Mr. Grapevine tells us that Techtribe founder, Rohit is working on a new startup – TenMarks
A look at whois gives some information: Registrant: Rohit Agarwal, 117 Mallorca Way, San Francisco, California 94123, United States.
More than the information from whois, what we really know (since the last 3.5 months) is that the Techtribe was under serious pressure to perform – and Canaan might write off the investment (as some of you already pointed out) or sell it off.
What about Techtribe?
Joins our shortcircuit pool. Well, check out the alexa traffic:
Why do you think the Techtribe’s online recruitment model failed? Was it too BD (i.e. business development) heavy? Or due to lack of any significant user engagement? Well, they raised $2mn in 2007 (from Canaan Partners) and as far as I remember, they did spend a good amount of money on adwords.
So, do you need real techies to drive such system? What’s your take?
The new venture, Tenmarks, it seems is an inspiration from doostang? Too early to say.
Update: Seems that media (and other bloggers) have started writing about Techtribe’s deadpooled state now. To keep things in perspective, the decision to cloes Techtribe was taken around August 2008. We have been aware of this, but decided to let things unfold by itself.
Any idea how much Canaan had invested in Techtribe ? Were there any other investors ?
$2mn in 2007.
i dont think anybody is surpised with this..quite expected
May be because of freeze in hiring by most of the companies, their plans didn’t get work out.
Well,
This is news.
We are also into the business of online hiring and Techtribe going down commingles a lot of feelings from us.
I think the model is great. It didnt failed, actually the market isnt ready yet. techtribe actually has helped many company to hire perfect profile matching their needs.
i think all this is a big scam…. a nexus between the Rohit and cannan guys. this guys rohit has failed too many times. not sure why the VCs are pumping into the shit he jumps into.
@Namma, You got it right! It seems Canaan was under some pressure to fund techtribe.
It’s amazing that Rohit still goes around the country talking about innovation – talks of cheap/insight-less talks India is made to witness.
He wrote a book on innovation as well..but dude, implementation is not so easy.
@Sameer, I the whole VC thing in india is a big fraud/scam… if u see the stats. the founders of these companies are either from IIT or IIM. and also all the fund managers that are managing VC money are from IIT and IIM. my experience was pretty bad with VCs… if you have know a relative or a friend who knows a VC then u at least have a chance of meeting them. otherwise there is no chance.
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Techtribe – what was Canaan thinking when they invested into this
a 6th grade kid could figure out this was a loser a.You infringe of a person’s privacy and career prospects within their co via an un-solicited referral b. no one was interested in the measly referral commission offered for upper mgmnt jobs , that was a joke c. the user exp was lousy d. flaws , flaws and more flaws . Guess all they saw was the artificial traction it generated , a very short term approach and vision and finally it was a losing team anyone in their right mind with that kind of money could have reinvented themselves and made it a winner. This was a spoil’t management who misused money – catering from the Taj till they went bust
Interesting observations about Rohit’s new venture, tenmarks.com. From the brand name, it sounds like an educational service, but on the landing page it says “a balanced nutrition plan for students”! Now how many students in colleges/schools actually go on the internet to find a balanced meal? Are we Indians so health conscious, especially students who mostly eat in canteens or hostel mess ? I can’t wait to see what exactly tenmarks is and gets to the user. As far as I see it, it will again fall short in the same area that techtribe did, the right product for the wrong market or at the wrong time.
Techtribe failed because of so many reasons:
The team did not undertsand recruitmnets and they wanted to do 1000 crores of recuriting business by creating tech communities!!!
More so core of their revenue which was “recruiting” was actually a by-product of their social networking business
Tech tribe was a me too social network…..which offered lesser features than other like linked-in etc.
More so it was focussed on sick industry like “tech” where recruiting is extremely commoditized and vanilla.
Signing up customers is easiest thing in recruiting business….delivering it is the toughest..they had no advantage over recruiting companies who do it for living.
In simple words they were just doing postman’s job and that to very badly….their failure was definate.