Image Credit: ptnphoto / Shutterstock What does the former chief executive of one of the most well known news aggregators do after it nearly escapes death and gets acquired by seed-stage venture capital firm Betaworks? The answer: Start a home improvement site. Former Digg chief executive Matt Williams just raised $3.5 million from Jeff Bezos, Andreessen Horowitz, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and Sherpa Foundry for his new venture Pro, a site that helps people get quotes for the home improvements they have in mind, as well as find professionals to hire for those jobs. After taking over the for interim chief executive Kevin Rose in 2010, Williams eventually sold the company in three parts in 2012. Digg sold the brand, website, and technology to Betaworks for $500,000, most of its engineering staff went over to the Washington Post‘‘s SocialCode project for $12 million, and some patents went to LinkedIn for around $4 million. After the sale of Digg, Williams joined Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur in residence. Seattle-based Pro was established last year and is still in its beta phase. The company seems to be taking on services such as Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Porch, also a Seattle-based startup. However, Williams told GeekWire that he sees Pro as different from Porch, and that it will be more of an e-commerce site that takes a cut from the transactions it facilitates instead of charging people for viewing or posting listings. Also, unlike Yelp, Williams doesn’t want to list absolutely every professional in an area, but rather focus on the top ones as vetted by the Pro staff. While the site got its start in Seattle, Williams declined to reveal where it would go next, although he did tell GeekWire that Pro will a “Pro Report” to consumers in every major U.S. city to help them easily find the best home improvement professionals in their area. “I truly believe that this is one of those opportunities that I look at the early days of Amazon and say this has the makings for a gargantuan industry,” the early Amazon employee told GeekWire. “Someone will take and make each of these verticals incredibly easy to price, book and pay.” Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our community. We’re here to provide tools ... read more » Madrona is a venture capital firm that teams with Northwest technology entrepreneurs to nurture ideas from startup to market success.... read more » Redpoint Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on investments in early stage technology companies. The founders of Redpoint Ventures have been involved with successful investments including Foundry, Juniper Networks, Netflix, and ... read more » Two Sigma Ventures invests in companies run by highly driven people with potentially world-changing ideas. They seek out companies using technology, computing, mathematics, or data to tackle hard problems, and aim to help them thrive.... read more » Pro is a nationwide pricing engine for home projects. Through its deep database of home services and unique algorithms, anyone can immediately turn their home to-do list into a detailed estimate including labor costs in their area.... read more »
Posted on: Wed, 14 May 2014 02:15:03 +0000
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