Bob Chandra, CEO of Grayboxx, a local search start-up, just informed me that the company is selling its IP to Bay Advisor. Grayboxx launched last year with a lot of industry interest in their “Preference Scoring” algorithm. Grayboxx had aggregated data about businesses and ranked those businesses according to their mysterious formula.
Some industry insiders I have spoken with found the results to be pretty impressive but it’s definitely a challenge for any start-up to become the industry standard. The service’s audience had been growing thanks to local search engine optimization, but according to Chandra they felt that Bay Advisor could exploit the technology in a bigger way. It’s not completely clear what Bay Advisor intends to do with the Preference Scoring data but my guess is that we will see a more focused local search application come out of this.
I give Bob and his team a lot of credit for trying to bring some innovation to local search. Best of luck to them on their future endeavors.
Newsflash: According to Chandra his next project is Site605, which looks like what you would get if Mahalo mated with Mechanical Turk.
Update: Check out my friend Zach’s site Artbreak.com, where you can sell art online.
5 Response Comments
Sorry to see Grayboxx go. Best of luck to Bob & team.
Why throw the grenade into the tent after leaving? How does this help you?
http://thefunded.com/funds/item/1333
I saw the posts, etc. You really expect the firm that lead your A round to also lead your B? Really?
Jeff Smith
Phd student, Stanford University
Jeff, as a student, you may not have much experience with fundraising, nor the sequencing of financing. It is actually very common for an A investor to do the B, especially if the A was essentially a seed financing, as opposed to a full-fledged A round. Typically, entrepreneurs or start-up CEOs create a milestone or metrics plan with their investor which is how they track performance. Dave Reichert of Garage.com once said choose a venture investor based on their ability to get the next round of financing because the rest of the assistance- as far as business development, hiring, etc. you can generally do yourself. It looks like Sierra fell short here. Before you carry water for Sierra, or make unfounded accusations that Chandra wrote the post you linked to, you might want to get some real world experience.
RST,
Good points however I am 99.9% sure the post Jeff pointed out is by Bob. See:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers?viewQuestion=&questionID=214101&askerID=2622746
correction – 99.9% sure the post is by Bob or someone else associated with Grayboxx.