resorts what those pricing strategies should be to increase conversions.
Last year, Liftopia booked 1.2 percent of all skier visits in North America, but some individual resorts did 45 percent of their business online during the same period. Now, they’ve told Liftopia want to do as much of 60 percent of their ticket sales online in the upcoming season.
Liftopia’s business model is a SaaS-based service, but one where the rates charged are based on the transactions that come through the platform. It’s a higher percentage (12%) when transactions are driven through Liftopia.com and a lower percentage (4%) when driven through Cloud Store. “We’ve built it that way because we always want it to be in our best interest to drive drive for resorts,” explains Reece. There are also some additional costs associated with driving transactions, as Liftopia handles processing, fraud protection, chargebacks and other payment details.
As Cloud Store grows, the consumer-facing Liftopia.com has as well, reaching over 1 million visitors per month during peak season last year.
With the additional funding, the company will be focused on new product features which solve other problems for resorts, while making skiing more accessible for consumers. Reece says they’ll be looking into how Liftopia can serve additional consumer segments with the correct price points, how it can improve the mobile experience, and will look into further international expansions, too. Longer term, there’s also room for the company to move a little bit beyond skiing and other winter activities to help resorts with their year-round businesses involving other things like mountain biking or water parks. And it may also help consumers with other travel activities related to getting to the resorts, as well.
“If we continue to scale and help the industry solve its core problems around skiing, and if we get more people to ski,” says Reece,” at some point it does make sense for us…to help a person find more options for how they can get there and where they should stay.”
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