Thursday, November 06, 2008

DMW: BitTorrent President Steps Down To Form New Venture With YouTube Co-Founder

San Francisco - BitTorrent Co-Founder Ashwin Navin is stepping down as President to focus on a new tech incubator he is launching along with a few other high-profile tech entrepreneurs. According to a note Ashwin sent out yesterday, he has partnered with YouTube's Steve Chen, MySpace's Aber Whitcomb and HotOrNot's Jim Young and purchased a small building in the Mission District of San Francisco where they intend to build "a physical environment conducive to innovation, collaboration and company formation."
According to NewTeeVee.com, Steven Chen has no plans to leave the company he co-founded and Aber Whitcomb currently remains Myspace's CTO while Jim Young reportedly has left the day-to-day involvement in HotOrNor after it was acquired earlier this year for $20 million, according to TechCrunch.
Ashwin Navin will retain the title Co-Founder and join the Board for BitTorrent while investing most of his time and money in his new venture:
"... we want to invite the next generation of tech entrepreneurs to use the facility as their initial base of operations. We intend to invest our time and money among this group trying to hatch the next few big ideas," writes Navis.
Jay Baage

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Venturefrogs II? Perhaps they can incubate something like Zappo's....

Anonymous said...

seems like a young ambtious guy. too bad he didn't make it like those other lucky guys. he's like turtle in entourage. what do you want again jonny drama?????

Ashwin Navin
President and Co-founder

Ashwin Navin is Co-founder and Board Member of BitTorrent, Inc. He hails from Yahoo! where he was an influential member of the company’s Corporate Development group. He possesses extensive experience in structuring and negotiating acquisitions, partnerships and alliances in the tech industry. While at Yahoo!, Ashwin was responsible for M&A, divestitures and company strategy in the U.S. and key global markets such as India and Korea. Before Yahoo!, Ashwin worked with Wall Street powerhouses Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Merrill Lynch as an investment banker and research analyst. Ashwin earned a dual B.A. from Claremont McKenna in Government and Economics.

Anonymous said...

once a chump.....always a chump....

Anonymous said...

Ashwin Navin is the most pompous full of shit person person you will ever meet. He is extremely distrustful and overrepresents himself. I have had several meeting with him and can attest to this. Can't understand why Steve Chen would partner with such a devious person like him.

Advice to Steve: watch out!!

Anonymous said...

BitTorrent In Complete Disarray: President and CEO Leave; 18 Employees Laid Off
By Rafat Ali - Fri 07 Nov 2008 04:02 PM PST

Goes to the point that P2P is not a business model in itself, and then, of course, bad management will even make it worse: BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based company that has been trying to develop an online video service and company around the open source P2P delivery technology, has been in deep trouble for a while now, and the issues came to fore this week, as the CEO and President of the company have left. The company has also fired about half of its employees, 18 in number, and this after it laid off 20 percent of the staff in August.

Company co-founder and president Ashwin Navin is leaving to start an incubator (please no...) with a few other well-known tech execs like YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, as NTV reported yesterday. Then today, CEO Douglas Walker, who has only been in the job a year, also left; the company has appointed CTO Eric Klinker as the new CEO. Klinker also joined a year ago; founder Bram Cohen, who was previously the tech brain and inventor of the technology, has been serving as “chief scientist,” which is kinda like a CTO, only deeper sounding. Founded in 2004, BitTorrent is backed by Accel and DCM.

The company has raised almost $46 million in funding, of which $17 million was raised earlier in the summer, so it presumably has enough cash for now. But an online video site/service won’t cut it without scale or enough backing, and as a P2P tech service provider, there’s too much piracy-and-perception baggage to cut through.

Wonder when the other shoe will drop for other P2P competitors like Vuze…