Uh-oh. Just a month after Gina Bianchini, co-founder of build-a-social-network service Ning, departed the company, it's cutting 40 percent of its staff and axing its free, ad-supported service.
Bianchini had co-founded Ning with Valley legend Marc Andreessen, and it had raised $119 million in venture capital, including a whopping $60 million round in early 2008 that Andreessen famously characterized as a stockpile for the "nuclear winter" that would help get it through the economic recession.
Jason Rosenthal, the Ning COO who took over as CEO from Bianchini, sent an e-mail memo to company staffers on Thursday that somebody forwarded to industry blog TechCrunch. He explained that Ning will be focusing on premium networks--which come with additional features and are not ad-supported--because that's where the company's business successes have been, thus far.
Via Cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20002611-36.html
The Palo Alto., Calif.-based company announced the cuts -- about 70 people in all -- one month after long-time Ning CEO and co-founder Gina Bianchini was replaced by by COO Jason Rosenthal. The move forces existing free networks to either change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere.
Here is another article:
Ning Collapses, No Longer Free
memo from Jason Rosenthal that was leaked to Techcrunch:
Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.
As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.