Zirtual may have just abruptly shut down | Hacker News Reader

Zirtual may have just abruptly shut down

66 pointsopendoorryan22 comments

Slack message from my ZA 10 min ago:

I'm up late tonight and received an email to my personal email from Zirtual that for financial reasons, they cannot continue as a company effective immediately. I would still like to help you in any way I can! I no longer have access to my Zirtual accounts, including the secure system where I had saved your passwords, but I'm glad I can still access this Slack! I can still access your calendar, too. I would be happy to discuss how to continue our assistant-client relationship if you would like. I'm also sending you an email from my personal email [redacted]. This would be a difficult transition, but once I have access to everything like [redacted] again, we can just continue as we had been before

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From around 44 minutes in at http://thisweekinstartups.com/maren-kate-donovan-zirtual/:

You have an $11 million run rate business now. It's just extraordinary. I think the investment community has probably missed this investment. I think they really should be more focused on it. I consider you like a sleeper. At some point the investment community is going to look at this like, well this could be like, similar to an Uber or Lyft or one of these companies that really scales because there is such a huge opportunity to arbitrage between the cities and the work and when you get into the specialized stuff, it's going to be game over.

It gets even worse towards the end, with Calacanis going full talk-up-my-investment mode, gloating about Zirtual's revenue and margin numbers, and the founder's abilities.

That was Friday. Today on https://twitter.com/jason:

1/sorry to hear about @Zirtual shutdown today, as a fan of the service & as an investor. I don't speak for the company & have limited 411.

2/we have @marenkate booked for @TWistartups for this past Friday for weeks, I found out about issues on Saturday while out of the country.

3/wouldn't have suggested being on the show Friday if I knew they were shutting down Monday; confused at a $11m a year business imploding.

You just can't make this stuff up.

I think this is a good demonstration of the difference in impression you get from the press and what's actually going on.

But this isn't the press. This is an investor hyping one of his own investments infomercial style and then a few days later, when it implodes, claiming he didn't have a clue. It's embarrassingly cringeworthy.

What this demonstrates is that many startup investors know little more than what they read in the press. Lots of people assume prominent startup investors are smart, diligent and informed but the reality is that many angels know little more about the companies they've invested in than the suckers who were eagerly buying toxic mortgage-backed securities in 2007.

I'm a ZA, and I can confirm that Zirtual did just shut down. I got an email from the CEO at 1:30 PDT telling me I no longer have a job.

Wow, very awkward timing considering the latest "This Week in Startups" podcast is all about Zirtual

http://thisweekinstartups.com/

Literally finished listening to that episode like an hour ago before seeing this post. Talk about bad timing.

Wow. That sucks for the 400 or so people that depended for their day-to-day living on this. Nice to have a bit of a warning too.

Let's hope that at least they'll pay out what is due and refund un-used funds to users so they may continue to use the VA even if they're no longer using Zirtual. After all, the credibility hit should be limited to Zirtual, not to the people that worked hard as VAs.

Looking at @marenkate twitter there is this: https://twitter.com/marenkate/status/628400241511796736

I guess she confronted reality a week ago and told everyone today.

Both emails sent to clients AND employees posted here: http://www.brandoneley.com/zirtual-shut-its-doors-what-does-...

Definitely some WEIRD stuff going on here. I don't see how any investor would ever give them another round of financing after firing all their employees AND clients, and leaving many having paid up front for services they never received.

fyi - Red Butler (Z competitor) responds. http://prn.to/1IUibKq

fun fact: many years ago, zirtual's ceo used to participate here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maren

That gender identity is confusing me. That's really her?

> "on a mission to become a self made man"

yes, it is definitely her. she used to keep a blog:

http://www.escapingthe9to5.com

"one girl's quest to become a self made man"

"Self made man" is a phrase. She chose to keep the phrase rather than swap the gender to "self made woman" to be PC, as it probably didn't bother her all that much.

Not everyone cares about gender politics or places so much important on their gender identity.

They had 400 employees. So with $5.5MM investment they could operate for a month or two.

EDIT: Oh, low wage jobs. Still overhead for W-2 employees is going to be some log_x of payroll.

Can anyone explain what Zirtual is/was?

A min wage assistant for lazy people.

They were paid nearly twice minimum wage.

official confirmation:

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/08/10/virtual-assistant-s...

Sounds super shady ... !

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