Weekend Road Trips

We had a hectic weekend here at Listia.  On Friday afternoon, we drove up to San Francisco to meet Gary Vaynerchuk!  For those that don’t know him, he’s the creator of Wine Library TV and has “captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business”.

He was out here promoting his new book, “Crush It” which is all about building personal brands online and has given us some great ideas on how to leverage social media tools to tell more people know about Listia. I have also been following him personally for some time now, so i couldn’t pass up this opportunity to meet him in person. The good news for our users is that he gave us a couple of signed copies of his book to give away on Listia!  We will be listing them up shortly 🙂

Then on Saturday, we made our way up to Berkeley, CA for Startup School 2009.  The event was held at UC Berkeley and it was packed with great speakers and enthusiastic entrepreneurs.  Many of the talks were very inspiring and we learned a great deal about building awesome businesses from the founders of Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Zappos, Zynga, 37 Signals and more!  It was amazing to hear their stories and chat with other entrepreneurs like ourselves.

As always, we also have a bunch of new features and updates coming out… so stay tuned!  Here are some photos from our weekend:

Listia Raises Some Money

Some good news for Listia just two months after our launch.  Here’s our press release:

Listia.com Raises $400k in Funding to Help People Give and Get Free Stuff

Sunnyvale, CA – October 13, 2009 – Listia.com, a new online auction site for free stuff, announced today that it has secured $400k in financing.  The deal was led by Implistic Capital.

The company previously raised a seed round from Y Combinator, which specializes in funding early stage startups.

This round of funding will enable the company to build the largest online marketplace for free stuff and give users an easy way to give away items they no longer need in return for something they want.

Listia uses an online auction system that makes use of virtual credits instead of cash. Every user gets free credits when they sign up. Users then bid credits for things they want, so each item goes to the person who wants it most.

In addition to providing a community and marketplace for free stuff, Listia hopes to help charitable causes through its charity auction program and promote environmental awareness by helping people give stuff away instead of throwing it in landfills.

Listia Inc. was founded in June 2009 by James Fong and Gee-Hwan Chuang. The Listia.com web site was launched in August 2009 and has since become a popular marketplace for giving away and getting free stuff through its free online auction system.

Contacts:

Gee Chuang
gee@listia.com

James Fong
james@listia.com