Handshake.com
Gets New Funding,
Managers, Location
Handshake.com is waving bye-bye.
The onetime Fullerton e-commerce firm, an online service that allows customers to receive bids on services ranging from car repairs to dog grooming, has moved to Los Angeles, saying the northern metropolis offers a more attractive working environment and broader talent pool.
“It was purely recruiting, attracting talent,” said Mike Barton, the company’s new chief executive, one of a management team taking over for Handshake’s original four founders. “If we had to base ourselves in Tuscaloosa, Ala., to get the very best people we’d go there.”
The Marina del Rey area Handshake has moved to, Barton said, has a high concentration of Internet-based companies, providing more tech-savvy workers and making it easier to woo employees from other areas. He said at least two-dozen dot-com firms have set up shop in the two-mile radius around Handshake’s new headquarters.
Though no one explicitly criticized Orange County’s workforce, company officials said LA is closer to an established hub for online businesses.
The move came in conjunction with a second round of financing estimated to be at least $30 million and the installation of the new management team. Co-founder and former CEO Ajay Shah and his fellow co-founders still work for the company: Shah is now the company’s vice president for strategic planning and technology, Dave Elkins is its chief information officer, Dan Summers is director of recruiting and human reparticipated in the most recent round of funding, adding to its previous $4 million investment.
Neither Idealab officials nor SBC Venture Capital, a division of SBC Communications that joined the current round, would say how much they invested.
Though Barton declined to provide a range for the funding, he said it provides operating capital sufficient for “many, many months” in the midst of investor uneasiness about tech startups. Handshake has no immediate plans to go public, Barton added.
Despite online retailers’ recent fall from grace, Forrester Research estimates that online sales of business-to-consumer services will reach $22.1 billion by 2003. By being one of the first to broker services online, Handshake hopes to grab a significant portion of that share now.
“We’re in very-fast-growth mode,” Barton said. “We are clearly establishing a leadership position in our market, we have a great set of investors backing us,now it’s just go and roll it out really quick and really smart.”
