Adieu Odeo RIP
Odeo, a San Francisco-based podcasting site started by Evan Williams is buying back the share owned by investment firm Charles River Ventures.
Odeo had raised millions in funding from Charles River Ventures, Mitch Capor, Josh Kopelman and Ron Conway amongst others in August 2005. Obvious Corp is full funded by Williams, and now owns the assets of Odeo and Twitter.com.
Everyone I know in the web world either works for one of the Internet giants and wants to be in a startup or is in a startup that wants to be bought by an Internet giant. The grass is always greener, of course, but I believe there’s room for a different model for building and running web properties. Obvious will be a kind of product lab, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. There are many details to be figured out, but the general idea is to simply build and launch things that we want to exist in the world, with a high degree of freedom. And to do so cheaply and quickly, with self-organized teams that can leverage each other’s technology, talents, and traffic. Rather than looking to be acquired, we plan to make money from the services and share it with the people who contribute. Occasionally, it may make sense to spin things out into their own entities, which get outside investment, but the company is not an incubator.
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