Sources familiar with the negotiations tell AllThingsD that HP CEO Meg Whitman wants out of the $47 million, 15-year naming rights deal, which is scheduled to end in 2016. The move is part of a global reevaluation by HP of its marketing efforts and sponsorships. The change could be announced as early as this summer, in time for the 2013-14 hockey season.

Software giant SAP is said to be interested in taking over the naming rights. Its founder, former co-CEO and chairman of its supervisory board, Hasso Plattner, is the majority owner of the Sharks. Plattner, who ranks at No. 122 on the Forbes magazine list of global billionaires, with a net worth of $8.9 billion, recently bought out two other co-owners, the longtime Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Kevin Compton, and former VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos. Following that deal, Plattner’s stake in the team is said to be in the neighborhood of 90 percent.

HP spokesman Michael Thacker declined to comment, as did SAP spokesman James Dever.

A change in the arena’s naming rights would have to be approved by the San Jose city council. Michelle McGurk, a spokeswoman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, had no immediate comment. Update, 4:50 PM PDT: I just received a statement from McGurk. See it below.

Scott Emmert, a spokesman for the San Jose Sharks, didn’t immediately return messages seeking a comment.

According to people familiar with the discussions, Plattner raised the issue of HP’s naming rights with Whitman directly during a routine meeting. HP is a significant SAP customer. Asked if HP intended to hold on to its naming rights through 2016 as the current agreement states, Whitman said, “Frankly, I’d like to get out of it.”

HP inherited the naming rights from Compaq, the computer company it acquired in 2002 for $25 billion. At the time, San Jose’s arena was known as The Compaq Center at San Jose. It has been known as the HP Pavilion at San Jose since late 2002. The rights are said to cost HP about $3.1 million a year.

As annual expenditures go, $3.1 million is pocket change for HP. While it doesn’t disclose marketing expenditures directly, those expenses fall under the “selling, general and administrative” (SG&A) line item on HP’s income statement, which in fiscal 2012 was $13.5 billion.

Still, since Whitman took over as CEO in 2011, marketing functions that had previously been run by HP’s disparate business units — the PC unit, the printer unit and so on — have been centralized under Chief Marketing Officer Marty Homlish.

Over the years, HP has become involved with hundreds, if not thousands, of events and programs that it sponsors as a way of raising the visibility of the HP brand. Those programs and sponsorships are now in the process of being systematically reevaluated, and many are being canceled outright.

The HP Pavilion name was given to the arena to align with the company’s main PC brand, known as Pavilion. But with personal computer sales in rapid decline, attaching the brand name to a sporting facility is no longer seen as an effective use of marketing dollars, people familiar with HP’s thinking say. Money saved from canceled marketing efforts is being redirected into either new marketing efforts or into HP’s research and development budget.

HP will still have access to the arena and to San Jose Sharks games. Sources say the company intends to hold on to a single luxury box it owns to entertain customers. Oddly enough, the naming rights for the luxury suites belong to another tech company: They’re currently known as Citrix Suites.

Informally known as the Shark Tank, the arena seats 17,562 for hockey games, and more than 19,000 for concerts. It hosts as many as 190 events a year, including the SAP Open, a men’s tennis tournament. It was briefly the home court of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors during a period when the Oakland Coliseum was under reconstruction.

Update: Here’s the statement I just got from Michelle McGurk, a spokeswoman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed:

“We’ve enjoyed a long and productive partnership with both the Sharks and HP, and we greatly appreciate their long-standing and valuable commitment to our community.

“The current agreement is scheduled to end in 2016, so we would be starting a process in the coming year or so to explore contract alternatives in the normal course of business.

“Because the Arena is an outstanding facility and Silicon Valley a unique location, we’re optimistic that we will be able to end up in position of mutual benefit for everyone, without speculating on any specific outcome.”

Joshua Rosenkranz, the partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represented Facebook in its battle with the Winklevoss twins over their ownership stake and is currently representing Apple in its dispute with Google over the iPhone and iPad touchscreen patents, is now also helping to defend Kleiner, according to court documents.

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Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr has joined the board of Flipboard, the mobile-based social media magazine, as an adviser.

“John has been a long-time supporter and adviser to Flipboard and it is fantastic to have him on the board,” a Flipboard spokesperson told AllThingsD. “We feel very fortunate to be working with him and everyone at KP.”

Doerr’s move into an advisory role at Flipboard, first noted by Owen Thomas at Business Insider, is a natural one, as Doerr has had an existing relationship with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue over the years. McCue founded and subsequently sold Paper Software to Netscape in 1996, where he went on to work on and evolve the Netscape browser with Doerr again acting as adviser. McCue also founded TellMe, backed again by Doerr and Kleiner’s funds.

Another Kleiner partner, Eric Feng, recently joined Flipboard as the startup’s new CTO.

McCue was a board seat holder at Twitter before he was asked to leave over what the microblogging site saw as eventual conflicts of interest. Doerr often showed up to Twitter board meetings in an advisory role, but never held an official seat.

