AllThingsD » Tesla Motors

E-Commerce Assistant Shopify Raises $7 Million in First Round

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:30:25 +0000

Shopify, which is powering online storefronts that sell merchandise ranging from stuffed Angry Birds to the latest in protective cases for the iPad, is announcing today that it has raised $7 million in venture capital.

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital and Felicis Ventures.

Shopify has more than 10,000 stores actively selling products on its platform, which provides features such as custom themes to create a storefront, an iPhone app that helps track orders and easy integration with PayPal or credit cards. Competitors in the space include BigCommerce and Yahoo Merchant Solutions.

Tobias Lutke, Shopify’s CEO and co-founder, said the funding will help the company expand the team from 30 employees and add mobile capabilities to its products. Lutke says mobile phones are playing a huge role in this year’s holiday shopping season, and that they can do a lot more “cool stuff” going forward.

The Ottawa-based company was founded five years ago originally as an online storefront selling snowboards and other winter gear. Lutke said that’s when he realized how difficult it was to start an online store. Shopify has now shut down the storefront to focus on reselling the software it has built for itself. He hasn’t raised any money before because the company has been profitable to date.

Shopify is now processing more than $100 million in revenues, and beyond Angry Birds developer Rovio and DodoCase, it counts General Electric, Tesla Motors, Amnesty International and the Foo Fighters as customers. Lutke: “People are becoming extremely savvy about selling online. The time it takes to get up and running is always decreasing. It’s an amaizing thing.”

Aydin Senkut, founder and managing director of Felicis Ventures, said: “We have conviction that e-commerce is a key area, and some areas of e-commerce have not seen a lot of innovation…and I was blown away at how beautiful and practical Shopify is. They’ve been bootstrapping and have had a lot of traction. I was very impressed with the company.”

Tesla and Toyota to Deliver Electric Car Prototypes

Beth Callaghan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:43:05 +0000

Tesla will develop battery-powered prototypes of Toyota’s RAV4 and Lexus RX as part of a larger bid to collaborate on the development of affordable electric vehicles. It’s the first step toward partnership between the two companies since Toyota bought a $50 million stake a few days after the electric car maker’s IPO earlier this month.

Tesla IPO Firing on All Cylinders Batteries [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:12:34 +0000

Tesla Motors went public today in the first initial public offering from an American car company since Ford’s (F) in 1956. And already, its stock appears to have attracted a cult following.

Floated with an initial offering price of $17, shares in the company opened at $19 and closed at $23.89–up $6.89, or 40.5 percent. Not a surprise, really, since Tesla (TSLA) raised the size of the IPO to 13.3 million shares from 11.1 million shares yesterday, presumably because of strong interest in the offering from investors.

That Tesla hasn’t earned a dime since it was founded in 2003 and doesn’t expect to post a quarterly profit until at least 2012 doesn’t seem to have fazed investors, who are evidently quite impressed with the company’s $109,000 all-electric Roadster and the fact that it has managed to sell 1,063 of the vehicles in less than two years.

“A lot of people were puzzled about why we were going public without profits,” CEO Elon Musk said today. “The reason we are not profitable today is because we are in the midst of expanding with the Model S.”

The bet here, then, seems to be the promise of the S, the $50,000 electric sedan the company plans to bring to market in 2013. And that appears to be working out quite well for Tesla.

Nokia Slashes Prices

John Paczkowski — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:00:03 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Tesla Motors Plans IPO

John Paczkowski — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:44:14 +0000

Add Tesla Motors to the list of companies planning to avail themselves of what may, or may not, be a fledgling IPO recovery this year. The electric car maker said Friday that it’s planning an initial public offering to raise up to $100 million.

Tesla’s S-1 form doesn’t specify the share price or where the stock will be traded. It does, however, note that stock will be issued “as soon as practicable”–whatever that means. A few other details worth noting:

Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), J.P. Morgan (JPM) and Deutsche Bank (DB) are listed as underwriters.
To date, Tesla has sold 937 Roadsters in 18 countries.
Tesla had sales for the first nine months of 2009 of $93.4 million. Losses for that same period were $31.5 million
Since its inception, Tesla has had revenue of $108.2 million, with cumulative losses of $236.4 million.

Who Shot Valleywag? Gossip Bloggers Thomas (Outgoing) and Tate (Incoming) Speak!

Kara Swisher — Sat, 02 May 2009 04:20:43 +0000

Was it Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in Fraiche Yogurt with a Macbook Air? Or Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk on the streets of San Francisco with a Model S? Or, most likely of all, Marissa Mayer of Google in the penthouse with a Manolo Blahnik spiked heel?

For all the invective this trio has taken from him, all would certainly be prime suspects if some nefarious fate befell always controversial Valleywag gossip blogger Owen Thomas.

Actually, the truth is a little more mundane: The self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley” is moving onto another digital job as head of GE (GE) unit NBC Universal’s new Bay Area Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.”

There, the 37-year-old Thomas will run a site that focuses on news from around the San Francisco region, with a mix of national stories. But, sources said, he is still going to continue to drill down on tech too, so those burned before by him should not relax too much.

Thomas has been running Valleywag since mid-2007. Its staff got pretty large for a while, until it was recently downsized and its content stuffed into Gawker, the flagship site of Gawker Media. The Valleywag site remains, though, and will continue to.

And it will now be the domain of deceptively fresh-faced Ryan Tate, Thomas’s replacement. The Berkeley resident, 32, has been the night editor for Gawker since early last year.

Interestingly, Tate was an intern for The Wall Street Journal’s California edition and also worked for tech-oriented publications like Business 2.0, Upside and the San Francisco Business Times.

