All of France is talking about Seesmic’s sale to Hootsuite for an undisclosed amount, announced on TechCrunch last week. Whatever the circumstance of the sale, the price, or the reason for the acquisition, the entire startup community seemed happy to see Seesmic see an exit. Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur has been working day & night to find Seesmic a true path, having recently cut it’s product line down to its bare minimum social media tracking service Ping.
A Startup Community “Congratulations”
The startup community rallied with the news, and the comments from startup allstars like Dave McClure, Tariq Krim & Ouriel Ohayon are an attestation to the respect this community has for him. Almost left in the limelight was Hootsuite, as CEO Ryan Holmes came out afterwards about the acquisition, noting that Hootsuite purchased Seesmic solely for its enterprise customers. We’d talked last year about Seesmic’s trouble with finding the right path when they closed down their European offices, but Loic was always the first one to admit when he wasn’t living up to other’s, and more importantly his own expectations of what Seesmic should be.
With Seesmic gone, LeWeb will Explode!
A lot of people already knew that Loic’s real prize gem has always been LeWeb. If you don’t know LeWeb, I don’t know why you’re reading this site, as it likely wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for LeWeb, which is often described as Europe’s best (and occasionally “only”) great startup conference. People had been hinting for a while that Loic would be looking to double down on LeWeb, and this past June’s 1st LeWeb London may be a hint of things to come. Now that Loic is free to focus all his start power energy on LeWeb, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a LeWeb Berlin in the pipelines. In the past few years, Paddy Cosgrave’s Dublin Web Summit has been moving quickly to become a pan-European startup conference giant, and I’m sure Loic will be looking to remind everyone who told Silicon Valley about Europe in the beginning.
All Joke Aside. Slow Clap for Loic.
It’s no secret that Seesmic struggled through the years, and I’ve certainly been hard on Loic both about Seesmic and about LeWeb, but it has always been with the understood notion that both the startup and the conference are of the highest caliber, and deserve to be reviewed, criticized and praised as such. Just one month into existence Loic invited the Rude Baguette to come to LeWeb – I could joke that he is great at spotting great talent, but I’d prefer to point out that he has always had a reputation of giving anyone a chance. His reputation in France for being willing to meet anyone visiting out in the Silicon Valley has made him an ongoing champion for France in California, and I look forward to seeing where LeWeb will go in the future, and what future ventures he will find himself championing.