AllThingsD » Peter Pham

Startup Studio Science Hires Digital Veteran Jason Rapp

Peter Kafka — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:00:26 +0000

Science, the Los Angeles-based startup “studio,” has a big new slug of funding from Hearst. And now the company has someone to help it spend that money: Digital veteran Jason Rapp has come aboard as the company’s managing director.

Rapp, whose last position was president at how-to video maker Mahalo, is supposed to “find and develop new opportunities for the Science portfolio and offer strategic counsel to the firm.”

Science is best known for funding and launching e-commerce companies like Dollar Shave Club.

Rapp’s e-commerce experience includes a stint running Gifts.com for Barry Diller’s IAC conglomerate. Rapp also worked on M&A at IAC, and had a similar role at the New York Times.

The Science of Investing: Hearst's New Venture Arm in $30 Million Funding Deal With Los Angeles Tech Studio

Kara Swisher — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 02:40:05 +0000

Hearst Ventures, the investment arm of media giant Hearst Corporation, said it was making a minority equity investment in Science, the Los Angeles area tech “studio.”

Privately held Hearst is the sole investor in the new funding, although the company declined to reveal financial terms of the investment.

But sources with awareness of the deal said it was close to $30 million for a stake above 20 percent.

Somewhat akin to a startup accelerator, Science is attempting to quickly create and scale a number of promising companies in a variety of areas, and has launched 13 so far.

Among the Santa Monica, Calif., tech studio’s recent efforts: Dollar Shave Club, a subscription-based products company aimed at men; Ellie, which sells high-end activewear for women; and Wittlebee, a clothes club for kids.

Hearst Ventures is operated by Hearst’s Entertainment and Syndication unit, which is run by Scott Sassa and George Kliavkoff. Kliavkoff will join Science’s board of directors.

“It’s clear to us that, while we have these brands that resonate with consumers, we think there are some learnings we can get from these guys that are hard to get in a big company,” said Sassa. “Being able to be nimble with insight and guidance is important for us.”

Kliavkoff also noted that this was a way to get immediate ownership in a range of promising companies. “We are writing one check and will have an immediate stake in more than a dozen great startups,” he said. “[Science] has been very thoughtful in starting companies in smart areas.”

In a statement, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack said: “Hearst is continually looking for smart investments that bring value and intelligence to the company — our investment in Science does both. We’re excited to partner with Science to continue its trajectory of success, gain meaningful industry knowledge and utilize Science’s platforms for current and future Hearst investments.”

Though quieter than most, Hearst Ventures have made many successful investments over 15 years, including in Netscape and Broadcast.com. More recently, it has funded such companies as Brightcove and Pandora, as well as HootSuite and BuzzFeed.

Science was founded in late 2011 — with $10 million funding from big-name investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and White Star Capital. Its CEO is well-regarded entrepreneur Mike Jones, who was most recently CEO of Myspace. Prior to Myspace, he had started and sold Userplane to AOL in 2006. In addition, well-known entrepreneur Peter Pham is chief business officer at Science.

“I am very proud of work that the Science team has accomplished since launching,” said Jones, in a quick interview tonight (short enough so that his wife would not get angry at me for ruining Valentine’s Day). “I am extremely excited about opportunities for Science companies going forward.”

More to come, but here is the very clever viral video that Dollar Shave Club did on its launch:

L.A. Stories: Mike Jones and Peter Pham Talk About the Science of Tech Studios (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:27:00 +0000

While swanning about Los Angeles last week, I paid a visit to a number of interesting techies, including Mike Jones and Peter Pham, who recently founded Science.

While there are a lot of incubators and accelerators out there fiddling with start-ups, the pair of well-known entrepreneurs are calling this venture a “technology studio.”

By that, they mean that Science will do a lot more, from coming up with in-house ideas to investing some of their $10 million in backing to advising on how Silicon Valley should look at investments in Southern California to even taking on restructuring of larger entities.

Science investors include Rustic Canyon, White Star Capital, the Social+Capital Partnership and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, and it also has relationships with private equity firms for the bigger stuff.

The focus of Science, as the pair discusses below in a video interview, will be in three arenas: The intersection of content and commerce, social and mobile, and location.

As longtime entrepreneurs and Internet execs, Jones and Pham know those arenas, both the pluses and the minuses.

Jones tried his best (and, like others, failed) with the Myspace revival and also founded and sold Specific Media, Userplane and Tsavo Media.

Pham was recently helming the high-profile and controversial Color photo-sharing start-up in Silicon Valley and did stints at both BillShrink and Photobucket (a former News Corp. property, as was Myspace. News Corp. owns this Web site.).

