The young CEO of Quixey, a startup that raised over $84 million, is being replaced
Quixey
It looks like a startup called Quixey could be caught by the rule.
Quixey was founded in 2009 as a search engine of sorts for mobile apps. It involved a technology called "deep linking" which lets mobile apps link to parts of one another without launching the app.
Now, Quixey's young founder CEO Tomer Kagan is stepping down as CEO to take on the chief strategy officer role. The board has hired Mark Lazar as the new CEO. Lazer has been a CEO of over 10 companies, the company says, and his best known company is one called LoopNet which went public in 2006.
Quixey was missing internal sales targets, several sources told Recode's Mark Bergen. In February, it lost other top execs, including its CTO and COO, Bergen reports, and it promoted a new CTO, Rajat Mukherjee, who hailed from Yahoo and cut his teeth at Google.
Yesterday's darling
In 2012 Quixey was on the rise, led by its then 28-year-old cofounder, Kagan, who raised over $24 million from Valley bigwigs like Maynard Webb and Google chairman Eric Schmidt's fund, Innovation Endeavors. About a year ago, Quixey raised another $60 million led by Alibaba with participation of investors such as SoftBank, Goldman Sachs, and GGV Capital, at about a $600 million valuation.
Kagen was known as a "futurist," meaning he envisions the future and works with scientists to make it come true, he once told Business Insider. He was on the board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute) and worked with the National Science Foundation's futurist project (known as Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation or EFRI).
He saw a future where so many objects were run by apps, that an app search engine could be the next Google.
Today, there are a growing number of tools to do deep linking, including one offered by Google, and Quixey shifted its focus to in-app advertising.
Employees on Glassdoor have had some harsh things to say about the startup: 45% would recommend the company to a friend and 58% approved of Kagen as CEO. As one employee explained, "Quixey lacks focus. We're trying to do a million things at once."
- A couple accidentally shipped their cat in an Amazon return package. It arrived safely 6 days later, hundreds of miles away.
- A centenarian who starts her day with gentle exercise and loves walks shares 5 longevity tips, including staying single
- 2 states where home prices are falling because there are too many houses and not enough buyers
- "To sit and talk in the box...!" Kohli's message to critics as RCB wrecks GT in IPL Match 45
- 7 Nutritious and flavourful tiffin ideas to pack for school
- India's e-commerce market set to skyrocket as the country's digital economy surges to USD 1 Trillion by 2030
- Top 5 places to visit near Rishikesh
- Indian economy remains in bright spot: Ministry of Finance
- JNK India IPO allotment date
- JioCinema New Plans
- Realme Narzo 70 Launched
- Apple Let Loose event
- Elon Musk Apology
- RIL cash flows
- Charlie Munger
- Feedbank IPO allotment
- Tata IPO allotment
- Most generous retirement plans
- Broadcom lays off
- Cibil Score vs Cibil Report
- Birla and Bajaj in top Richest
- Nestle Sept 2023 report
- India Equity Market