venturewire exclusives - meebo

"Unlike Joyent and Upstartle, which want to sell to businesses, Meebo, the instant messaging platform provider based in Palo Alto, is entirely focused on consumers. 'When we launched it was more like, 'Huh, we think this would be cool. If we get a ton of user volume we think there would be ways to monetize it,'' said Sternberg. Now, nearly 4.8 million users have successfully logged-in to Meebo to access their instant messenger accounts without having to download any software to a desktop.

Despite the fact that Meebo was approached by at least one large enterprise that wanted to use its software as the company's instant messaging platform, Sternberg steadfastly insists he doesn't want to sell to enterprises. 'If we really did want to get into that enterprise business, it would mean long, enterprise sales forces,' said Sternberg. 'It's a lot of infrastructure that we would have to build in order to get into that particular business,' and he's just not interested. "