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I just think this website is amazing and considering it's valued at somewhere around $200million+, that's just incredible. It's got 130 million monthly unique visitors who click over 45 billion pages. That's just insane to me but at the same time I guess I'm not surprised.
Imgur Raises $40 Million From Andreessen Horowitz After Five Years Going It Alone - Forbes
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Chief Imgur settler, founder Alan Schaaf, with some of his team. (Credit: Josh Couper)In late January, Imgur cofounder Alan Schaaf and COO Matt Strader gave a firm take on venture capital during a conversation about their popular photo-hosting and sharing site’s new analytics offering: they didn’t need it, they’d bootstrapped the company for five years, and it was something to potentially consider a while down the road.
Two months later, and Imgur’s changed its tune, announcing Thursday it raised $40 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz and with participation by Reddit, the site with which Imgur has arguably the closest ties–and closest potential competition for users.
“We’d had a few meetings with firms over the last several years, and we just never really clicked,” Schaaf says. “But when we went to Andreessen Horowitz, we were all soon laughing, talking about new product ideas for Imgur.” Taking lead for the Silicon Valley firm is Lars Dalgaard, who will join Imgur’s board.
But why give up on the proudly-bootstrapped status? Imgur’s actually been profitable since the beginning as its built out a community of 130 million monthly unique visitors who click over 45. billion pages. The team finally decided its growth could only go so fast on its own cash flow, Schaaf says. “Look, we are profitable, but we aren’t so profitable that we could suddenly double or triple our team size, which is what we want to do.”
Imgur’s about to enter a period of more rapid growth. The company’s office, across the street from WeWork in San Francisco, only has 10 desks for 13 people right now. And Imgur plans to hire about three new people a month for the rest of the year until its more than doubled in size.
The lion’s share of Imgur’s expansion will be its development team, and Schaaf says the company’s looking for engineers who are nerds like he is–people who can build their own computers and code for fun. “We’re Midwestern guys, so we tend to gravitate towards the quiet, similar type,” Schaaf says. But Imgur, which makes money from selling pro accounts that charge $2 a month for more features, will also now be building out sales and marketing and some of the other nitty gritty a more mature startup needs.
Schaaf says Andreessen Horowitz, which is known for having dozens of support staff in one of the more desk-heavy offices of any venture firm, will be critical in helping Imgur hire for that growth. And Schaaf says he’s happy to have signed on with a firm that’s got a reputation for being a little bit more public-facing, with its partners headlined by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz also active on Twitter and the press. “We’ve been pretty under the radar as a company the last couple years, and now more recently we want people to know what we’re about.”
As for determining a valuation for what the company’s worth after five years building it on his own, Schaaf admits it was a long and somewhat painful process. “We thought there would actual math behind valuations,” he says in a tweak at venture capital overall. Instead its a bit of internal growth projections, competition research, and then a heavy dose of the subjective, Schaaf says.
Imgur didn’t disclose its valuation. Could it be worth more than Reddit was when it sold for $240 million in a different, less frothy market? “That’s a nice try,” Schaaf tells Forbes.
While Reddit’s investment in the deal is relatively small, both Imgurians stressed its strategic important. Much of Imgur’s traffic still comes from the site, which was developed originally to serve the Reddit community. But there’s never been a formal relationship.
“We know those guys at Reddit, we’ve played board games with them, Settlers of Catan. But to have a real partnership on paper now is great,” says Schaaf.
A financial hug from Reddit means that product partnerships are in the works down the road, though the Imgur team stayed vague on what we might see. Whatever comes out of the deal, anchoring Imgur with Reddit is an obvious move to protect against a future Imgur-killer gaining popularity on the site.
Does Imgur have to worry about its type of content as it grows up? Strader says that pornographic content is a small enough percentage of the site’s hosted content that it didn’t come up in meetings with the venture investors. And Imgur.com, the public-facing site, doesn’t allow for content that doesn’t meet Imgur’s own terms of service. What people link to and host privately, however, is something that Imgur doesn’t track.
Imgur Raises $40 Million From Andreessen Horowitz After Five Years Going It Alone - Forbes
I
mgur Raises $40 Million From Andreessen Horowitz After Five Years Going It Alone
Chief Imgur settler, founder Alan Schaaf, with some of his team. (Credit: Josh Couper)In late January, Imgur cofounder Alan Schaaf and COO Matt Strader gave a firm take on venture capital during a conversation about their popular photo-hosting and sharing site’s new analytics offering: they didn’t need it, they’d bootstrapped the company for five years, and it was something to potentially consider a while down the road.Two months later, and Imgur’s changed its tune, announcing Thursday it raised $40 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz and with participation by Reddit, the site with which Imgur has arguably the closest ties–and closest potential competition for users.
“We’d had a few meetings with firms over the last several years, and we just never really clicked,” Schaaf says. “But when we went to Andreessen Horowitz, we were all soon laughing, talking about new product ideas for Imgur.” Taking lead for the Silicon Valley firm is Lars Dalgaard, who will join Imgur’s board.
But why give up on the proudly-bootstrapped status? Imgur’s actually been profitable since the beginning as its built out a community of 130 million monthly unique visitors who click over 45. billion pages. The team finally decided its growth could only go so fast on its own cash flow, Schaaf says. “Look, we are profitable, but we aren’t so profitable that we could suddenly double or triple our team size, which is what we want to do.”
Imgur’s about to enter a period of more rapid growth. The company’s office, across the street from WeWork in San Francisco, only has 10 desks for 13 people right now. And Imgur plans to hire about three new people a month for the rest of the year until its more than doubled in size.
The lion’s share of Imgur’s expansion will be its development team, and Schaaf says the company’s looking for engineers who are nerds like he is–people who can build their own computers and code for fun. “We’re Midwestern guys, so we tend to gravitate towards the quiet, similar type,” Schaaf says. But Imgur, which makes money from selling pro accounts that charge $2 a month for more features, will also now be building out sales and marketing and some of the other nitty gritty a more mature startup needs.
Schaaf says Andreessen Horowitz, which is known for having dozens of support staff in one of the more desk-heavy offices of any venture firm, will be critical in helping Imgur hire for that growth. And Schaaf says he’s happy to have signed on with a firm that’s got a reputation for being a little bit more public-facing, with its partners headlined by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz also active on Twitter and the press. “We’ve been pretty under the radar as a company the last couple years, and now more recently we want people to know what we’re about.”
As for determining a valuation for what the company’s worth after five years building it on his own, Schaaf admits it was a long and somewhat painful process. “We thought there would actual math behind valuations,” he says in a tweak at venture capital overall. Instead its a bit of internal growth projections, competition research, and then a heavy dose of the subjective, Schaaf says.
Imgur didn’t disclose its valuation. Could it be worth more than Reddit was when it sold for $240 million in a different, less frothy market? “That’s a nice try,” Schaaf tells Forbes.
While Reddit’s investment in the deal is relatively small, both Imgurians stressed its strategic important. Much of Imgur’s traffic still comes from the site, which was developed originally to serve the Reddit community. But there’s never been a formal relationship.
“We know those guys at Reddit, we’ve played board games with them, Settlers of Catan. But to have a real partnership on paper now is great,” says Schaaf.
A financial hug from Reddit means that product partnerships are in the works down the road, though the Imgur team stayed vague on what we might see. Whatever comes out of the deal, anchoring Imgur with Reddit is an obvious move to protect against a future Imgur-killer gaining popularity on the site.
Does Imgur have to worry about its type of content as it grows up? Strader says that pornographic content is a small enough percentage of the site’s hosted content that it didn’t come up in meetings with the venture investors. And Imgur.com, the public-facing site, doesn’t allow for content that doesn’t meet Imgur’s own terms of service. What people link to and host privately, however, is something that Imgur doesn’t track.
