Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp Steps Down, 10 Years Later

Garrett Camp, the co-founder and long-time CEO of Web discovery service StumbleUpon, is moving on. Or up, you could say — Camp will now be chairman of the board, while the company undertakes a public search for a new CEO.

While his Web 2.0-era peers sold their companies and founded new ones, Garrett Camp stuck with StumbleUpon for 10 years since creating it as a grad student. That included selling the company to eBay for $75 million, buying it back, and notching 25 million registered users as of last month.

Ten years seems about long enough, Camp said today. “It was my first job and my first love,” he explained.

Camp hasn’t been exclusively focused on StumbleUpon. He co-founded the on-demand ride service Uber and is chairman there as well.

Camp said he’s been thinking about stepping back for years, and more seriously in the past six months. I asked if he wouldn’t have rather quit when Uber was getting started a few years back.

Camp said no. He does have a few new start-up ideas he’s thinking about, but they would be “virtual” products, unlike the real-world challenge of Uber. Camp said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is better suited to that operational role, where Camp wants to work on products.

StumbleUpon co-founder Geoff Smith is to stay in his position as CTO.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”