Just when it looked like Facebook was on the block, courting offers in the 2 billion dollar range (and rejecting ones in the 3/4 billion dollar range), they’ve scored 25 million clams from a clutch of Silicon Valley investers led by Greylock Partners, according to Silicon Beat (via Paid Content). The social networking site – we understand it’s very popular with the young people (7.56 billion page views in March alone) – says that reports of their sales efforts were greatly exagerrated. Says director of marketing Melanie Deitch, “It has never been our intention to sell the company.” Uh huh. Not for only 750 mil, anyway.
Facebook isn’t the only social net site getting some venture capital love. Business Week says that Visible Path, a more grown-up operation (think “MySpace for the office,” writes BW) has also gotten an influx of cash – $17 million from Menlo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Integral Capital. With a subscription based revenue model, Visible Path “keeps tabs on whom its users communicate with by e-mail or through other means. And it ranks the strengths of those relationships based on how often people communicate.” Users can use existing contacts to create new business relationships through their Visible Path networks, by seeing which of their colleagues has legitimate ‘ins’ with folks they’d like to deal with.
Completing today’s VC trifecta, Loren Baker writes that SimplyHired (a job search site we wrote about here) is the benficiary of a $13.5 million windfall, courtesy of Fox Interactive Media and Foundation Capital. Seems to make sense for Fox; SEJ contributor Greg Sterling points out in a Reuters story that Fox’s explosively popular MySpace site is chock full of teenage and college age users who’ll soon be hitting the bricks looking for work.