Here’s my chat with them about their sun-dappled dreams of SoCal tech hegemony via their Santa Monica, Calif., HQ:

[ See post to watch video ]

Former Color Co-Founder Peter Pham Heads to Former Myspace CEO's L.A. Tech Studio (Video)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:00:54 +0000

Well-known tech entrepreneur Peter Pham will be joining the Los Angeles-based start-ups lab that was just launched by former Myspace CEO Mike Jones.

Pham, who was recently helming the high-profile and controversial Color photo-sharing start-up in Silicon Valley, will be moving south again to join Jones at the Santa Monica, Calif.-based “technology studio,” called Science.

As Liz Gannes reported last week, the goal — with $10 million in funding and private equity partners at the ready for more — is to “incubate ideas in-house, invest in other people’s start-ups, advise Silicon Valley companies on breaking into Hollywood, and maybe even look into reworking later-stage Internet companies like Yahoo.”

Pham and Jones will aim at three verticals: The intersection of content and commerce, social systems, and mobile and location.

That’s an area that Pham knows well, with stints at both BillShrink and Photobucket (also a former News Corp. property, as was MySpace), as well as active angel investing.

In an interview yesterday, Pham said he hopes to bridge the Silicon Valley-L.A. delta more, since there is an increasing amount of promising tech taking place there, too.

“There is a lot going on in L.A., and a lot of tech talent that still sometimes get less attention up in Silicon Valley,” said Pham. “I hope to be part of bringing the communities a little closer together.”

In addition, he said that the focus of Science would not necessarily be on online entertainment start-ups, as might be expected, given the proximity to Hollywood.

“We really want to shine a light on the innovation taking place in Los Angeles beyond the obvious,” said Pham.

It’s a good idea, given how navel-gazing Northern California geeks can be.

Also in the L.A. start-up scene of late is a new accelerator called Start Engine, which debuted recently with a focus on mentorship on 120 start-ups per year.

You can see Pham featured in this video that Gannes did about Color:

[ See post to watch video ]

And here’s the official press release about Pham joining Science:

Peter Pham press release.FINAL11-21-11

Confirmed: Co-founder Peter Pham Leaves Color

Liz Gannes — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 02:57:05 +0000

Peter Pham, co-founder and president at the social networking start-up Color, has left the company, as was first reported by TechCrunch.

Pham confirmed his departure in an email but declined to comment further.

Color co-founder and CEO Bill Nguyen said of Pham, “I wish him the absolute best. He’s really good at deals. For a company that’s on the verge of being able to use distribution to scale he’s going to be amazing.”

Nguyen said Pham and Color had parted ways more than a month ago.

Color counted seven founders when it launched in March, with Nguyen and Pham the most prominently featured (see our video below; in the screenshot above, Nguyen is on the left and Pham on the right).

[ See post to watch video ]

The launch was widely seen as a bust, in part due to the Color app’s inscrutable interface and problematic lack of content when used in isolation. Negative perceptions were especially compounded by the fact that Color had raised $41 million before even releasing a product.

Tonight, Nguyen downplayed any broader problems, and said Color has continued to hire and has new launches on the horizon.

Video: With $41M in Hand, Color Offers New Proximity-Based Social Network

Liz Gannes — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:17 +0000

I can hear the haters already: ANOTHER photo-sharing app? ANOTHER social network?

Yes.

Bill Nguyen, the serial entrepreneur who most recently sold Lala to Apple for around $80 million, is today launching Color, a proximity-based social network with no privacy settings.

The effulgent Nguyen has already gotten Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital and Silicon Valley Bank to buy into his next act, raising $41 million in seed and Series A rounds in the eight months since he left Apple last year.

Color launches today on iPhone and Android (BlackBerry and Windows Phone are said to be coming soon). It is primarily a photo-sharing app, though text and video are also supported.

Rather than friending or following each other, Color’s users simply post pictures. Then, other users open the app and see pictures that Color has determined are relevant to them.

Users see pictures posted recently and nearby to their current location, as well as pictures posted by other members they’ve expressed an interest in by looking at, liking or commenting on their content.

This concept seems fitting for events–say, a sports game or a wedding–where lots of people who don’t necessarily know each other are taking photos of the same thing.

Everything posted on Color is public, and Color owns the rights to all content on the service (though users can delete their own uploads.)

What’s different about Color is relationships are implicit rather than explicit. This tweak may well resonate with people who feel their Facebook and Twitter friend lists are random, outdated and overwhelming.

Color hired away LinkedIn Chief Scientist DJ Patil to lead a team that dynamically determines what pictures and users are relevant.

So, for instance, to augment a location signal from GPS, Color will use clues like lighting and ambient noise to understand that two photos were taken in the same place. It will also try to understand which people users are interested in, and how that changes over time–so if a user hasn’t interacted with someone’s pictures for the while, that person’s icon will appear further out and darker in the user’s list of relevant people (Color calls this the “elastic network”).

