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Exclusive: OpenTable CEO Jordan Likely to Head to Silicon Valley VC Firm Andreessen Horowitz

Kara Swisher — Wed, 04 May 2011 05:28:00 +0000

Jeff Jordan, the president and CEO of OpenTable who unexpectedly stepped down from his job today at the online restaurant reservation leader, is set to take a job at a major venture firm in Silicon Valley.

Sources said Jordan has spoken to several major VCs about moving to their firms recently.

While Benchmark Capital was a big funder of OpenTable before it went public in 2009, sources said the likeliest home for the well-known Internet player–Jordan has also been a major exec at eBay–is Andreessen Horowitz.

The move would be a coup for the firm, which has been busy adding partners since its founding only a few years ago by Web icon Marc Andreessen and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz.

Jordan’s announcement that he was leaving OpenTable today during its first-quarter earnings call caused the stock to decline precipitously today, even though he said he would remain active as executive chairman.

CFO Matthew Roberts was named as his replacement.

Explaining the move, Jordan said:

“I’ve been managing Internet businesses since 1999. That’s 12 years of being in the tornado, and it’s pretty exhausting. I’ll be looking at the next challenge, but in terms of operating an Internet business, I’ve scratched that itch very well.”

It’s an itch that he will be scratching as a VC apparently and likely at one of tech’s hottest firms, which has investments in everything from gaming phenom Zynga to social buying service Groupon to microblogging start-up Twitter.

A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment and Jordan has not responded to an email query.

OpenTable CEO Jeff Jordan Talks About Groupon, Mobile Growth and Why IPOs Aren't That Scary!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:38:23 +0000

It was certainly high time that BoomTown made a reservation–oh, I had to make that pun–to check in with OpenTable (OPEN) CEO Jeff Jordan.

The well-liked and voluble Silicon Valley exec–who had worked in a top job at eBay (EBAY) before moving over to the online restaurant reservation service and taking it public last year–has actually been up to a lot recently.

That includes a discount-coupon program that was just rolled out called Spotlight, which Jordan doesn’t even try to pretend is not a copycat move to take advantage of all the excitement around Groupon.

And there has been more, from adding restaurant reviews to a cloud computing offering to, most importantly, a big push for its mobile apps, which have been growing wildly.

Jordan also discussed how leading a public company has been going, especially since many Internet outfits have been avoiding the prospect.

So far, the company’s post-IPO life has been going well. OpenTable stock has been performing strongly this year, up 118 percent in the year to date, compared to many more lackluster performances in the sector.

Jordan, who had been in consideration for many big Internet CEO jobs, talks about all this and more in the video interview below:

[ See post to watch video ]

D7 Tech Demo: Siri

Oliver J. Chiang — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:00:37 +0000

Many would-be augurs have been trying to pinpoint the moment the artificial intelligence overlord known as Skynet gets it start: Some may one day point to the launch of Siri. Siri is a virtual personal assistant for your iPhone or computer, with a pedigree: It originated at the Stanford Research Institute and was spun out as an AI project financed by DARPA. Now, as an alternative to search, Siri is supposed to carry out tasks like finding your next flight out or ordering a pizza by crawling the Web and conversing with the user, processing requests, responding and learning from the interaction. It will do this via a combination of technologies, including speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search.

Demo Highlights

[ See post to watch video ]

Live Blog

Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus comes out. He introduces himself and the product. It’s been many years of work in the making, he says.
Siri is about making interactions between the Web and user much simpler. It is focusing on mobile first. He shows the interface on an iPhone with both a Google screen and Siri screen side by side. Dag types in a flight query to both.
Siri figures out what you mean. Dag asks it a question, compares the results between Siri and Google (GOOG). Walt: Google is terrible! Dag: It gets really interesting when you ask it do a service. Walt: Can’t Bing do this?
It can take actions on your behalf too. For instance, “Il Forniao [Italian restaurant] reservations tonight for 3 at 5pm.” Siri takes your information and pulls up the reservation function for the restaurant.
Siri is sort of a giant mashup of services, Dag says.
It’s “Carol Bartz,” not “Sheryl Bartz,” Dag. Now let’s try asking for a movie. Siri returns the closest location and time for “Angels and Demons.” Siri has an API.
“Get red sox yankees tickets in boston”–this is one for Walt, says Dag. $1,649–the price is wrong? But Siri delivers. Shows a map of the stadium and seats/tickets.
Walt: so Google is constantly stupid, we see that now. But is it only good for certain services? How about ballet? Dag: It learns, we break it out into various areas of expertise. Right now, for instance, it doesn’t do TV listings. Siri has a Q&A function. Dag asks a question to the True Knowledge Web service. Kara: Ask it “How old is Kara?” Siri’s answer: “Dag, it’s not polite to ask about women’s ages.” It’s arguably broken Asimov’s Second Law already. Someone get John Connor, just in case.
Now Dag is demoing on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, speaking into the phone. Voice recognition is pretty good. He tells it: “Find a plumber near my house.” Siri pulls up a list of nearby plumbers. Kara: Do you have to have a voice like yours for it to work? Dag: It gets pretty good, it learns. Kara: I like.
Walt: Will it be in the App Store? Dag: This summer, and it will be a free app. Walt: Revenue stream? Dag: Tie-ins with the other platforms, i.e., OpenTable. We’ll start with mobile and then build it out.
Walt and Kara: Thanks; that was really cool.

