Blind entrepreneurs boost eBay sales
EBay is recruiting an unlikely group of new entrepreneurs into its selling ranks – the visually impaired.
Blind citizens have staggeringly high rates of unemployment, with some 70 percent of working-age, legally blind adults out of work, according to the National Federation of the Blind.
So the online marketplace, in partnership with NFB, began recruiting test sellers in the blind community late last year. In February, it began a pilot program with 15 blind entrepreneurs. In total, they have sold more than 2,100 items, including everything from packing tape to clothing and makeup.
“We have a commitment to making our pages accessible,” said Jonas Klink, senior product manager of accessibility for San Jose, California-based eBay. The company was also the title sponsor at NFB’s national convention in July.
“These 15 pilot program participants have been selling above and beyond even the majority of our sighted community,” said Klink, adding that word has spread through the blind community. “A number have become top-rated sellers.”
The blind sellers use enhanced tools such as screen access software that verbalizes content on the Internet, which has primarily been designed for sighted participants.
“When you look at the Web as a whole, you’re looking at a very visual medium,” Klink said. “Designing for the visually impaired is in some cases harder because you don’t have the luxury of well-known graphics.”
Angel investor makes a Mint
At 5-foot-8, Dave McClure calls himself “one of the smallest” venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, either “by height or by wallet size”. But he was walking tall after Intuit announced it was buying Mint.com recently for $170 million.
That means McClure, who invested $25,000 in Mint two years ago as part of a Series A funding round, is in line for a healthy payout. At the time McClure was actually on Mint’s payroll as a consultant, but was so impressed with the startup’s founder, Aaron Patzer, that he took the money they were paying him and “turned it right back around and wrote them a check.”
Mint is the first big win for McClure out of the many companies he’s invested in since cashing out from his part in PayPal’s $1.5 billion sale to eBay. “I’ve been doing angel investing for almost five years now and this is the first full exit I’ve had,” said McClure, who first found out about the deal in a 4 a.m. email from Patzer.
A few hours later McClure was hi-fiving fellow investors Rob Hayes (First Round Capital), Mark Goines and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, where McClure said they were all walking around “with big-ass smiles on our faces.”
Prior to its exit, Mint had raised a combined $30 million – half of that coming in a Series C round led by Benchmark Capital that just closed in August. Some have questioned whether Mint’s $170 million sale was high enough given the amount of VC capital it raised, but McClure disagreed.
“From the angel and A round point of view it was a great outcome,” insisted McClure. “For the B round investors, I’m not sure how big a win Benchmark was expecting, but just looking at it from an IRR (internal rate of return) basis it’s still a pretty good story for them. For the C round investors, I don’t know anyone that makes that good a return in 30 days or less.”
Blogger Jason Fried, of 37Signals.com, didn’t take umbrage with the sale price, but in a post said it was an example of the “VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation” and that Mint’s exit was likely forced by investors. Union Square Ventures’ principal partner Fred Wilson countered Fried’s assertion in his own blog titled “Who Decides When To Exit?”