Color hopes that the public nature of its service combined with the personal nature of a single user’s smartphone photos will ensure that people keep it decent. Its business model is to be location-based advertising.

Color also counts Peter Pham, formerly of BillShrink and Photobucket, as co-founder and president. (There are seven total with the co-founder title.) Pham and Nguyen showed off the product and described the company vision and business model in a video interview at the company’s expansive downtown Palo Alto offices earlier this week, which seem mostly empty despite Color’s team of 30 employees.

[ See post to watch video ]

The real test, of course, will be not how many employees it can hire and how much money it can raise, but how many people actually find the product useful.

Will people see the value in contributing their experiences to Color’s massive repository? Will they understand how the app works, with its ample use of coinages like “bulletins” (proximity-based view), “visual diary” (chronological diary view) and “multilens” (albums of multiple people’s photos of the same thing)? We’ll have to see.

Behind the Scenes at D@CES Event and Party (Including a Geek Chat With Punky Brewster!)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:25:39 +0000

Here’s a lovely video BoomTown did behind the scenes at our interview event and after-party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last Friday.

While there, the crack All Things Digital team interviewed and reported on sessions with Palm (PALM) CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings and Google (GOOG) Android guru Andy Rubin.

But we also prepared and then partied. Here is video proof, including interviews with Cisco (CSCO) Flip unit head Jonathan Kaplan, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Consumer Electronics Association head Gary Shapiro and–drum roll–former child star Soleil Moon Frye, who was there for Kodak (EK).

Frye has actually gone the digital mom route, although she remains well known for her role as cute-as-a-button Punky Brewster on the 1980s television series.

Yippie! Grossaroo! Holy Macanoli! Punky Power!

She uttered none of these classic lines, of course, but here’s the video anyway:

[ See post to watch video ]

(You can see all our full CES coverage here.)

Kara Visits The Lobby Party on Sand Hill Road (As Opposed to the Sandy Beaches of Hawaii)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:55:23 +0000

Last night, BoomTown went to a lovely party thrown by David Hornik, the August Capital VC who also runs The Lobby conference in his spare time.

He threw the event because those who attend the annual invitation-only gathering in Hawaii wanted to get together again during the year in Silicon Valley for even more schmoozing.

I went to the first Lobby in the fall of 2007 (you can see my video of that below too), so Hornik let me in to have some pizza and beer at August’s offices on Sand Hill Road and use my Flip video to ask those in attendance where they thought the digital sector was in terms of the economy and innovation.

So here’s Hornik, angel investor Brett Bullington (who is also in the 2007 video, but in shorts) and BillShrink’s Peter Pham, as well a merger of MINIs.

Here’s the video (with my 2007 one below it):

[ See post to watch video ]

BillShrink's Pham Speaks About the T-Mobile Deal, the Econalypse and More!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:00:04 +0000

Last week, BoomTown paid an economically-minded visit to the Redwood City, Calif., offices of BillShrink, a Silicon Valley start-up aimed at helping consumers find cheaper prices on gas, cellphones and plans and credit cards via a Web-based comparison and alert system.

Launched about a year ago and armed with about $9 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, it has aims of moving into a range of other money-saving arenas too.

But today, it got a major boost in its existing business by inking a deal to be part of a huge national advertising campaign by T-Mobile aimed at boosting price awareness among consumers, an apt message for these econalyptic times.

The ads will start tonight in a big way on the finale of “American Idol” and will star Catherine Zeta-Jones, who asks consumers in high-profile television commercials if they want a “mobile makeover.”

Cue BillShrink, even if it does not end up recommending T-Mobile’s service.

It is the first time the mobile carrier has recommended a third-party Web site and one that is independent. T-Mobile must, given it is the No. 4 player and has to beat the bigger players with a curve ball.

While BillShrink does make money from referrals of vendors, BillShrink CEO Peter Pham said the service it delivers to consumers must remain unbiased to render the right comparison results to consumers.

I sat down and talked with Pham, a former Photobucket exec, about all this and also where BillShrink is headed next.

Here’s the video interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

And here is the T-Mobile commercial:

[ See post to watch video ]

Finally, here is the press release from T-Mobile about the campaign:

T-Mobile Aims to Help Wireless Customers Save Money by Offering ‘Mobile Makeovers’

BELLEVUE, Wash., May 20, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE)–T-Mobile USA, Inc. announced today a new campaign dedicated to helping people save money on their wireless service, and unveils a familiar face to inform customers that T-Mobile has “the coverage you need at the price you want.”

