Odeo is under some crisis these days as its founder and Blogger co-creator Evan Williams admitted recently and as the demise of Odeo-run Audioblogger shows. However, a handful of Odeo folks including Evan and Biz Stone that form Obvious Corp has bought back Odeo’s shares from its investors - Charles River Ventures, Mitch Capor, Ron Conway, Josh Kopelman etc.
Evan’s startup company Obvious Corp now owns the assets of Odeo and spin-off service Twitter. Now Obvious Corp will run both the services.
On the buying back of the company from its investors, Evan had to say this:
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.
I guess that Odeo will be better run now as the folks in Obvious Corp know exactly what to do and what are the things to avoid in order to get Odeo back to its feet.
By the way, the price at which Odeo was bought back is still undisclosed.
Read Evan’s blog post on this.
