Fatdoor Gets Cash, New CEO from Yahoo!

Fatdoor is announcing today that it raised, “$5.5 million from an investment group led by Norwest Venture Partners and also including KeyNote Ventures. Fatdoor will use this first institutional round of funding to expand its market presence, scale its infrastructure and further build out the company’s innovative, community offerings.”

Here’s my original post when the site launched.

I wondered if the site could become a “social network for adults,” which is sort of what Multiply is also trying to do in a different way. Here’s what I speculated at the time:

In the most successful version of fatdoor it becomes a hub for parents and neighbors to communicate and organize and for businesses to promote themselves in their local communities. The local, social-network nature of the site may also make self-service (advertising) more viable here than it would otherwise be.

The original incarnation of Fatdoor basically stalled. The site never came out of its “invitation only” beta in one suburban market. Its original vision was ambitious, idealistic — and unfocused.

Now Jennifer Dulski has come in (from Yahoo!) as the new CEO. I had breakfast with her yesterday and she literally sketched out for me some of the new thinking about direction, functionality, audience and so on. I knew that Dulski was leaving Yahoo!, where she had been for roughly 10 years, but I didn’t know where she was going until she told me over breakfast.

Her presence at Fatdoor immediately makes the site more interesting and, probably, viable. She’s very very smart about local and very well rounded in terms of her skills and perspective. As one Yahoo! Search Marketing person later told me yesterday, “she gets the whole picture.” And Dulski personifies the potential audience for the site: parents, women.

There are likely to be lots of changes at the site in the coming months, including probably the brand as well.

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