Thomas is reportedly staying on at Valleywag through the middle of the month and then it will be Tate’s turn to make mischief with tech’s more puffed-up mandarins.

In an effort to scare Tate into steering clear of BoomTown, I invited the pair to All Things Digital HQ this rainy afternoon for a little sit-down to discuss where the controversial site has been and where it is going.

Here’s the video (and below it, a video interview I did with Thomas and then-Valleywag writer Megan McCarthy, when he got the job):

[ See post to watch video ]

Your Karma Ran Over My Tesla

John Paczkowski — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:16:19 +0000

Tesla Motors has lost its Sturm und Drang race with Fisker Coachbuild. On Monday, an arbitrator ruled that Fisker did nothing untoward by introducing an electric-powered luxury sports car after doing some design work for Tesla.

As you may recall, Tesla sued Fisker Coachbuild back in April, charging that founder Henrik Fisker stole valuable company design ideas and trade secrets after it hired him to design the company’s oft-delayed plug-in electric-powered WhiteStar hybrid sedan.

Tesla claimed Fisker sabotaged the WhiteStar project by purposely drafting a subpar design that set it back three to six months, then stole proprietary Tesla technology and used it to build a competing car–the Fisker Karma. Unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show this past January, the $80,000 Karma had been scheduled to arrive at market in late 2009. Because of the production delays allegedly caused by Fisker’s designs, the WhiteStar won’t arrive until 2010.

“I think it’s ironic that Fisker chose to name his car the Karma, when what he’s done is very bad karma,” Tesla attorney Adam C. Belsky said back in April.

The arbitrator, it seems, didn’t quite agree. “The evidence is overwhelming that Fisker did nothing wrong,” he found. “The assertion of violations of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act by Fisker were baseless and neither brought nor pursued in good faith.”

A tough break for Tesla, which has been hit hard by the financial crisis, so hard that it was forced to borrow $40 million to cover its costs earlier this week.

Tesla Foiled

John Paczkowski — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:42:04 +0000

While $25 billion in low-cost federal loans keeps General Motors (GM), Ford (F) and Chrysler churning out SUVs through the econalypse, the wheels are coming off cleantech car company Tesla Motors. Without access to the same sorts of loans given its Detroit colleagues, the country’s leading electric car maker is delaying production of its Model S sedan, sacking an unspecified number of employees and shuttering two offices. “These are extraordinary times,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in post to the company blog. “The global financial system has gone through the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and the effects are only beginning to wind their way through every facet of the economy. It’s not an understatement to say that nearly every business will be impacted by what has unfolded in the past weeks, and this is true for Silicon Valley as well.”

What, Otellini Worry?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:00:01 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Tesla CEO in Love With His Car, Got a Feel for His Automobile

John Paczkowski — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:06:08 +0000

I would say it’s great. According to one of the car magazines, either Car & Driver or AutoWeek, it’s apparently the best kind of mid-speed acceleration of any car they ever tested. So that’s perfect for when you’re driving on the highway and you want to make a lane change or something like that. It’s incredibly responsive, so it’s a very, very fun car to drive.”

–Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk sings his creation’s praises.

Now that Tesla Motors has finally managed to roll its first zero-emission Roadster out of the garage, the company is looking at markets other than the luxury one for which the $98,000 car was intended. The company plans to build an electric four-door, five-passenger sports sedan that will sell for about half the price of the Roadster.

To do that, Tesla figures it needs another $250 million in the bank and so it’s mulling an IPO. Said Tesla’s chairman Elon Musk, “I would say within [the] end of this year or next year there is a good chance we would go public.”

(Crash test photo courtesy Tesla Motors)

Tesla Roadster Produces Co-Founder Emission

John Paczkowski — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:13:54 +0000

When Tesla Motors co-founder Martin Eberhard stepped down from the CEO spot earlier this year to concentrate on technology and development, it was apparently his first step toward the door he was just shown. Seems Eberhard’s been ousted from the company, or as Tesla euphemistically puts it: “transitioned from the board of directors and executive management of the company to the advisory board.”

Why? Tesla won’t quite say. “I’m sorry that it came to this and wish it were not so,” Tesla Chairman Elon Musk said in an email to the San Jose Mercury News. “It was not a question of personality differences, as the decision to have Martin transition to an advisory role was unanimous among the board. Tesla has operational problems that need to be solved, and if the board thought there was any way that Martin could be part of the solution, then he would still be an employee of the company.”

Eberhard, however, has a different take on the situation. “Yes, it is true–I am no longer with Tesla Motors–neither on its board of directors nor an employee of any sort,” he wrote in a post to the Tesla Motors Club blog. “I have also signed a nondisparagement agreement with Tesla, so I must, by contract, be a bit careful about how I word things. But I am also not going to lie about it. I am not at all happy with the way I was treated, and I do not think this was the very best way to handle a transition–not the best for Tesla Motors, not the best for Tesla’s customers (to whom I still feel a strong sense of responsibility), and not for Tesla’s investors.”

Some Lovely Videos From WSJ Online! eBay Earnings, Pregnant Googlers, Seagate's Watkins and Electric Roadsters!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 07:23:57 +0000

Some digital-iscious videos to peruse:

Some are worried about eBay’s recent financial results and some are not:

It’s good to be pregnant at Google (but maybe not so good to be old), including–no joke–”Expectant Mother Parking” spots:

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, who is a firecracker, talks about the drive-maker’s sharp earnings:

Tesla Motors’ Martin Eberhard (they love him in Silicon Valley) on the first electrical roadsters: