Postmates acquihires Secret CEO David Byttow's startup Bold; Bold will shut down its enterprise blogging tool, plus the anonymous publishing space IO
Josh Constine / TechCrunch : Tweets: @joshconstine and @krogsgard Tweets: Josh Constine / @joshconstine : The guy who took $3M off the table a year before Secret imploded will now lead product for Postmates' consumer app http://twitter.com/... Brian Krogsgard / @krogsgard : Another blogging platform bites the dust http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
David Byttow has a pattern here: he ran Secret through its 16-month arc, cashing out $3M a year before it collapsed, then launched Bold in mid-2016 with $1M raised and bot assistants pitched at enterprise publishing. A year later that bet is over — Bold's enterprise tool and its anonymous space IO both shut down in favor of an acqui-hire.
For Postmates, this is the second time it has bought a team rather than built one, after the 2015 Sosh acquisition brought local-discovery talent in-house. The move lands while leaked financials showed gross margins above 20% and revenues doubling through Q1 2016 — growth that puts pressure on the consumer product to keep pace.
First-order effects
- Bold's enterprise blogging customers and IO users lose their products outright, with no successor named — another entry in what Brian Krogsgard flagged as blogging platforms shutting down.
- Byttow takes the lead-product role on Postmates' consumer app, putting a twice-burned founder in charge of the experience the company is betting its growth on.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise publishing startups competing for the same buyers now face one less funded rival ($1M) but also a cautionary signal that bot-assisted content tools struggled to find traction outside big platforms.
- Postmates' rivals in on-demand delivery must weigh whether their own product roadmaps need acquired talent, since Postmates is visibly using small acqui-hires to staff up between funding milestones.
Third-order effects
- If the Sosh-plus-Bold pattern holds, delivery platforms are consolidating around talent acquisition rather than organic feature-building, reinforcing the talent-moat logic where headcount quality substitutes for R&D timelines.
- The trajectory also foreshadows Postmates' endgame pressure: by 2019 it was fielding acquisition interest from DoorDash, Walmart, and Uber while weighing a much-delayed IPO, meaning every product hire serves either a sale or a public listing story.
The trend: On-demand platforms are filling product gaps through serial acqui-hires of failed-consumer-app founders, turning shutdown-prone startups into a hiring pipeline.