VatorNews executive brief on Xoopit

Congratulations to Xoopit! This week, the company announced it’s
being acquired by Yahoo. In fact, take a look at Xoopit’s Vator
profile, and you’ll see Xoopit co-founder and CEO Bijan Mirashi
announce it.

VatorNews
has been following Xoopit since it practically launched. You can go to
our search box and type in “Xoopit” and see our half-dozen interviews
and shows. Click here. You can also Follow Xoopit on Vator.tv

But
to make it easy for you, we wanted to present our reports in what we’ll
call the VatorNews brief on this great little company that’s achieved
a nice exit. Reports peg the sale price of Xoopit at $20 million.
Mirashi would not confirm or deny the amount.

Here’s our coverage, brought to you by our sponsor: Orrick. I also pulled out some
highlights.

Yahoo acquires Xoopit:

“We’ve
been dedicating a significant amount of resources toward the Yahoo mail
application platform since it launched in December 2008,” said Bijan
Mirashi, co-founder and CEO of Xoopit. “We saw a unique business
opportunity to be the leader in Web mail applications. Yahoo’s merger
offer allowed us to fully realize our vision to make mail more useful,
social and fun.” 

Xoopit on the virtues of raising less:

“Sometimes having too much money too soon can be distracting for the
business b/c it could lead entrepreneurs to make decisions to try
things that they wouldn’t try when they have to just have limited
funds,” said Bijan Mirashi, co-founder and CEO of Xoopit, in this episode of fundRazor with host John Bautista. “When you have limited funds you have to make very, very hard,
painful trade offs. It’s those hard painful trade-offs that force you
into something specific and valuable.”

The fundraising behind Xoopit

At the seed round, Xoopit had both angel and venture investors. At
the seed round, Bijan and his team knew they wanted to build a
technology-heavy product to solve the complex problem of indexing
inboxes. The team decided they had to raise $1 million. Foundation Capital partners Adam Grosser and Charles Modlow
helped Xoopit prioritize which products to develop first. Apparently,
the team was flowing with ideas. Foundation also led a convertible
round in Xoopit.

Xoopit CEO on valuing transparency

Bijan’s biggest lesson is one of transparency, something most entrepreneurs
don’t think about enough. “There’s no need to be in stealth mode,” he
said. “When you’re first generating your idea, get out there and share
your ideas.” A friend of his once said, “Run rabid through the Silicon
Valley, show everyone your ideas.” And, so, Bijan did. Bijan’s other piece of advice is about thinking small. Rich Tong,
partner at Ignition, said to Bijan once that when developing a product,
always “find the thinnest edget of the wedge.” What this means is that
entrepreneurs tend to try to build too much. “What’s the smallest
version of your vision,” said Bijan.

Putting the killer back in killer app

When X-1 Technologies came out many years ago, I stopped keeping a
contact list. When I wanted to find a phone number, I just searched for
someone’s name. Desktop search was the first step toward making sense
of my inbox, and maintaining email’s position as the killer app even
beyond the 90’s. Today, like Xoopit are helping Webmail services remain relevant as social networks become the
primary place to communicate, especially with the younger generations.

Vator Box looks at Xoopit

Our Vator Box (Ezra Roizen, Ackrell Capital and Brian
Singerman, Founders Fund) coverage of Xoopit was spot on, in Minute 11:30 Ezra
Roizen predicting that Xoopit would be a nice “feature-based”
acquisition for one of the large mail providers, Ezra said:  “R&D
is being pushed outside the organization, many brilliant entrepreneurs will
move outside of the organization and innovate – and that’s good for
the mother ship (meaning Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft).”As Brian and Ezra agreed about Xoopit, “being acquired
by a big company after a year is a good year!”