6 posts and columns on burn rate

Digg Lays Off More Than One-Third of Staff as It Seeks to Cut Costs

in News on October 25, 2010 at 11:39 am PT

Digg has announced it is laying off 25 of its 67 staffers today, part of an attempt by the San Francisco social news discovery site to rationalize its costs. In an interview with BoomTown this morning, CEO Matt Williams noted that “the burn rate is just too high” for the company.

Blip.TV Raises $10 Million for More Web Video You (Probably) Won’t See on Hulu

in Media on May 19, 2010 at 5:00 am PT

It’s no YouTube, but Blip.TV is turning five, too. That’s impressive enough for any Web video outfit, but CEO Mike Hudack also has a good story to tell: He’s figuring out how to make money from the clips small-time producers make–and how to get the producers enough money to make more clips. Repeat.

Palm Running Out of Time–Again

in News on March 19, 2010 at 7:14 am PT

Remarking on Palm’s gruesome third quarter during an earnings call yesterday, CEO Jon Rubinstein called the company’s performance “extremely disappointing to me personally.” This sentiment seems to be widely held among investors, who are dragging the company’s shares through the mud today, and analysts questioning whether Palm can ever pull off the turnaround for which it’s striving.

The Case for the Fat Start-Up

in News on March 17, 2010 at 12:00 pm PT

Much has been written and said about the current economic downturn and the resulting lessons on how to run high-technology companies. Quite famously, Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, held a mandatory all-CEO meeting in fall 2008 during which it advised them to “Cut spending. Cut fat. Preserve capital.”

Universal Music Group Didn’t Help Veoh, but It Didn’t Kill It

in Media on February 11, 2010 at 4:25 pm PT

The music label’s suit made it very difficult for Veoh to climb out of the deep hole it found itself in last year. But it was the Web video start-up, not Universal, that dug that pit.

Michael Wolff Has Been Trash-Talking the Internet Since 1998–See the Video!

in News on December 2, 2008 at 2:39 am PT

Ah, Michael Wolff! Always throwing stink bombs and making deliciously wackadoo declarations about the Internet. In a recent dinner interview the author had with BusinessWeek’s media columnist Jon Fine this week, Wolff slaps around News Corp. social network MySpace, with a series of his trash-buckling phrases, some of which are true and some a bit more of a stretch. But it’s par for the course for Wolff, as you can see here in an appearance with BoomTown on the “Charlie Rose” show a decade ago. “It’s craziness, it’s loco, it makes no sense,” said Wolff about the Internet, circa July 27, 1998. And later: “I think the myth of the Internet is that it is going to come into everybody’s home.”