In April 2011, Boston’s Where Inc. sold to eBay-owned PayPal for $135 million. And now, more than three years later, we are putting the startup back in the headlines.
Last week, we introduced you to the first half of the Where mafia – a select list of individuals who had a hand in building the location-focused mobile company, and, in the wake of the acquisition, continue to catalyze innovation in other ventures within Greater Boston and beyond.
The reason for outlining a “mafia” at Where, or any company, is larger than showering a team with well-deserved praise post-exit. A mafia is about recognizing people who have grown professionally and personally in coordination with the company’s own traction, an inherent reciprocity that’s perhaps taken for granted in the startup realm. Further, it’s an outlet through which to acknowledge those opportunities opened by a tenure at a company – the skills gained and the connections made – and to reflect on how and why people seized them. Lastly, a mafia connects dots within a community, delineating the intense fellowship formed in the trenches of an early-stage company, and how its members help one another out in the future.
Take a look at the second part of Where’s mafia below.
The Major Player
Walt Doyle
After a successful three-year stint as vice president and general manager of Mapquest, Doyle stepped into the chief executive role at Where in fall of 2005.
Many of the decisions made that led to Where’s success went down under Doyle’s command. He oversaw the growth of Where from 20 to 130 people and built an all-star executive team (if you couldn’t already tell from last week’s Where mafia teaser). During his tenure as CEO, Doyle helped close multiple funding rounds worth over $16 million from Venrock, GrandBanks Capital and Kodiak Venture Partners. He ushered the company through its significant relaunch, featuring location-enabled mobile widgets, in 2007. Also important to note is that Doyle drove the company’s rebranding from uLocate to Where. In 2010, the startup shed its bulky title and adopted the name of the company’s GPS-based local search app, Where, to streamline its corporate identity.
Many local startups are now fortunate to know Doyle as not only the charismatic former chief executive of Where, but also as an involved investor, thoughtful advisor and, perhaps most distinguishably, a loyal advocate. When Where was acquired in 2011, Doyle became general manager of PayPal Media Network. He soon started serving as an advisor to Streetwise Media and alumni networking startup EverTrue, and later, fine antiques marketplace Invaluable, mobile payments startup Leaf and ad campaign management platform Celtra, among others.
In May 2013, Doyle made angel investments in clypd, the Somerville TV ad startup founded by Where alums Joshua Summers and Dough Hurd, and EverTrue. Mere weeks after the deals, Doyle announced that he was officially stepping down from his position at PayPal Media Network. Rumors flew as to what the innovator’s next move would be; it wasn’t until last December that Doyle publicly shared his decision to join Highland Capital Partners’s Boston branch. He also played a key role in Cambridge venture firm Atlas Venture’s first AngelList Boston Syndicate, which ultimately led to a seed investment worth $2.25 million in alcohol delivery-on-demand startup Drizly in early 2014. Months before Drizly announced its funding, however, Doyle was pledging his support to the startup. Wrote Doyle in an AngelList post:
I am working with the team at Drizly to help them build the world’s first spirits on demand delivery service — an $80 billion dollar a year market opportunity. This syndicate is being raised for the sole purpose of the Drizly fundraise. All investors on same term sheet — great team, great market!
Today, Doyle sits on Drizly’s, and at least six other companies’, boards. He has yet to make his inaugural investment through Highland, but it’s safe to say that the Boston tech community will be paying close attention when he writes the first check.
The Spinoffs
Mok Oh (Moju Labs)
Oh had just stepped down in 2011 as founding CTO of Newton, Mass.-based mapping startup EveryScape when Doyle approached him to join Where. Doyle had made the MIT PhD an offer he couldn’t refuse – an opportunity to work as chief innovation officer and join Where, as it would turn out, mere months before the acquisition.
After the deal, Oh slid into a chief scientist role at PayPal’s offices in San Francisco at the urging of Where colleagues Joshua Summers, Doug Hurd and Ivan Mitrovic. Oh told BostInno he had received the chief scientist job description, which was emailed out to the company executives, and deleted it almost immediately. “I thought, ‘Holy crap, maybe they’re seeing something I’m not. Some of my best friends are saying something, maybe I should take a second look,’” Oh shared. He got the job, and shipped out to California in fall 2011.
After a little over a year, Oh moved into North Bridge Venture Partners’ West Coast office and began work as an entrepreneur-in-residence, advising a number of fledgling companies, including MIT startup Locu (acquired by GoDaddy! in 2013). In April 2013, however, he founded “consumer big data” company Moju Labs with the aim of moving from simply capturing to comprehending data in photos, videos, content and social media. The startup spun out its first product this spring, Moju, an app that lets you snap a series of photos and movements, and algorithmically chooses the best ones to highlight, ultimately creating a 3D, Vine-esque compilation of “stories” of images. The three-person team has already banked $1 million from Google’s Eugene Jhong and Facebook founding team members’ Eduardo and Alex Saverin.
Ivan Mitrovic (Private Securities Market)
After several years working as a software architect, Mitrovic began crafting kMaps, a mobile LBS platform for smartphones, in spring of 2005. Eight months later, kMaps was quietly acquired by Where, a deal that brought Mitrovic onto the startup’s team as chief technology officer. He stayed on as the mastermind behind Where’s mobile products and technical tweaks through the acquisition, ultimately becoming PayPal’s director of data science.
Mitrovic officially stepped down from PayPal in November 2013. Since then, he has busied himself by making angel investments in and advising Drizly and New York City house cleaning and key service delivery startup Proprly. According to Mitrovic, Doyle mobilized him to contribute to Drizly’s iOS and Android applications and provide general technical support while the startup was in the fundraising phase. Mitrovic also sits on the advisory board of Celtra, a Boston ad campaign management company, and bolsters their Big Data work.
