A week ago Ivan Kirigin started working at Facebook. That’s not a big news story but the background on Kirigin is. Kirigin owned the now defunct TipJoy, a micropayments service that was a year old.
Facebook was lined up to buy the company and then pulled out at the last minute. That’s not unusual in the Interest business. What is unusual is that they hired Kirigin before he and his wife closed up shop on TipJoy late this past week. The Facebook deal would have been impressive, an all-stock offer worth in the neighbourhood of $5 million. Would have been is the key word.
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Facebook walked away from the table instead waiting for the negotiations to fall apart to hire on owner Kirigin. It’s not clear what Kirigin’s role will be at Facebook but it being speculated that he will work with Facebook Payments by Tech Crunch.
The Kirigins are paying back their backers who included BetaWorks, the Accelerator Group, ex-Googler Chris Sacca and the Y Combinator startup factory. TipJoy allowed people to pay a small amount of money for online content using Twitter messaging. For a time it had ad placement on the corner of Twitter.com. That’s a rarity at Twitter. Even with the backing of Twitter and key investors though the start-up company didn’t make it for the long haul.
The bigger picture though may be the future of small Internet companies. Instead of buying a company outright could the Internet heavy-weights simply hire the key people? If that is the case it could spell a season of doom for the little guy.
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Where did you hear that the founders will be paying back the investors? This is totally unheard of… unless they want to take the company back and do something else with it instead of shutting down.
The founders of Odeo paid back their backers, but they turned it into Twitter and that was a smart move.