The news also comes in the wake of the departure of former Kleiner partner Ellen Pao, who was terminated from the investment firm for “performance issues.” (Pao also happens to be suing the firm, alleging long-standing sexual harassment issues.)

The $50 million round brings the company’s total raised to date to $117 million. Institutional Venture Partners led the fourth round with existing investors, with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners and Tiger Global Management also participating.

Also joining the round was strategic investor Scripps Networks Interactive, which owns TV networks, including HGTV and Food Network. Scripps and One Kings Lane became familiar with each other this winter after One Kings Lane ran its first-ever TV advertising campaign.

One Kings Lane CEO Doug Mack says the funding follows a strong year of growth, which was fueled by aggressive — and expensive — expansion plans in 2012.

Today, the online retailer employs 350 people, including the addition of four new executives to its management team. The growth necessitated getting new offices in San Francisco, where it now occupies 52,000 square feet of the Market Square building, and in Los Angeles and New York. As mentioned above, the company also kicked off a pricey advertising campaign, which cost millions of dollars in the fourth quarter alone.

But, Mack says, all that spending has been offset — at least partially — by top-line revenue growth, allowing it to cut its losses by a third compared to 2011. This year, One Kings Lane is on track to record $200 million in revenue, or double what it achieved last year.

Mack declined to discuss the company’s valuation, although he said it has gone up since the company raised money a year ago. However, one glaring milestone left for the company to achieve is profitability, which he believes could occur in the next year or two when the company hits $400 million in revenue.

Mack said this will be the company’s final round of private capital before going public.

“We weren’t really thinking we’d raise, but the consumer-based IPOs are not doing well, and we wondered if they weren’t doing well, if it would ripple back and affect us,” he said. “Basically, we got proactive because someday we might need it.”

Other e-commerce companies have had no problems raising capital recently, including Wayfair, another home decor site, which raised $36 million; flash sales sites like Zulily, which sells children’s apparel; and Fab.com.

Mack was reminded last month why it’s good to have a little more cash in the bank. During Hurricane Sandy, the One Kings Lane office in New York went dark for a week and a half. The staff had to scramble to take photos and write copy for the site from makeshift offices around town. “It was a good reminder — it can even be an act of God that can take you out,” he said.

Even with the difficulties that Sandy presented, Mack said the company is on track to surpass its goals for this holiday season. This year, consumers went “gangbusters” on Thankgiving, with 50 percent of the site’s visits coming from mobile devices (compared to the high 20 percent range normally).

Sales continued to be strong the week after Thanksgiving, fueled by a big Cyber Monday, to make the company’s best week ever, Mack said. The site isn’t focused on running promotions this holiday since most of its inventory is discounted anyway. Instead, it offered a greater selection, by updating the site twice a day instead of just once on Cyber Monday.

The new funds will go toward hiring more technology talent to help its mobile efforts and data tracking. Mack also plans to continue spending on marketing after seeing a huge return on investment from its TV campaigns, which not only brought new people to its site, but translated to more sales. It will also continue spending on its merchandising team, as it continues to add more product.

The latest sign of the trend comes from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The venture-capital firm will Tuesday announce two new initiatives around design. The first is a “Design Fellows” program that will recruit and place 35 to 40 interns at start-ups backed by the firm. The include One Kings Lane, Path and Zaarly. There is no age requirement, but Kleiner will focus its recruiting at universities.

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The razor-blade model has come to mean something in business: Selling something at a loss in order to lock in future sales at a markup.

But that approach doesn’t apply to this Venice, Calif.-based company, which is keeping things simple by creating an online membership service that sells basic razors without any superfluous features. Today, the company has raised $9.8 million in more capital to take the service international, starting with Canada next week.

Since coming out of beta in March, the company has gained a lot of attention for its funny commercials, which feature CEO Michael Dubin hawking the service in the tone of the recently successful Old Spice ads.

It also turns heads with its impressive investor list. The company’s first round was led today by Venrock, but as part of its seed round announced earlier this year, it raised money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Forerunner Ventures. Other contributors included Andreessen Horowitz, Shasta Ventures and Felicis Ventures. The company originally participated in Science, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based incubator founded by former Myspace CEO Mike Jones.

Dollar Shave Club’s service in Canada will offer the same goods as the American version — shavers with two, four or six blades — at a slightly higher price than it charges in the U.S.; the company plans to expand to other countries, as well. It declined to say how many members it had signed up so far.

And they’ve raised some high-class money to get it started.

LendUp, which launches today in California, will make loans of up to $250 for 30 days to people with poor credit.

LendUp has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, Kapor Capital, Bronze Investments, Founders Co-op, Data Collective, Y Combinator, the Start Fund and others, including debt that the company will use to fund its customers’ loans.

LendUp is less shy about sharing its loan pricing for its own customers: Basically, borrowers will be charged interest of 15 percent of the loan amount, minus a small discount for paying early.

