Unfortunately it’s too late and not in a positive light (TechCrunch, Rubel). Both the top tier bloggers picked up on a brief story in Ha’aretz, the major Israeli daily paper, that RawSugar has run out of money, laid off the staff and has been unable to sell the company or its major assets.
Unfortunately the reports are true. I’m unhappy because we had a great team, really good technology and sufficient funding to get to the second milestone (public availability of our product being the first and 75-100k active users, enough to justify a venture round) but for reasons I’m still not quite clear on, we never did get to that level of active use.
I’m surprised that none of the companies we spoke to about an acquisition the last few months made a real offer, because all of them would have benefited from adding our technology to their products. Using tags or labels with small hierarchical groupings is an important improvement for the second level of search and our tech would be a fast way to get there.
RawSugar had a terrific team, if a small one. TwoThree of our key engineering staff have been hired as part of the first group of employees of a new Google Israel lab (don’t ask me what they’re working on since they won’t tell me ;), as has our Haifa office manager. Our VP Engineering, Frank Smadja, has a brilliant understanding of language and semantics and will surely land easily. Our other engineers and our QA manager, I haven’t heard their plans yet but expect to be impressed when I do. Well, our QA Manager is due to give birth to her second child around the end of January and that ought to keep her happily occupied for quite some time, eh?
Our CEO/Founder, Ofer Ben Shachar, is a serial entrepreneur and after taking time to recharge batteries and get his new house complete will undoubtedly start another innovative company–I worked for him at NetDynamics and would join him again in a heartbeat. Working closely with Ofer for two years has been quite an education for me, enabling me to be involved in nearly every aspect of a startup. Also contributing substantially to my education were our bizdev manager Chris Fede and key advisor Dan Seligson.
RawSugar may be in the… well I can’t bring myself to type Mike’s group name but I have no regrets about joining or anything we did.
This does mean that I’m available for a new opportunity, short or long term, if you have an exciting product in the consumer internet or enterprise space. I’ve done big companies as well as startups and can operate effectively and comfortably in both environments. I can help you improve your customer experience in the form of community building and evangelism, product marketing/product management, or managing technical support.
Ofer and Frank will be happy to give you a good reference.
BillSaysThis 