Paul Allen Jumps Back in Founder's Seat with Software Startup Xiant
Billionaire Paul Allen hasn’t an easy month. Most notably, Allen, who famously invested upwards of $7 billion for a 52% stake in now-bankrupt Charter Communications, sold nearly all of his Class A common stock holdings in the company -- 28.5 million shares -- for a grand total of $996 last week, according to an SEC filing. (Analysts are still puzzling over why he bothered.) No sense dwelling on that silly matter, though! That seems to be the message coming from Allen’s camp, which today released the news that Allen is both funding and has founded a Seattle email software startup called Xiant (which apparently began life as Allen’s personal email sorting system). Xiant's software, which is available for free download here, enters a crowded field of startups that promise to make life easier for Outlook users. Just one example of another young company with a meaningful head start is Xobni, which began life as a Y Combinator startup and whose email plug-in has
