Dave Winer Absent from Seesmic Investor List
February 13th, 2008 by Bullshit MancusoIn the midst of pimping Seesmic last fall, Dave Winer announced that he was an investor in Loic Le Meur’s company.
Today, however, as news broke that the video-blogging startup had raised $6 million, Winer’s name was nowhere to be found among the investors:
The complete list of investors is:
- Michael Arrington - Founder, TechCrunch
- Steve Case - Co-Founder and former CEO and Chairman, AOL
- Jeff Clavier - Managing Partner, SoftTech VC
- Ron Conway - Early investor, Google
- Steve Garfield - Pioneering video blogger
- Dan Gillmor - Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship
- Reid Hoffman - Founder, LinkedIn
- Michael Parekh - Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
- Mark Pincus - Co-Founder and former Chairman and CEO, SupportSoft
- Ariel Poler - Founder and former CEO, IPRO and Topica
- Jeff Pulver - Chairman and Founder, Pulver.com
- Martin Varsavsky - Founder, FON
Winer’s also missing from the investor list on the company web site and hasn’t posted anything about Seesmic in months.
What gives? Could Le Meur or the other Seesmic execs have looked at the year-long flamewar between Winer and Jason Calacanis and figured out, as Adam Curry and Ron Bloom did with PodShow, that Winer might become an embarrassment to the venture?
Update: Winer posted a response — the stock market scared him off making the investment. Lucky Loic.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Well, you know the answer w/o even asking. Winer IS an embarrassment. Why would LeMeur want someone who constantly engages in oddball antics on his board. But I noticed something interesting. Did you notice Arrington’s name leading the list. So now we know it’s little coincidence why Loic got gobs of coverage over at Tech Munch
February 13th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
You are about 50% correct in your speculation: I told Loic that the worst thing he could ever do would be to get in business with Dave Winer/let him invest in his company.
Loic’s my friend… I had to tell him that!
Now, I have no idea what happened between Loic and Dave. Dave or Loic could have backed out–I have no idea!
best,
jason
February 13th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
For the record, Loic replied to Dave’s post (about NOT investing in Seesmic) as follows:
Dave’s a very cautious investor. Seemic MAY go big but honestly, Dave’s retired in one sense. He doesn’t have a working company…. just his investiments and he moved to a cash position recently so he’s going to be extra careful: very prudent in this market. He’s only holding Apple stock (at a current loss over purchase cost).
Millions of people will loose their savings this year (mostly over housing declines and risky loans) but Dave Winer will NOT be one of them.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I wonder whether Winer has the jack to invest a serious amount of money in Seesmic or any other startup. He bought his house in Berkeley for $1.52 million in 2006 and then got sued by his former attorney Jack Russo over the Weblogs.Com sale. How much of that pre-tax $2.3 million windfall is he likely to have left?
February 13th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Well, I Googled for Dave’s financial records and didn’t come up with squat.
And people wonder why I prefer to blog and comment anonymously. Blogging is a request for “FAM*E”.
February 14th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
McD: you’re seeing the remnants of the Markdown plugin. Why it works on comments I don’t know.
February 14th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Is that real Jason Calcanis in person or an actor playing him?