The average default rate for credit cards is 7 percent to 12 percent, says LendUp CEO Sasha Orloff (he’s the banking brother), and LendUp expects it will see rates higher than that.

LendUp CEO Sasha Orloff

But the company says its secret sauce — besides a friendly, modern Web site and in-house customer service — is the way it calculates risk based on personal data, and the way it will stick with a person over time to graduate them to safer loans. To start with, LendUp expects to approve 15 percent of applicants.

Credit card companies and banks are the original data miners, so it’s not necessarily clear to me that LendUp will have an advantage there. The stepbrothers did some hand-wavey stuff when we got to this part of the interview at their office in San Francisco’s Union Square.

But beyond data, the site also uses “gamification” — challenges and rewards, courtesy of Jacob Rosenberg, the brother who was at Zynga — to try to level up loan recipients over time.

LendUp CTO Jacob Rosenberg

The stepbrothers contended that it’s that long-term relationship that will make LendUp a good business. Over time, borrowers can get better loans and build their own credit.

They face competition from existing payday lenders, as well as start-ups BillFloat and ZestCash — though those companies help pay bills and make lower-risk installment loans, so they’re not exactly the same thing.

How big is the market opportunity for this? It’s not at all tiny. In the U.S., 15 million people take out “small-dollar credit” products, with $44 billion in payday loans expected in 2012, according to the Center for Financial Services Innovation and the Center for Responsible Lending.

But it’s not what you may think. Sales are forecast to increase because there are two additional days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, giving consumers more time to shop than they had last year.

That was the conclusion of a 15-page report written by analysts at Citi Research.

What’s more, the report said that retailers will see very little impact from people making purchases on mobile devices like phones and tablets, or on social media sites like Facebook or Pinterest, even though there’s a lot of hype surrounding those two areas. “While mobile and social will likely grab headlines this season, retailers should concentrate on their ‘core technologies,’ namely e-commerce nuts and bolts, and strategies that integrate their traditional stores [with online ordering and in-store pick-up],” concludes the report.

The document, which was distributed to Wall Street investors, includes data from several key industry sources, including Shop.org’s holiday outlook, ChannelAdvisor’s holiday outlook and information from Retail Systems Research.

Overall, it finds that online spending is expected to increase by 20 percent this year, which is slightly less than what the industry experienced in 2011 when it reported growth of 23 percent. In general, e-commerce continues to see significant gains as spending shifts from offline to online. Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, noted in a report last year that e-commerce in the U.S. was making up only 8 percent of overall retail.

While it indeed takes a lot for companies such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart to see an impact from changes, consumers are shifting their behavior to mobile and social, although probably not as fast as investors would like to see.

EBay is one of the most vocal companies in breaking out the impact of mobile. It told AllThingsD recently that its mobile applications have now been downloaded 100 million times. Furthermore, it is projecting sales on mobile devices to hit $10 billion, which is double what it did last year. That roughly pencils out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue, if you base the calculation off of last year’s gross merchandise volume.

In contrast, Citi cites data from Forrester Research that says smartphones will account for 3 percent of e-commerce this year, increasing to 7 percent in 2016.

Social commerce is less mature, although that’s starting to change, too. According to research conducted by Monetate, which helps Best Buy, Urban Outfitters and other clients market their Web sites, Pinterest came out of nowhere over the past year to become one of the most significant drivers of social traffic to e-commerce. In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook made up 60 percent of the social traffic to retailers, while Pinterest made up 26 percent; by the holidays, it could surpass both Facebook and Twitter.

Citi’s report quoted specific data from Booz & Co. that suggests that revenue from physical goods sold on social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

Citi’s biggest piece of advice for retailers is to provide as many choices to consumers as possible. For instance, users should be able to order online and pick up items in the store; retailers should have their databases synced so that they see the same prices in the store as they do online. Perhaps one of the most surprising nuggets was that brick-and-mortar retailers shouldn’t necessarily be losing out this holiday — after all, 90 percent or more of sales still occur offline.

Long-time gaming executive Bing Gordon offers one plausible reason: Facebook is suffering from a cyclical process currently found in the games industry, with peaks and valleys driven by new hardware releases.

“The Facebook platform right now feels like it has a life cycle,” Gordon said. “Right now, it feels like PlayStation.”

About every six years, a new Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo comes out, driving new sales for the entire industry. At first, he says, there’s a feeding frenzy, but as the systems age, the frenzy slows down. Near the end, prices drop to keep the platform going.

While Facebook can’t relate to the hardware comparison, it still finds itself at a similar point, where its novelty factor is fading and the number of people playing games on its network is leveling off. The first to really notice this trend was Zynga, the largest game maker on the platform, which missed second-quarter expectations by a long shot. “Right now, it’s kind of flat, and whether it takes another jump up or goes down remains to be seen,” Gordon said. “Is there something else to be done? Sure, maybe it’s mobile.”

As an investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Gordon is focused on consumer and gaming technologies; he has a good vantage point of the market from sitting on the boards of both Amazon and Zynga. Before joining Kleiner, he was a longtime executive at Electronic Arts. And since he’s dabbled in theater, including a stint on Broadway, he eagerly agreed to appear in a video (posted below).

Despite what some may consider a dire situation — Zynga and Facebook trading so far below their IPO prices — Gordon takes a longer view of the market. He remembers working at EA when its stock fell more than 70 percent in one week, and points to the way Amazon has recovered after once trading at $2 a share.

Gordon wouldn’t go into specifics on either company’s strategy, but before the camera started rolling, he chatted about Facebook’s ability to maintain its growth as a social games platform — and how it closely affects Zynga, the creator of some of the biggest social games, like FarmVille, CityVille and, more recently, ChefVille.

Gordon said that, thanks to Facebook, gaming is more social today than it has ever been, and he expects that trend to continue. But he does question whether the dominant access point will always be Facebook — or if it will eventually shift to mobile.

If that’s the case, can Zynga succeed somewhere other than Facebook?

“I think so, but it’s not provable,” he said. “Zynga has more talent than any company I’ve ever seen — way more talent than EA had at its peak.” But that, too, is changing. Over the past few months, Zynga has seen a half-dozen high-level departures. So, can that still be true? Gordon confidently and simply responded: “Oh, yeah.”

More from Gordon in the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120926/facebook-fatigue-kleiners-gordon-sees-console-like-cycles-in-social-gaming/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120910/exclusive-google-offers-exec-eric-rosenblum-leaves-for-mobile-ad-start-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20120910/exclusive-google-offers-exec-eric-rosenblum-leaves-for-mobile-ad-start-up/#comments Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:13:57 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=249377 Eric Rosenblum, the director of product for Google Offers, has left the Groupon competitor to join Drawbridge, a mobile advertising start-up.

In an interview, Rosenblum said that today was his first day at Drawbridge after working at Google for four and a half years.

In his new role as Drawbridge’s VP of Product, Rosenblum will be responsible for overseeing the company’s technology, which enables marketers to target users as they move from their computers to tablets and to mobile phones.

“Mobile is gaining share of minutes, so at some point it has to gain share of dollars,” Rosenblum said.

The company is trying to solve a problem, he said, that he was familiar with at Google. Google Offers sells discounts to consumers on everyday items, such as spa services or meals at restaurants, similar to Groupon. However, Google’s offering is slightly different because it is designed to help Google close the loop, so that it can show how online behavior — including Web searches — is dictating offline purchasing behavior. A key component of that is Google’s payment platform, called Google Wallet, which has struggled to gain consumer adoption.

While several members of the Google Wallet team have left, Google Offers has been more stable, even considering Rosenblum’s exit.

Rosenblum says his departure is not a reflection of the division’s success. “We’ve always positioned Google Offers as not competing directly with Groupon. We’ve built it as a closed loop ad platform,” he said. “I think we were wise to take a different tack and spend our engineering resources on that tack. Most small advertisers want to pay on CPA (cost per acquisition) basis, and I’m pretty proud that it’s as far along as it is.”

In May, Rosenblum announced that Google had started to integrate Groupon-like offers into Google Maps and that it was trying out other advertising models for coupons and rewards programs.

Now at Drawbridge, he said, he can help even small companies that don’t have Google-size resources increase revenue from mobile advertising by increasing their targeting abilities. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company is about two years old and has 21 employees. In May, Drawbridge’s founder and former Admob engineer Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan raised $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer.

Here’s the full release:

Eric Rosenblum, Former Google Director of Product, Joins Cross-Screen Advertising Startup Drawbridge

Mobile payments expert to lead product innovation for Drawbridge’s cross-screen advertising platform

SAN MATEO, Calif. – September 10, 2012 – Drawbridge, the leader in cross-screen mobile advertising, today announces its new VP of Product: Eric Rosenblum, former Google Offers Director of Product. Rosenblum brings over 16 years of experience in product innovation, mobile payments and entrepreneurial ventures and will be responsible for driving forward product development plans for Drawbridge’s cross-screen mobile ad platform.

Rosenblum spent over four years at Google as Director of Strategy and Operations and Director of Product. Prior to joining Google, Rosenblum was founder and CEO of Smartpay, a leading mobile payment company in China. He also served as GM of Greater China and Global Strategy GM for RealNetworks. Rosenblum started his career with the Boston Consulting Group in Hong Kong and Shanghai after receiving an MBA from MIT Sloan.

“Drawbridge’s opportunity is immense,” says Rosenblum. “10% of media time is now consumed on mobile, but mobile only attracts 1% of the ad spend. The team at Drawbridge has made tremendous progress developing the tools to close this gap and building the technology foundations to finally make targeting and attribution work across all mobile screens and devices. I am beyond excited to be joining this outstanding team for the challenge.”

Drawbridge has developed technology that is able to leverage targeting data across screens and across devices. Through Drawbridge’s sophisticated probabilistic and statistical inference models, brands get a unified view of their customers regardless of channel, screen, or device. Since launching in May, Drawbridge has onboarded major advertisers focused on driving cross-screen performance in the retail, travel, and entertainment verticals. Drawbridge has made its innovative platform publicly available to advertisers and publisher partners, who can sign up at www.drawbrid.ge.

Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, Drawbridge founder and former AdMob and Google scientist, leads the company with funding from premier venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

To learn more about Drawbridge or sign up for their service, visit: www.drawbrid.ge

About Drawbridge
Drawbridge developed the world’s first cross-screen ad technology, enabling marketers to reach their target audience across any screen and any device – smartphone, tablet or personal computer. Unlike web cookies or fingerprint-based solutions, Drawbridge leverages anonymous, non-personally identifiable information to serve ads to hundreds of millions of unique users around the world – regardless of what kind of device they happen to be using. Drawbridge is located in Silicon Valley and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner, Perkins Caulfield and Byers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120910/exclusive-google-offers-exec-eric-rosenblum-leaves-for-mobile-ad-start-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120802/one-kings-lane-stocks-up-on-talent-as-revenues-are-projected-to-hit-200-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20120802/one-kings-lane-stocks-up-on-talent-as-revenues-are-projected-to-hit-200-million/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2012 12:00:16 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=237018 In an interview, One Kings Lane CEO Doug Mack said the luxury home decor site is on target to hit $200 million in net revenue this year.

Additionally, to fuel the company’s growth, it has plans to hire aggressively, and recently appointed four new high-level executives.

“We want to be the most-visited premium home site in the U.S.,” Mack said, adding that the goal is to rival household names, like Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, West Elm and Restoration Hardware.

The four new hires are VP of Brand Development Sascha Jamall, who most recently ran brand and sourcing at Michaels Arts and Crafts; VP of Legal and General Counsel Susan Stick, who previously held a similar title at Skype; Chief People Officer John K. Anderson, who joins from Quidsi, a subsidiary of Amazon.com; and Chief Product & Technology Officer Jean Sini, who most recently ran engineering at Mint.com.

By the end of the year, Mack said, the San Francisco company could add 30 to 50 employees to bring the total headcount to as many as 350. Most of the new hires will be engineers, he said, adding that Sini has a “blank check” to add as much talent as needed.

One Kings Lane was founded in late 2008 by Susan Feldman and Alison Pincus (wife of Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, the social games company); Mack joined two years ago.

The online retailer sells designer items for the home, ranging from large oriental rugs to sophisticated and modern side tables. Most of the products are sold at deep discounts, and because of limited inventory and scarcity of availability on other sites, some items can sell out in as little as five minutes. If they don’t, they are pulled from the site within 72 hours.

Mack, who is insanely bullish about the company’s prospects, said that even though it is not yet profitable, he doesn’t consider the plans frivolous. Over the past year, One Kings Lane has been able to double top-line revenue, while also managing to cut losses in half.

Still, despite the retailer’s accomplishments, it has remained fairly quiet about its plans, with the exception of announcing several large funding rounds. Last September, the company raised $40 million from Tiger Global Management, Institutional Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Greylock Partners. The round brought total funding to $67 million and valued the firm at $440 million.

Since launching more than three years ago, the company has slowly expanded beyond its roots as a flash sales site.

In 2010, it added “tag sales,” which lets larger-scale interior designers sell off unused items on the site, and this year, it introduced a marketplace, allowing third-party boutiques to sell their unsold inventory on the site — although not all that apply are approved.

To keep up with demand from its five million members, Mack estimates that the site is now listing between 1,000 and 2,000 new products every day, but the goal is not to increase that number too much. Instead, he said, the company wants to stock more of each item to keep from selling out. That way, the site continues to be easy to browse, unlike large retailers that stock millions of items.

Mack said there are two primary ways that One Kings Lane will grow in the future.

The first is by gaining a larger share of home decor purchases, as more shopping shifts online.

He estimates that in 2007 the online home decor market totaled $9 billion, and that by 2015 it will be worth $23 billion. He also anticipates shopping to continue to increase on mobile phones. Already, mobile makes up 22 percent of the company’s sales, and it’s still growing. Other flash sales sites, including Gilt Groupe and Fab.com, are also hoping to benefit from this trend.

The second opportunity is for One Kings Lane to begin designing its own product lines, which is precisely why Mack hired Jamall, the company’s new VP of brand development. As part of Jamall’s responsibilities, he will work with existing suppliers to create one-of-a-kind products for the site. The products could either carry the vendor’s name or the One Kings Lane brand.

At some point, Mack said, an IPO is an option for One Kings Lane, but he isn’t in a hurry — especially as it spends aggressively during this hiring blitz.

