BitTorrent In Complete Disarray: President and CEO Leave; 18 Employees Laid Off
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
Goes to the point that P2P is not a business model in itself, and then of course bad management will even make it worse: BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based commercial company that has been trying to develop an online video service and company around the open source P2P delivery technology, has been in deep trouble for a while now, and the issues came to fore this week, as CEO and President of the company have left. The company has also fired about half of its employees, 18 in number, and this after it laid off 20 percent of staff in August.
Company co-founder and president Ashwin Navin is leaving to start an incubator (please no...) with a few other well known tech execs like YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, as NTV reported yesterday. Then today, the year-old CEO Douglas Walker also left, and the company has appointed CTO Eric Klinker as the new CEO. Klinker also joined a year ago; founder Bram Cohen, who was previously the tech brain and inventor of the technology, has been serving as "chief scientist", which is kinda like a CTO, only deeper sounding. Founded in 2004, BitTorrent is backed by Accel and DCM.
The company has raised almost $46 million in funding, of which $17 million was raised earlier in the summer, so it presumably has enough cash for now. But an online video site/service won't cut it without scale or enough backing, and as a P2P tech service provider, there's too much piracy-and-perception baggage to cut through.
Wonder when the other shoe will drop for other P2P competitors like Vuze
By Rafat Ali