T-Mobile is prompting wireless customers to compare the value they are getting with their current wireless provider against other national carriers. People can visit T-Mobile retail stores or http://www.T-Mobile.com for a Mobile Makeover(SM), at no charge, by linking customers to BillShrink, an independent third-party service that provides people with free, unbiased and personalized savings recommendations for everyday bills such as wireless plans, credit cards and gasoline.

“Providing great wireless coverage at a great price is at the heart of what T-Mobile offers,” said Denny Marie Post, chief marketing officer, T-Mobile USA, Inc. “We’re so confident that T-Mobile provides the best overall experience for a majority of Americans, we’re willing to put our value to the test by pointing people to an independent source. And while we may not come out on top each and every time, we believe a majority of people will see T-Mobile offers them the value they want, and the best experience in wireless.”

According to BillShrink, as many as eight out of 10 people unknowingly overpay for their wireless service.* BillShrink analyzes a customer’s wireless usage, along with wireless coverage in a customer’s area and service price, to provide recommendations to help people find the best value options. “Wireless customers need quality cell phone coverage at the best available price so BillShrink helps people easily navigate through millions of wireless plan combinations to provide a personalized recommendation,” said Peter Pham, CEO, BillShrink. “BillShrink shows people how to save money on their everyday bills and still get the best level of service.”

To help drive home the message that millions of Americans could save money on their wireless service, a familiar face and voice, Catherine Zeta-Jones, is again featured in T-Mobile’s television advertising. In the ads, she prompts people to get a Mobile Makeover in order to help determine if they are currently paying too much for their wireless services, and where to find the best value, based on their individual needs.

“As an avid T-Mobile customer, I’m delighted once again to help T-Mobile carry its message to millions of Americans about the great value they deliver,” Zeta-Jones said. “The Mobile Makeover campaign is a smart way to show consumers that they could save some serious money.”

The first television spot featuring Ms. Zeta-Jones will air tonight during the American Idol season finale on FOX. It features a group of Ivy League economists trying to educate homeowners they’re paying too much for their cell phone service, only to have door after door slammed in their face. Finally, a homeowner is pleasantly surprised when he opens the door to see Zeta-Jones standing on his doorstep asking, “Do you have time for a Mobile Makeover?” Zeta-Jones will be featured in two additional Mobile Makeover television spots in the coming weeks.

Online advertising, local radio, out-of-home advertising, retail collateral, and online video opportunities also will carry T-Mobile value and Mobile Makeover messaging.

For more information about Mobile Makeover and T-Mobile’s products and services, please visit a T-Mobile retail store, or go to http://www.T-Mobile.com. More information about BillShrink can be found at http://www.BillShrink.com.

*8 of 10 claim based on January 2009 sample of consumers who used BillShrink.com to analyze their reported usage. BillShrink.com is not operated or controlled, and the information/results provided on this site are not verified, by T-Mobile. See T-Mobile.com for rate plan information.

Kara Visits Burda's DLD Luncheon in Silicon Valley!

Kara Swisher — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:23:35 +0000

Yesterday, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg and I jumped into the BoomTownMini and took a road trip down the lovely 280 to Palo Alto’s MacArthur Park restaurant for a lunch thrown by Germany’s Hubert Burda Media.

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), which a lot of U.S. tech types have gone to, including me, even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

But Burda has also been dipping into the digital sector a lot, especially via the tireless tech networking of the company’s Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart, who have established a high profile for the company among Silicon Valley denizens.

That was in evidence at Burda’s luncheon yesterday, which was crowded with a panoply of techies and hosted by Czerny, Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, and well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Czerny has been taking Maria Burda (pictured here, she is also a famous German television star, better known as Maria Furtwängler) around the Valley on a learning tour this week to meet with companies like Ning, Mozilla, Facebook, and with venture capitalists. They are also here to attend Google’s Zeitgeist partners’ event, which starts today.

Here’s a video of yesterday’s luncheon, where I was asking everyone about the troubled economic situation and more.

It includes chats with Mullenweg and Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Facebook’s Brandee Barker and Randi Zuckerberg, Wired’s Steven Levy, Vardi and Burda and Czerny:

[ See post to watch video ]

Kara Visits Beta South!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:02:46 +0000

Here’s a video I did from a cool party I went to Tuesday night in Santa Monica, Calif., at the offices of ad network optimizer, Rubicon Project.

Organized by Beta South, a networking organization for digital start-ups in the Los Angeles area, it’s an interesting contrast to the frenetic nature of comparable Silicon Valley parties.

In the video, I talk to SoCal techies about the scene there, as well as comparisons to Silicon Valley, including Mike Jones of Userplane (sold to AOL) with Rubicon’s Frank Addante; Peter Pham, who was at PhotoBucket (sold to MySpace) and now BillShrink; and my favorite L.A. Webhead, Gregg Spiridellis of JibJab.

I also contemplate a mutant L.A. strawberry.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]