
HootSuite Raises $165M Series B - togasystems
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/hootsuite-raises-165m-series-b-round-from-insight-accel-and-omers-to-go-large-on-enterprise-social-media-monitoring/
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patmcguire
"One of the goals of the financing is to clean up our cap table. To this end,
we are allowing former Seesmic shareholders to liquidate their positions. At
the current valuation, you will realize an almost 40% return in the 11 short
months that you’ve been an investor. We would greatly appreciate your help by
selling your stake."

I don't know the situation, but that sounds odd.

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photorized
I would view this as preparation for being acquired by a larger entity.

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allsop8184
Great to see another awesome Canadian company w/ exciting news today.
Congratulations from all of us @shopify.

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unknownian
What happened to interesting (especially hardware) startups? Who wakes up in
the morning and thinks, "I want to improve the social media experience of
brands!"?

Oh that's right, they can't get funding because MBAs don't care about super
laser tech or virtual reality devices, but whatever gets them the most money.

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joonix
Serious question, what happened to the companies that popped up in the 90s
that:

* Helped enterprise clients manage their customer service email accounts

* Helped enterprise clients manage their web pages

Eventually "social media" will just become a normal part of the internet. Just
another company taking advantage of the idiocy and fear prevalent in large
enterprises. "Hmm, this social media thing sounds big. We need to be involved
in social media. Who can we throw buckets of money at to pretend they are
helping us with our social media?"

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drpgq
Well at least they've ended their unpaid interns policy.

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superconductor
Yup, use them up, spit them out, ??? and profit.

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photorized
Congrats to the HootSuite team - that's a very impressive valuation.

We recently built our own social media data discovery and analytics platform,
and whenever we run reports on software clients for top tweets - HootSuite is
always in 1st or 2nd position. Nice market penetration there.

Plug below -

In case anyone is interested - ours is not designed to replace HootSuite but
to complement it:

[http://signup.itrendcorporation.com/](http://signup.itrendcorporation.com/)

Would love to get some feedback from you folks.

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lewisflude
Congratulation guys! Looking forward to see how this all feeds back into the
product.

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livestyle
The team over at Buffer must be pretty stoked to see how big this market
really is.

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speeder
It saddens me that some companies, sometimes without revenue (I dunno if that
is the case with HootSuite) get multi-million deals, and some brilliant
startups by unknown people cannot get 50k USD borrowed by a bank...

Although my associate worked for a Angel Investing company and my main seed
investor work for a investment bank, we still don't understand who get
selected to get funded or not (we DO know the formal requeriments, but seemly
meeting them only make possible to talk with some investors, but that is it,
lots of investors will just outright ignore you)

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photorized
Note that HootSuite is a very popular tool, almost every single marketer that
I know is using it.

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speeder
I know, we use it too, but it is not only HootSuite, there are several
investments that get obviously excessively popular, sometimes not tech related
at all too (like Eike Batista, that convinced Brazil government to give him 10
billion and lost it all somehow...)

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photorized
That does happen, nothing we can do about that. :)

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dollar
HootSuite is less than useless, as Twitter Terms of Service prohibit anything
that might take eyes off of Twitter.

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togasystems
Obviously you are wrong. With 237 of the Fortune 500 companies using it, it
must not be that terribly useless.

Disclosure: I am an engineer with HootSuite

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toomuchtodo
You're also aware that Twitter could at anytime disallow your use of their
entire API ecosystem, correct?

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josh2600
They could, but Hootsuite pays money for access.

Hootsuite is also not just for Twitter; they allow access and control of
multiple social profiles. Granted most people use it only for Twitter, but the
fact remains, they have a product people are willing to pay for.

I can't really envision a scenario where Twitter killed them, but if you can,
please share.

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twerquie
> I can't really envision a scenario where Twitter killed them, but if you
> can, please share.

They enter the market with a competing product.

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adventured
See: "eBay Payments by Billpoint"

for a classic example of how even in the most optimal scenario, the platform
doesn't always win when it tries to compete with the ecosystem.

