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October 04, 2007
Kelkoo Rumor And The Shopbot Jungle
Who knows how much longer that little logo on the right will be on Kelkoo's homepage? No one, at least not officially. According to Reuters reports which tried to get confirmation of an FT report yesterday that said Yahoo was mulling a sale of Kelkoo, the VC-backed comparison shopping site it acquired back in 2004, the Internet giant was not confirming it.
The statement from Yahoo that Reuters did get said that it is a "priority" to improve the performance of Kelkoo by "identifying the right leadership and team structure to achieve our business goals".
Kelkoo's performance is getting squeezed by competitors, like other shopbots, according to Julien Codorniou, author of a book that tracked Kelkoo from founding to funding to acquisition. (Our book review here.)
He mentioned the bots trend when we asked him if he knew what was at the root of the Kelkoo rumors. "The high margin, high market share business that Kelkoo has is under attack," suggested Codorniou.
Codorniou who now works at Microsoft in France (his blog), also wrote: "Kelkoo has been facing new and tough competition in the last 2 years. Some shopbots now offer links for free to e-merchants, while others attack Kelkoo on their results ranking, etc.. The shopbot space is a real jungle."
Business models that worked four and five years ago are under threat from newer and leaner models, no doubt.
One thing is that the founding team didn't stay long with Yahoo post acquisition, pointed out Codorniou. Indeed, several careers come to mind (see below).
There is nothing unusual in entrepreneurs leaving once their venture is acquired, sometimes they are pushed out by the acquirer, and sometimes they jump as soon as their contracts end.
It is actually a good thing, at least for the tech venture market, in our opinion. As for the acquirers that have to integrate a new venture into their business, there are tons of books, articles, conferences, experts, and consultancies that can talk about that topic with greater expertise than this reporter.
Getting back to the founders: regular readers will know that one Kelkoo co-founder, Pierre Chappaz, is now with Wikio and has been working with Index Ventures, as an entrepreneur in residence. (He wrote in his blog that he has no comment on the rumor, by the way.)
Other examples, Crowdstorm, a UK startup soon to launch a product review and aggregation site, has another ex-Kelkoo exec at the helm. It has a good write up in in New Media Age . And in the early summer Commission Junction was recently able to recruit another co-founder, Pablo Gravier who had been with Kayak.com in the meantime.
Posted on October 4, 2007 06:57 AM | Posted to | Permalink
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