Mobshop Cofounder Jim Rose on Groupon's Valuation, Silicon Valley's Sweet Spot, and His Newest Seed-Stage Startup
Jim Rose has some stories to share. Like a lot of ambitious young people, the now 36-year-old Wisconsin native moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 to make his fortune. Indeed, he quickly co-founded Mobshop, one of the first online startups to let consumers pool their buying power in exchange for discounted goods. The company raised more than $50 million from the likes of Marc Andreessen and Mayfield Fund before shutting down in the wake of the dot.com explosion. The experience of going “up with the bubble and down with the crash” wasn’t an easy one for Rose, but it taught him lessons about pacing — and fundraising. Indeed, Rose raised just $400,000 when he next founded a vertical search site called Vamoose that was acquired by Internet Brands for a “sub $10 million” exit one year later. Today, Rose is at it again with his third startup, StorySomething, an online storytelling platform that he recently cofounded with Jonathan Ehrlich, director of consumer marking at Facebook. We talked yesterday about StorySomething, what’s happening on the fundraising front, and what — as someone well-acquainted with the group-buying model — Rose makes of Groupon’s reported new valuation of roughly $1.2 billion.