“We are enjoying being nimble and operating in the private capital markets,” he quipped.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120802/one-kings-lane-stocks-up-on-talent-as-revenues-are-projected-to-hit-200-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120720/kleiner-perkins-loses-motion-to-send-pao-case-to-arbitration/ http://allthingsd.com/20120720/kleiner-perkins-loses-motion-to-send-pao-case-to-arbitration/#comments Fri, 20 Jul 2012 18:27:19 +0000 Deborah Gage http://allthingsd.com/?p=232413 Top Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has been sued by one of its partners, Ellen Pao, for gender discrimination and retaliation, today lost its motion to send the case to arbitration in San Francisco Superior Court.

Judge Harold Kahn had tentatively denied the motion to send the case to arbitration earlier this month.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120720/kleiner-perkins-loses-motion-to-send-pao-case-to-arbitration/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120717/egnyte-gets-16m-for-hybrid-cloud/ http://allthingsd.com/20120717/egnyte-gets-16m-for-hybrid-cloud/#comments Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:30:21 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=230793 Google Ventures led a $16 million Series C funding for enterprise file-sharing company Egnyte, joined by previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Polaris Ventures. Versus Dropbox and Box.net, Egnyte offers a “hybrid cloud” solution, where companies can use their existing infrastructure and firewalls in conjunction with cloud computing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120717/egnyte-gets-16m-for-hybrid-cloud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120628/tech-companies-rejoice-ivps-new-jumbo-fund-totals-1-billion/ http://allthingsd.com/20120628/tech-companies-rejoice-ivps-new-jumbo-fund-totals-1-billion/#comments Thu, 28 Jun 2012 11:00:49 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=225398 Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) could be considered an old-timer in the world of venture investing, especially by today’s youthful Silicon Valley standards.

At 32 years old, the venture firm has backed more than 300 companies and has witnessed 90 companies go public. Some of its better-known deals include comScore, Dropbox, HomeAway, Kayak, LivingSocial, Netflix, Twitter and Zynga.

Today, it is announcing that it will continue its legacy, having raised its 14th fund, totaling $1 billion. In total, it now has $4 billion under management.

In an interview, IVP’s General Partner Dennis Phelps said the fund is the firm’s largest to date, exceeding its current fund of $750 million.

Despite a larger fund this time, Phelps said it will be business as usual. The plan is to invest about $10 million to $100 million in 10 to 12 companies a year, or 25 to 30 companies over the fund’s 10-year life. The one thing that will change is the average deal size, which will get slightly larger.

“We’ve had the opportunity to make larger investments, but we didn’t have the fund size to support it,” Phelps said. “Companies are choosing to remain private longer, but it doesn’t change our investment model.”

In general, the company’s sweet spot is later-stage companies with roughly $20 million in annualized revenue in the Internet and digital media, enterprise technology, and mobile and communications sectors, he said. But he noted that they do not invest in life sciences or clean technology. Currently of IVP’s active portfolio companies, more than half have revenue of $50 million or more, and a third of them are profitable.

“We feel like our deal flow is as strong as it’s ever been,” he said. “We’ve had amazing momentum in the marketplace, and view us as a firm on the ascendancy.”

Other firms to recently pocket a lot of cash include Andreessen Horowitz’s monster $1.5 billion fund, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ $525 million fund for early-stage companies.

IVP has six general partners: Phelps, Todd Chaffee, Norm Fogelsong, Steve Harrick, Jules Maltz and Sandy Miller.

Here’s a visual snapshot of the firm’s history:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120628/tech-companies-rejoice-ivps-new-jumbo-fund-totals-1-billion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120614/why-the-rumored-microsoft-deal-for-yammer-rings-true/ http://allthingsd.com/20120614/why-the-rumored-microsoft-deal-for-yammer-rings-true/#comments Thu, 14 Jun 2012 08:56:14 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=220225 For awhile now, rumors have been in the water that Microsoft was interested in buying out the social enterprise software company Yammer. A report in Bloomberg News, plus a tweet about a conversation overheard at a Silicon Valley coffee shop, has raised them to a fever pitch.

No one authorized to speak for Yammer is talking about this. I will say that a lunch meeting I had scheduled on Tuesday in New York with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni was suddenly canceled because of what I was told was a “personal emergency.” It could be coincidence, but then again it might not be.

Another bit of color I’ve heard — and again it may not mean anything — is that Yammer CEO David Sacks has invitations out for a big 40th-birthday bash in Southern California this weekend, at which rapper Snoop Dogg is expected to perform. Whether or not Sacks will be celebrating the sale of his company is still uncertain, but there’s a lot about the speculative story in Bloomberg — which cites two people familiar with the talks — that makes sense.

Outwardly, Yammer has looked to be the most promising of the social enterprise software players that are not named Jive. In February, it raised $85 million in a fifth round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, at an implied valuation of about $1 billion. Meritech Capital Partners, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group and Khosla Ventures also participated in that round. Prior investors include Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners, and the angel investors are Bill Lee, Max Levchin and the football great Ronnie Lott.

