Easel To Shut Down Nine Months After Being Acquired By GitHub

Back when GitHub acquired Easel, a collaborative, What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get HTML web design tool, Easel’s blog post on the matter implied that it would be sticking around. “Easel continues to run as it has,” it read.

Alas, things change. Nine months later, Easel is closing up shop.

So what was Easel? If you’re familiar with other WYSIWYG web design tools — things like Dreamweaver, or iWeb — imagine a somewhat trimmed-down version running inside of the browser built with team collaboration in mind. Easel was part of YC’s Summer 2012 class and was acquired by GitHub in January of this year on undisclosed terms.

We profiled Easel here and wrote of its acquisition here.

The news of the shutdown comes from the Easel team itself in its first blog post since the acquisition.

The service is now immediately closed to new users, and existing users have until October 31 to export the HTML/CSS for any projects they’ve built so far.

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Recruitment Trainwreck BranchOut In Talks To Be Acquired, May Sell Mobile Team To Hearst

BranchOut‘s story is a brutal lesson about the risk of derailment when you build on someone else’s platform. After raising $49 million and growing to 33 million users, Facebook changed its viral channels leading BranchOut to starve. Now the “Linkedin Within Facebook” wants to throw in the towel.

Sources confirm that BranchOut is in discussions with several acquirers in the recruiting space for its main team, product, and data, though that may take a little time and the main product will run until then. Right now, it’s in late stage talks with the Hearst Corporation to sell its mobile team that built enterprise chat app Talk.co. That info is backed up by the fact that Talk.co that it launched a year ago, was quietly shut down today, and its apps have been removed too. BranchOut could find another buyer for Talk and its team, though, and the leak of this news could impact the outcome.

BranchOut’s Talk.co would potentially work for Hearst on mobile apps for delivering content from the corporation’s magazines and TV channels. That part of the deal is being shopped for “multiple-millions of dollars”, which might range into the tens of millions said one of my sources, so not a big win. The price for the rest of the team, product, and data is unclear. I’ve contacted BranchOut and it refused to comment.

Started in 2010 by Tickle co-founder Rick Marini, BranchOut’s Facebook desktop app was designed to help people find jobs and figure out where their friends worked. It used spammy Facebook wall posts to grow to huge numbers of signups in its early days, eventually reaching 33 million users after adding mobile apps. The chance to compete with LinkedIn and its progress helped BranchOut raise money from Accel, Floodgate, Redpoint, Norwest, and Mayfield Fund. A $25 million round in April 2012 brought it to $49 million in capital. But then things went pear-shaped.

Few of BranchOut’s users were truly engaged, and the recruitment search tool it planned to make money with never got serious traction. When Facebook banned the spammy wall post method, BranchOut’s churn quickly outpaced its growth and the company deflated. The traintracks were stripped out from under it.

In late 2012 it tried turning into more of a feed-focused social network about work accomplishments, but no one felt like bragging about their day’s meetings and milestones. Its core use case was usurped in January 2013 when Facebook launched Graph Search, making it easy to natively see where friends worked. In August 2013 we got word that BranchOut would pivot to workplace chat, which it launched as Talk in October of last year. The cross-platform app let you sign up with a work email address and see a buddy list of your coworkers. You could ping them with one-on-one and one-to-many instant messages, or set up chat rooms. Unfortunately, Talk.co failed to pick up much steam either, as Slack became the new darling of enterprise communication.

Now BranchOut is cutting its losses by trying to find its team a new home and sell the data people gave it about where they worked and studied. Overall, entrepreneurs should take away the realization that if you’re dependent on another company, you’re vulnerable. While Facebook supercharged BranchOut’s initial growth and made it easy for people to hand the app their professional data, that reliance turned into an addiction. When Facebook forced BranchOut to go cold-turkey, the withdrawl wasn’t pretty.

Building on someone else’s platform requires a tough balance of opportunity an risk, and startups always have to be ready to stand on their own two legs.

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Curated Food Delivery Startup Caviar In Talks To Be Acquired By Square For $100 Million

Curated food delivery startup Caviar is in talks to be acquired by Square in a deal that could be worth at least $100 million, according to several sources. While we’ve heard the deal is slated to take place over the next couple of weeks, these things could always fall apart.

Caviar is one of many new startups that seeks to enable customers to order meals online and have them delivered in a short period of time. It differentiates by striking exclusive delivery deals with high-quality restaurants, and also by offering a group-ordering feature so that customers can have their family and coworkers add their own meal selections simply by sharing a link.

Launching first in San Francisco, the service is now available in other major markets, including New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

We’ve seen a lot of investment go into the food delivery space over the last several months, with Caviar being one of the beneficiaries of that funding. The company raised a $13 million Series A round led by Tiger Global just this April. It had previously secured $2 million in seed funding prior to that, with investors that included Winklevoss Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, among others.

But it hasn’t been alone: Investors have poured funding into a wide range of on-demand food delivery services of late. In recent months, we’ve seen Munchery raise $28 million, Postmates raise $16 million, and Spoonrocket and Sprig each raise about $10 million.

All that competition could be part of the reason for what seems like an early exit for the company. While it seems strange Caviar would seek to be acquired so soon after raising funding, it’s possible that the competitive environment is just too much for it to handle, and maybe it would do better to be part of a larger company.

Payment processing company Square launched Square Order in May to bite into the food delivery service industry. There have been speculations as to whether the technology was built in-house or was part of another acquisition or third party.

Currently, Square Order offers a mobile app for consumers to order food for takeout. But it requires the consumer to pick up their own order. Caviar, by contrast, handles all pickup and delivery for the restaurants it partners with, lowering the fixed costs associated with delivery and could provide a big value-add to potential Square restaurant partners.

Curated Food Delivery Startup Caviar In Talks To Be Acquired By Square For $100 Million

Curated food delivery startup Caviar is in talks to be acquired by Square in a deal that could be worth at least $100 million, according to several sources. While we’ve heard the deal is slated to take place over the next couple of weeks, these things could always fall apart.

Caviar is one of many new startups that seeks to enable customers to order meals online and have them delivered in a short period of time. It differentiates by striking exclusive delivery deals with high-quality restaurants, and also by offering a group-ordering feature so that customers can have their family and coworkers add their own meal selections simply by sharing a link.

Launching first in San Francisco, the service is now available in other major markets, including New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

We’ve seen a lot of investment go into the food delivery space over the last several months, with Caviar being one of the beneficiaries of that funding. The company raised a $13 million Series A round led by Tiger Global just this April. It had previously secured $2 million in seed funding prior to that, with investors that included Winklevoss Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, among others.

But it hasn’t been alone: Investors have poured funding into a wide range of on-demand food delivery services of late. In recent months, we’ve seen Munchery raise $28 million, Postmates raise $16 million, and Spoonrocket and Sprig each raise about $10 million.

All that competition could be part of the reason for what seems like an early exit for the company. While it seems strange Caviar would seek to be acquired so soon after raising funding, it’s possible that the competitive environment is just too much for it to handle, and maybe it would do better to be part of a larger company.

Payment processing company Square launched Square Order in May to bite into the food delivery service industry. There have been speculations as to whether the technology was built in-house or was part of another acquisition or third party.

Currently, Square Order offers a mobile app for consumers to order food for takeout. But it requires the consumer to pick up their own order. Caviar, by contrast, handles all pickup and delivery for the restaurants it partners with, lowering the fixed costs associated with delivery and could provide a big value-add to potential Square restaurant partners.