Yahoo Buys Tomfoolery for $16M

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by Sara Isenberg
Publisher, Santa Cruz Tech Beat

January 30, 2014 — Santa Cruz, CA

I met Sol Lipman back in the good ol’ days of NextSpace when he was working on 12seconds.tv. Jakey Knobel was working with him. Ruby Anaya was working with Davey Reynolds at Parachute Creative in the office next to the kitchen. Ethan Nagel, a relative newcomer, moved in as a 3rd member of an office that another ‘Spacer and I were sharing overlooking Pacific. (Back then, Ethan had a perpetually full candy dish that I was welcome to share.) Eventually Sol took this crew and some other ‘Spacers on a retreat and they came back with Rally Up. In August 2010, AOL bought the Rally Up team for $10M and they all moved out of NextSpace. We were very proud and a little sad, all at the same time. Some moved over-the-hill and some commuted. When I reflect on the early days of NextSpace, it’s from the era before AOL took the Rally Up team.

I ran into Sol and his wife (last spring?) at a winery on the west side of Santa Cruz. Sol had moved on to Tomfoolery (Anchor app). So when the news broke that Yahoo bought Tomfoolery for $16M… well it’s pretty cool when you know the folks. Tomfoolery confirmed this morning.

Friends – together we have traveled far and wide, you and the small and humble folk at Tomfoolery, Inc., and now it’s time for us to move to the next phase of our journey. Today, we are announcing that we’ve reached an agreement to join Yahoo to help build the next generation of communications and community products. If you’re familiar with our backgrounds, you’ll see that we have long loved Yahoo and the products it has created. We are so incredibly proud and excited to be joining this company (and for some of us, it’s a bit of a homecoming).

Learn more here:

• TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/30/founder-stories-kakul-srivastava-tomfoolery/
• TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/28/yahoo-tomfoolery/
• Tomfoolery: http://blog.tomfoolery.com/post/74954728920/the-next-phase-of-our-adventure

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Sara Isenberg curates and publishes Santa Cruz Tech Beat for the benefit of the extended business and technology community. When she is not volunteering her time for the tech scene, Sara makes her living by managing software projects, web strategy planning, and providing development team services (including account management, vendor management, strategic partner management, beta project management, referrals to qualified technical team members, and more). Please visit her website: Sara Isenberg Web Consulting & Project Management, or contact Sara by email if you have any project management, account management, or Development Team leadership or service needs.