Client News: worlds collide as Blake Krikorian joins board of Clicker.com
November 5th, 2009 by Jeremy
We had a great announcement this morning from one of our newest clients, Clicker.com. Blake Krikorian, the founder and former CEO of Sling Media (makers of the Slingbox) has agreed to join the board of directors at Clicker. He’s also investing in the company personally. This has special significance to me as Blake was my old boss back in the day.
Blake joins CEO/founder Jim Lanzone (former CEO of Ask.com) on the board, along with Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital and Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures. Clicker’s mission is to be the ultimate programming guide for television on the Internet, and they have the team to do it. Of all the thing’s Blake could have done since leaving Sling (and that’s more or less whatever he wanted) he’s decided to make Clicker his first move. That’s a heck of a vote of confidence – not to mention some personal financial investment.
I’ve known Blake since my Mediabolic days when he first saw me demo the “Digital Library” from Pioneer back in 2003. He then hired me as the first employee at Sling Media, where I worked my proverbial tail off to help bring his vision (the Slingbox) to the market. Sling was a huge success, both by making great products and by the eventual acquisition by Echostar in 2007. Now with Blake joining the Clicker team, he is yet in the position where he controls my fate (albeit to a slightly lesser extent than in the past).
The press release went out on the wire this morning. Some of the coverage we’ve gotten is listed below – we’ll update the list as other coverage comes in.