As of four months ago, however, he’s been working on a new initiative in what he calls the “impact investing” space with Henri-Claude Bailly, a business executive and clean energy entrepreneur, and Jonathan Abe, the former senior vice president of Nexamp, a solar independent power producer. The project, Private Securities Market, silently launched last week, and is currently bootstrapped with help from friends and family, Mitrovic shared. Private Securities Market allows people to buy equity or debt securities in renewable energy, with a focus on local impact.
The Ones to Watch
Cannonball
Jim Caralis joined Where in 2010 as the director of consumer product. Shortly after PayPal’s acquisition of Where, Caralis hopped onto the team at mobile game community company MocoSpace , where he worked as vice president of game development for nearly a year. In 2012, he teamed up with Thibault Le Conte, the founder of real-time intelligence for retail stores startup Mobee, and MIT Sloan graduate Raffaele Colella to start email iPad app Cannonball, which organizes email as one would a pile of snail mail, intuitively splitting up important messages from promotions, subscriptions and newsletters. The slick app raised $600,000 from a number of angels and dropped in Apple’s App Store in October 2013.
Happier
After stints in venture capital at New York City firm Hudson Ventures and at Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, Nataly Kogan joined Where in 2011 as vice president of consumer experience. She stayed on with Where post-PayPal acquisition for a while, working on the parent company’s point-of-sale app, PayPal Here. In 2012, Kogan established Happier, a social gratitude journaling app that empowers people to take charge of their life through and mood-improving courses on subjects like stress, yoga and motivation. (Former Where designer Sarah Wohl followed Kogan to her new endeavor; she now works at ModCloth in San Francisco.) In 2011, the South Boston-based startup raised $1.2 million in seed from Resolute Ventures’ Mike Hirshland and Venrock partner Mike Tyrell (Tyrell also invested in Where).
Niall Hawkins (EverTrue)
As VP of finance and administration, Hawkins was responsible for holding down Where’s finances and human resources from 2007 until the company’s acquisition in 2011. In bringing Hawkins on board, Where picked up a powerhouse. Before joining the startup, he served as a controller at local events platform and discovery startup Going.com (acquired by AOL in 2009) and finance director at VeriSign, where he worked alongside Where alum David Chang, after Moreover Technologies, the startup at which he worked, was acquired. Upon Where’s acquisition, the team and PayPal recognized Hawkins’ contributions and promoted him to director of finance in PayPal’s retail and point-of-sale division.
After over two years at PayPal, however, Hawkins soon headed back to his startup roots. In the summer of 2013, he joined Boston alumni network research startup and Techstars 2013 graduate EverTrue, where he fills the role of chief financial officer. Interestingly, Doyle was a strong early advocate for EverTrue and invested in the company’s $5.25 million Series A round in spring 2013. He invited CEO Brent Grinna into his North End office to work for free, which ultimately led to Grinna’s meeting of EverTrue Co-founder Eric Carlstrom. Doyle also occupies a seat on EverTrue’s board of directors.
Former Where engineer Bob Breznak is also now at EverTrue. Breznak joined Where a mere two months before its acquisition. In the wake of the deal, he continued working on PayPal’s technical team until 2012, when he joined Startup Institute as a developer track curriculum architect. It wasn’t until January 2013 that Breznak hopped aboard EverTrue’s team as an engineering lead.
Stefanie Matthews (ViralGains)
Matthews was one of Where’s last hires before its acquisition. She joined the team as its senior manager of ad operations after serving at Smarter Travel (acquired by TripAdvisor in 2007). Over the course of three and a half years, Matthews moved up PayPal’s ladder to director of operations, advertising and demand generation. This June, however, she departed the company and dove back into the startup scene, taking on a role as vice president of customer success and operations at MassChallenge winner and 500 Startups graduate ViralGains.
Degrees of Separation
Brad Rosen
Rosen was a co-founder and the chief executive of social network and peer recommendation platform Zync. When the startup was acquired by Where (then still known as uLocate) in 2009, he did a brief stint on the Where team as vice president of product. (Also on the Zync team were Jing-ta Chow, who now serves as the site engineering manager at PayPal, and Josh Summers, who has since started clypd.)
The exit with Zync seemed to have whetted Rosen’s appetite for entrepreneurship. Within a year of selling the company to Where, he founded Etude, an app for learning music on the piano and the first sheet music reader. The startup was acquired by Steinway Sons in 2011 – around four months after Where was acquired by PayPal. The innovator has since been focusing his efforts on Drync, a wine discovery app that enables people to scan and buy wine the moment they taste it. His latest venture most recently closed $2.1 million in seed funding in April 2014.
Taking the Where web one step further, we were told by the Drync team that its 12-person crew is currently working out of clypd’s incubation space in Davis Square.
***
In this two-post series, we’ve touted the accomplishments and contributions of numerous people, startups and organizations. But as former Where vice president of product and PayPal Media Network COO David Chang pointed out in Part 1’s comment section, there are many more folks who were essential to Where’s success, whether still at PayPal Media Network or another company. Here are a handful – but admittedly not all – of those worthy of plaudits:
Ron Braunfeld – former Where vice president of business development, now president of mobile print coupon-saving app, SnipSnap
Dan Gilmartin – former Where vice president of marketing and PayPal director of mobile marketing, now no longer at PayPal (and reportedly off sailing)
Jerry King – former Where COO, now COO at Portland, Maine-based home delivery pharmacy service for pet-owners company, Vets First Choice
Arik Keller – former Where senior director of product, now PayPal Media Network director of product and Start Tank mentor
Scott Hendrickson – former Where vice president of advertising sales, now PayPal Media Network’s head of advertising solutions
For a visual (albeit incomplete) clarification, Doyle, with help from Chang, created this chart of where the Where team is now.