Jaxtr

» see jaxtr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the cheap international calls in my house went a different way. we had calling cards and, later, msn with a headset, and that covered whatever long distance i needed. jaxtr was solving the same problem from a stranger angle, and it was never the tool that reached me in ankara. so i knew the category jaxtr lived in without ever having a reason to sign up for jaxtr itself.

it started in menlo park in october 2005, phillip mobin and touraj parang. the idea was half phone company and half social network. you dropped a little widget onto your blog or your myspace page, and a visitor could click it and actually ring your phone, routed so they never saw your number and you never saw theirs.

on top of that it did cheap international calling, the callback trick where the service rings both ends and bridges them at a local rate. that combination pulled in a lot of people fast. by 2008 the company was claiming ten million users spread across 220 countries.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

the timing is the cruel part. really though, in june 2008 jaxtr raised ten million dollars from lehman brothers venture partners. three months later lehman brothers was the biggest bankruptcy in american history and the whole financial world was on fire. money for a mid-stage calling startup got very hard to find very fast.

that october the company laid off close to a third of its staff and pushed out its ceo, konstantin guericke, who had been one of the people who started linkedin. a service can survive a bad quarter. it has a harder time surviving a bad quarter with its main investor gone and its leadership reshuffled at the same time.

~ the postmortem ~

jaxtr did not get a shutdown announcement so much as an absorption. in those days sabeer bhatia, the man who had built hotmail and sold it to microsoft, was running a company called sabsebolo, and on june 14 2009 it took jaxtr over. the service as its own thing effectively stopped there. the corporate husk stayed on paper until 2018, but the product was already done.

the deeper reason is simpler than any one deal. the smartphone was arriving, and with it skype and a wave of free voice apps that did what jaxtr charged for, without the widget and without the callback dance. a clever workaround for expensive calls stops mattering the moment the calls are just free.

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