– Connie Loizos is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own. –
As a little boy, Philip Kaplan, the serial entrepreneur long known as Pud, was “force fed” Ritalin. Kaplan says this with a laugh, but even today, the 35-year-old admits to having trouble focusing for too long on any one thing. “My wife says I’m like a kitten with a ball of yarn,” he shrugs.
Kaplan’s attraction to the next shiny new thing has led him to start dozens of companies in his lifetime, including F*ckedCompany, which famously chronicled dot.com busts and saw 5 million monthly unique visitors at its peak a decade ago; AdBrite, the advertising sales and services network; and Blippy, a controversial social network that asks users to share their credit card and online purchases.
But Kaplan’s corporate creativity has also taken a toll. He left AdBrite in 2008 after “launching 10 businesses” within the company. “There were 125 employees at the time. No one knew who was doing what. I realized I was creating a lot of chaos.” (Kaplan remains the single biggest individual shareholder of AdBrite, which has raised $35 million, largely from Sequoia Capital.)
Over a lunch of shrimp burritos in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood recently, Kaplan revealed for the first time that he has also left Blippy, which last year raised nearly $13 million from investors, most of whom piled into the company before it even launched.
The funding was led by Index Ventures, and includes such celebrity patrons of social media as Chris Sacca, an early Twitter backer, and Ron Conway. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, whose VC firm Greylock Partners also took part in the funding round, will join Swipely’s board as an observer.
