Startup Stackdriver snags StyleFeeder founder

Barb Darrow — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:11:59 +0000

Stackdriver, a small Boston startup that’s taking on the giant problem of managing applications that run across public cloud infrastructure, has a new key technology exec in Philip Jacob.

Philip Jacob

Jacob founded StyleFeeder in 2003 to help people sift through millions of online items to find and buy stuff they want.

“In today’s terms, it’s like Pinterest with a Netflix-style recommendation-style algorithm on top, ” Jacob told me in an interview. The service, in the pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook era, grew to one million registered users, mostly women, and competed with Like.com and Shopstyle, he said.

Magazines like Elle — seeking to augment ad revenue — partnered with the service and Elle’s owner, Time Inc., ended up buying StyleFeeder in early 2010 for a reported “eight figures.”

Dan Belcher, co-founder of Stackdriver, is thrilled to have Jacob aboard. “He’s a well-known mentor in the Boston area and is much sought after. He turned down two other CTO jobs to come here,” he said.

Stackdriver, which launched this summer out of a conference room at Northeastern University, is now installed in a real office near Boston’s Innovation District and has grown from four to nine employees, Jacob said.

Asked why he picked Stackdriver over other suitors, Jacob said that while he loved the cloud computing space, “it’s really about the team. These are the people I want to spend time with.”

Jacobs will be a member of the company’s core engineering team. The company is avoiding titles, Belcher said.

Stackdriver was founded by Belcher and Izzy Azeri, both VMware veterans. Jeremy Katz, a DevOps expert who spent time at Hubspot, is also aboard.

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StyleFeeder Fed $2M

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:31:45 +0000

Social shopping site StyleFeeder has bagged $2 million in its first round of institutional funding from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company, which ~~recently morphed into a full-fledged site (and maybe business?) from a widget~~ has a full-fledged site, a Facebook application and a widget, offers recommendations about clothes, gadgets and home goods. StyleFeeder says it will use the funding to snag users and employees.

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GigaOM » StyleFeeder

Startup Stackdriver snags StyleFeeder founder

StyleFeeder Fed $2M