The OpenTable Binge and Purge

John Paczkowski — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:31:04 +0000

Anyone remember Foodline.com? Judging from the performance of OpenTable’s IPO last week, it would seem few do. Like OpenTable, Foodline was an online restaurant reservation business. And it too boasted some high-profile investors–Zagat, American Express (AXP). But it never went public. It went bankrupt in 2001, leaving the online restaurant market to OpenTable, which survived the bust to try its luck on the open market a few years later.

Ancient history, I suppose. But perhaps worth thinking about in light of OpenTable’s rather astonishing IPO last week. Originally priced at between $12 and $14, shares in the company were instead listed at $20. They opened at $24.50 and then spiked to $33 before closing at $31.81. A 59 percent surge on the first day of trading. For a company whose business is built on the recession-brutalized fine-dining industry? Impressive. Must have made for quite a windfall for OpenTable’s’s larger investors. Especially those who took the opportunity to dump their stakes in the company. Charles Schwab (SCHW), Pacific Asset Partners, W Capital Partners, Venture Frogs, Zagat and a number of small private investors sold off all their OpenTable shares as part of the company’s IPO (click on chart below), according to the SEC filing.

Interesting, yeah? Seems at least some of the company’s investors had been hoping for an exit. And they fled for it in unison, pockets full, when one was offered. Perhaps they’d lost their appetite for risk after reading through the Risk Factors section of Open Tables IPO filing, which grimly noted that “a significant majority of our restaurant customers are fine-dining restaurants which have been particularly affected by economic downturns such as the one we are currently experiencing.”

Or perhaps, like Scott Sweet, a senior managing partner at I.P.O. Boutique, they remember Foodline and the last dot-com bubble and bust. “People don’t truly know the story here about this company. It’s a one-trick pony company,” Sweet told the New York Times. “Pricier restaurants in San Francisco, Tampa, New York are not that hard to get in right now. In fact, one can do it themselves if they choose, with 15 minutes notice.”

OpenTable Shareholders Apparently Booking Reservations in Empty Restaurants

John Paczkowski — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:53:44 +0000

Anyone who dismissed OpenTable’s IPO price of $20 as grossly overpriced has, in short order, been proven grossly mistaken. Shares in the online restaurant reservation company opened at $24.50 apiece, up 23 percent from its IPO price. As I write this, they’re trading at $28.72 after topping out at $30–more than double their original price range.

Astonishing for a restaurant reservation company going public in the middle of the worst recession in decades. And especially for OpenTable, which has posted operating losses in four of the last five years and saw the total number of reservations seated by its restaurant customers drop 10 to 15 percent for the fourth quarter of 2008 from the same period in 2007. Sure, revenue increased 36 percent in 2008 and 21 percent in the first quarter of 2009 compared to prior years. But come on–booking reservations in empty restaurants? At a time when the public is chowing down on Top Ramen?

“This [is] reminiscent of the 1999-2000 IPO pricings,” IPO Boutique partner Scott Sweet said in a research note to clients. “This IPO environment has not and should not see a pricing like what was chosen, considering the restaurant business is very prone to the recession. I believe that once sanity prevails, it will likely trade down hard.”

Will OpenTable Be Just What Silicon Valley Ordered This Week?

Kara Swisher — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:35:54 +0000

One of the first Silicon Valley start-ups to go public in a long while–OpenTable–is expected to come to market this week, with venture firms hoping it will prove a tasty treat for Wall Street.

Whether the $42 million initial public offering of the online restaurant reservation service proves to be a bellwether or not is unclear since its business has–despite strong revenue gains over the last two years–run up operating losses for much of its lifespan of 10 years.

OpenTable’s last three months of results, though, have seen a small profit. It makes money primarily from fees from restaurants it gets for a variety of services.

Revenue for 2007 was $41.1 million and for 2008, $55.8 million.

OpenTable is most definitely a creature of Silicon Valley. Its CEO, Jeff Jordan, is a former top eBay (EBAY) exec, and one of its VC backers is Benchmark Capital, among others. Its venture funding has totaled about $50 million.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the San Francisco-based OpenTable is expected to price from $12 to $14 a share and then begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker stock symbol OPEN later this week.

Proceeds from the sale of three million shares, OpenTable has said in regulatory filings, will net it about $16.1 million, with 48 percent of shares being sold by existing shareholders.

The IPO, underwritten by Merrill Lynch & Co., would value the company at about $280 million, which is about five times its 2008 revenues.

(You can look at OpenTable’s initial public filing in January about the IPO here.)