Twitter makes Web company an easier sale

How Twitter helped sell a company. Frustrated by an unfulfilling gig at a start-up company, programmer Craig Spitzkoff decided to create a website as a side project. JobVent would allow anyone who had a gripe about an employer to share it online.

Spitzkoff started the site in 2004, and by this year it was attracting about 150,000 unique visitors each month, along with thousands of company reviews, and it had been featured on “Good Morning America.’’ But Spitzkoff, now a vice president of development at Raizlabs in Brookline, was also feeling like he had run out of the time and motivation to maintain the site, and he was going through a health crisis.

So in June, he mentioned on his blog that JobVent was for sale, and he sent out a tweet to his 185 followers on Twitter. “Found a few semi-interested parties,’’ he tweeted a few days later, “but nothing serious yet.’’ By July, the deal had closed.

“ ‘Yay’ means I sold my first company,’’ Spitzkoff told a friend on Twitter. “Yes . . . there will be tequila shots.’’

JobVent, Spitzkoff said, had been generating revenue from advertising that was “in the tens of thousands of dollars a year.’’ Still, by 2009, “I’d gotten tired of listening to people complain about their jobs,’’ he said.

Spitzkoff’s Twitter messages attracted the attention of Glassdoor, a start-up in Sausalito, Calif., funded by Benchmark Capital. Like JobVent, Glassdoor aims to collect comments about employers from employees, but also to share information about salaries, benefits, and the job interview experience. Glassdoor is newer, launched in June 2008.

Glassdoor’s acquisition of JobVent was an all-cash deal, Spitzkoff said, pegging the purchase price at somewhere under $100,000. A Glassdoor spokeswoman wouldn’t comment on the particulars of the deal, except to say that JobVent will continue to operate independently: “We believe that there’s value in both brands being separate and distinct,’’ she said.

When I ran into Spitzkoff at the Web Innovators Group meeting last week, he seemed happy about how easy the transaction had been - no investment bankers involved.

One slogan that explains it all. When Danielle Duplin worked in electronics warfare at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, she lived in the North End.

“I’d walk out my door right next to the Old North Church and drive to work thinking, ‘I’m basically driving the same route where Paul Revere rode his horse.’ ’’ Now, Duplin works at Fidelity Investments, in a building next door to South Station.

“Our office looks out over the place where the Boston Tea Party took place,’’ she said.

With her colleague Sean Belka, Duplin came up with what I think is an excellent phrase to capture the spirit of Boston: “Revolutionary ideas start here.’’ (It was first used in July at the inaugural TEDx Boston event as part of an introductory video.)

“We’re blessed to be in this city with deep roots for American democracy - and the spirit of entrepreneurship,’’ she said.

Boston was the Petri dish of the Revolution, and in the following century it was the site of the first use of surgical anesthesia - at Massachusetts General Hospital. The century after that, doctors here were the first to use chemotherapy to fight leukemia. Boston was the business center that spawned the first commercial bank in the country, the modern mutual fund, and the first venture capital firm. The first video game was developed at MIT in the 1960s, and Rock Band, the top-selling game of 2008, was developed by two MIT alums. Alexander Graham Bell placed the first telephone call in Boston in 1876, and in 1971 Cambridge researcher Ray Tomlinson wrote the software that allowed e-mail messages to be sent from one computer to another over the Arpanet, the Internet’s predecessor. (It was Tomlinson who selected the @ sign for e-mail addresses.)

Revolutionary ideas seem to be what we’ve been good at generating, from the 18th century to the 21st.

“Revolution is sometimes bloody, and sometimes, you’re staring into the abyss,’’ said Belka, who runs the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, the Fidelity group that evaluates new technologies for use by the company and its customers.

Often, an innovative Bostonian helps spread a revolutionary idea around the world, whether it’s organ transplantation or car-sharing. Sometimes, the idea creates a big hometown company, like Fidelity or Genzyme, and sometimes it creates a company that eventually gets acquired by an outsider.

And a few more things I like about “Revolutionary ideas start here’’: The slogan embraces both academia and commerce; it works equally well for Boston or Massachusetts or all of New England; and it wasn’t cooked up by a committee or consortium. Duplin and Belka assure me Fidelity has no plans to trademark the phrase, either.

You may not think we need a slogan or rallying cry for our exceptionally innovative corner of the world, but you have to admit that “Revolutionary ideas start here’’ is a pretty good one.

Or perhaps you have a better idea.

From the comments:

■KAEK: “Love it. And so much better than the ‘128 Belt’ and ‘Dot.Commonwealth’ tags of the past.’’

■David Solomont: “I’ve got to add a comment regarding your list of local innovations. I’m sure everyone has their favorites, or ones that seem most important. Frankly, I think the spreadsheet courtesy of Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston should be high up on all these lists. For all practical purposes, the spreadsheet spawned the proliferation of personal (desktop) computers, etc.’’

■Dan Croak: “Great slogan! I’d be even more interested to hear a nickname for the place that can rival the emotive qualities of ‘Silicon Valley.’ Something particularly focused on the Red Line from Davis (Tufts) to JFK/UMass (UMass-Boston Venture Development Center), maybe?’’