That round of funding came on the heels of the late-2011 IPO of rival Jive, whose market capitalization as of Wednesday’s close was $1.03 billion. Lots of people got rich in that offering, especially founders Bill Lynch and Matthew Tucker, and CEO Tony Zingale.

Jive had followed a fairly specific path to going public, which Yammer could have followed, but hasn’t. For example: Before raising a $30 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins in the summer of 2010, Jive had tapped Zingale, the veteran CEO of Mercury Interactive, who saw that company through its $4.5 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard.

Later, in early 2011, Jive added directors with public company experience to its board; then it set about making some important acquisitions, among them Proximal Labs, an “acqhire” deal; and then OfficSync, a deal that gave it crucial plug-in technology for Microsoft Office.

Yammer has done nothing like this, with one exception: Its April acquisition of the British start-up OneDrum looked an awful lot like Jive’s acquisition of OfficSync. Otherwise, there have been none of the classic pre-IPO signals from Yammer: No high-profile additions to the board, no more acquisitions, no chatter about bankers competing to lead it through the S1 filing and road-show process. When asked about his interest in doing an IPO, Sacks would, in conversations with me, tend to simply avoid the subject. A billion-dollar exit now would seem mighty attractive to Sacks and Yammer’s investors, rather than the uncertainty of an IPO in a shaky market, coupled with a head-to-head-to-head competitive slugfest with Jive and Salesforce.

Then there’s the simple matter of business challenges. Yammer is, by all accounts and its own publicly disclosed stats, having trouble converting its free users to paid status. It is quick to brag about its four million corporate users, but they’re fuzzy numbers. Many start using the service for free, experiment with it, but never turn out to be regular, daily users. Fewer still ever convert to paid status. Yammer has said in the past that its conversion rate is about 20 percent, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Getting companies to pony up has proven difficult. Jive doesn’t disclose the total number of seats, but it does disclose how many companies are customers: 676 as of March 31, all of them paying subscribers.

If Microsoft proves to be the buyer, then it would give the Windows and Office giant a key piece of technology to offer its enterprise customers. One big argument for the existence of the social enterprise software business is to attack Microsoft’s outdated collaboration software, SharePoint.

The players are many: Aside from Jive and Yammer, there’s Salesforce.com’s Chatter service, which tends to be strong in sales departments where the mainline CRM service is already in use. Other players include Socialcast, owned by VMware; Moxie Software and Atlassian’s HipChat are others.

Once Microsoft gets its hands on it, two things will be true: Yammer, which is generally seen as still being buggy and in need of a lot of smoothing out of its rougher edges, will need some serious investment. The problem is that, even at a $1 billion valuation, Yammer is small enough that it will disappear inside Microsoft.

The other is that the freemium business model will have to go away. With the possible exception of Skype, it’s just not in Microsoft’s DNA to offer an enterprise product for free and leave it to the users to upgrade to the paid version when it suits them. When the rubber meets the road, many customers may dump Yammer in favor of something else. Those who are serious and willing to pay will consider Jive, which would probably capitalize on the opportunity by offering special deals to customers who switch. Those who demand free will switch to something they can still get for free.

We’ll see if this deal materializes. Bloomberg said a deal could be announced as early as today.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120614/why-the-rumored-microsoft-deal-for-yammer-rings-true/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120531/kleiner-perkins-poaches-squares-megan-quinn-as-newest-partner/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/kleiner-perkins-poaches-squares-megan-quinn-as-newest-partner/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 17:27:30 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=215343 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has hired Megan Quinn as partner of the company’s digital group, where she will focus on consumer Internet investments. Quinn joins the high-profile investment firm from Square, where she was director of products at the mobile payments company. Prior to Square, Quinn was at Google for seven years and led development of products such as Google Maps. She is joining a week after Kleiner’s Ellen Pao filed a lawsuit against the firm, alleging gender discrimination. Kleiner has said the allegations are without merit.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120531/kleiner-perkins-poaches-squares-megan-quinn-as-newest-partner/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120531/day-two-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/day-two-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 10:00:14 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=215153
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120531/day-two-at-d10-in-tweets-and-pictures/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/kleiner-perkins-partner-john-doerr-calls-gender-discrimination-charges-false/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/kleiner-perkins-partner-john-doerr-calls-gender-discrimination-charges-false/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 22:49:05 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=214795 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner and public leader John Doerr today issued a statement that directly rejects the gender discrimination lawsuit leveled against the firm by partner Ellen Pao. Doerr said his firm intends to defend itself “vigorously” against the “false allegations,” adding the charges had previously been found to be without merit by an independent expert, and reiterated KPCB’s track record of hiring and funding women and their companies. The full statement is here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/kleiner-perkins-partner-john-doerr-calls-gender-discrimination-charges-false/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meekers-legendary-internet-slide-deck-the-d10-highlights-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meekers-legendary-internet-slide-deck-the-d10-highlights-video/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 18:07:07 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=214297 Most people dread presentations with PowerPoint slides, but Mary Meeker’s presentations on the future of the Internet have become legendary. Today, the former Morgan Stanley analyst turned Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers venture capitalist brought her latest observations — and a 125-slide deck — to D: All Things Digital.

