Jeff Bonforte Joins Xobni as CEO

xobni.com

28 points·brezina··8 comments

Congrats guys -- what a week!

If only you could have had Bonforte demoing your product and Bill Gates as your CEO ;-)

By what metric is Yahoo Messenger now number 1? That seems silly to me. I'm guessing they just count everyone who has a Yahoo Mail account as a customer. I have to think that by actual usage it's still 3rd.

http://www.bonforte.com/resume/

seems like he's effective enough that his lack of hard technical background isn't really a problem.

He and Tim O'Reilly are the only classics majors I am aware of in high tech. Perhaps my six years of studying Latin and two years of Greek have been more helpful than I realized. At 35 with all of his accomplishments I am surprised that Yahoo let him go.

The Xobni guys are biased towards folks that have previously started startups be it their investors(YC & Khosla Ventures) or hires -- which is a good thing.

seems like a smart hire.

Why? Xobni is 14 person company, do they really need an external CEO?

Also, this particular hire didn't really succeed in social search @ Yahoo.

perhaps the founders don't have the skills needed to grow the company further so hired the talent in. Also maybe the investors behind it wanted someone with experience at the helm.

This is common stuff that happens all the time in funded startups.

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