Among the many topics Meeker addressed: The challenge of monetizing mobile content, how the Internet and digital technology are changing, well, everything, and how those changes are affecting the next generation in interesting ways.

She also made news by revealing that Kleiner has done no deals as of the end of the quarter ended in March, because valuations in the private markets are too high; she also reflected on the troubles surrounding the Facebook IPO. Highlights from the video are below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meekers-legendary-internet-slide-deck-the-d10-highlights-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-talks-about-how-digital-is-changing-everything/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-talks-about-how-digital-is-changing-everything/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 16:07:56 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=214103 We all hear it every day: The Internet and digital technologies are changing everything. It’s become one of those big pronouncements that tends to end a bad conversation or start a good one.

But few people have thought about the subject as clearly and completely as Mary Meeker, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst, who in a presentation at D: All Things Digital illustrated those changes in their historical context.

We’re pretty familiar with the well-worn tales of how the Internet is disrupting the 305-year-old newspaper business, and how mobile phones are messing up the 125-year-old landline telephone business. But Meeker’s presentation goes a lot deeper than that.

The Internet is also disrupting the creation of art, how people document and record the histories of their life, how they take notes, how they borrow money. Roughly a third of Meeker’s 125 slides are devoted to this theme of change and disruption, and when taken as a whole, it’s startling. “A lot of it is stuff you know, but when packaged in a way that you see it all together, I’m overwhelmed,” she said.

“People used to put pictures on their walls, and now they have Facebook,” Meeker said.

Other examples: Groupon and clipping old coupons. Also, going to school. “Education and learning will become as fun as video games,” Meeker said.

Something else that’s changed: How people cope with traffic. During a follow-up interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Meeker talked about Waze, a navigation and traffic app for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. She described how, when she saw a burning semi truck pulled over on the side of the road, she reported it first to Waze before calling 911.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-talks-about-how-digital-is-changing-everything/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-explains-the-mobile-monetization-challenge/ http://allthingsd.com/20120530/mary-meeker-explains-the-mobile-monetization-challenge/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 15:32:34 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=214061 Looming over the Internet industry is the mismatch between the growth in mobile usage and mobile monetization.

Most recently, it was the risk factor that helped take down Facebook’s ill-fated IPO roadshow, when the company warned at the last minute publicly (and perhaps more emphatically privately) that mobile monetization really wasn’t keeping pace.

So it’s quite topical that today at D10, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker is delivering one of her famed Internet trends presentations by depicting the opportunity for mobile advertising.

Here’s how Meeker describes it; there are a lot of stats in here, but they actually tell a rather smooth narrative:

There are 1.1 billion global mobile 3G subscribers, which is 37 percent growth but just 18 percent penetration. That’s compared to 2.3 billion global Internet users, with growth of just 8 percent from last year.

Adoption of new smart devices is happening faster than ever — the iPad and Android growth curves are way steeper than that for iPhone. But there’s still a long way to go; there are only 953 million smartphone subscriptions of the world’s 6.1 billion mobile subscriptions.

In May of this year, mobile usage hit 10 percent of total global Internet traffic, up from about 5 percent at the same time last year.

Okay, now over to the monetization side: Right now, it’s not just ads. Mobile e-commerce is 8 percent of the total e-commerce market in the U.S. Today, payments for and within applications account for 71 percent of revenue versus 29 percent for mobile advertising.

Meeker concludes there’s a “material upside” for advertising in mobile because it’s currently out of whack with the percent of total media consumption.

And that’s a pressing issue, because mobile Internet usage is replacing desktop Internet usage. In India this month, total mobile Internet was bigger than desktop Internet for the very first time.

There are lots of places to find evidence of the mobile monetization gap. Effective desktop CPMs are five times the price of mobile Internet CPMs in the U.S.: $3.50 versus $0.75. And companies like Pandora, Tencent and Zynga currently report that average revenue per user is as much as five times lower on mobile. Google’s and Facebook’s financials show mobile is constraining revenue growth.

Meeker doesn’t provide solutions to those problems, but she does surface some light at the end of the tunnel. For instance, in the more mature Japanese market, mobile game maker GREE has seen rapid growth in average revenue per user, up to $24 per user per year at the beginning of 2012. Another player, CyberAgent, has seen a similar curve, and is now up to $418 average revenue per paying user on mobile, more than what it sees on the desktop.

Using pattern recognition from the Japanese market, Meeker predicts that mobile monetization levels in the U.S. could surpass those on the desktop within one to three years. She says she thinks this pattern of dollars following eyeballs is inevitable, but “it just takes time.”

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