More Chaos at Clinkle
What’s that sound? Is it the joyful noise of Clinkle‘s soundwave-based payment system finally launching in the wild? No such luck. Instead, it’s more bad news from the infamously dysfunctional startup.
Cinkle’s most recent hire, designer Josh Brewster of Twitter, has left the company after less than a week. He felt he had “landed in the midst of things shifting and decided it wasn’t a good fit,” according to a statement sent to Recode. What was shift that made Brewster uncomfortable? The departure of COO Barry McCarthy, who came over from Netflix.
McCarthy was hired in October and was apparently told the service would launch in November. Instead, an employee-only beta launched in February, and the wider release date in select university markets is still unknown. Yesterday, the beta test widened to friends and family, according to Clinkle.
“They’re not nearly as close to scaling the businesses as I thought they were when I came in the door,” McCarthy told Recode.
CEO Lucas Duplan posted on the company blog about the latest mess. The most recent post before that was all the way back in the summer of 2013, when Clinkle received its $25 million funding that made heads turn in the Valley. In the technosphere, that’s an Ice Age ago.
In yesterday’s post, Duplan acknowledged the company had hit some “speed bumps” as part of “growing up.” He also denied that the company has been overly secretive about its product development:
And while many people think we’ve been unnecessarily mysterious, one thing I’d like to make clear is that creating smoke screens hasn’t been our intent. It’s all about creating a great experience for our users. Building a payment platform of the scope and complexity that we anticipate is a serious thing — and, because of the nature of our business, it’s critical that we adequately stress test our mobile wallet in a live environment, where we can iterate without distraction before broad public availability. The testing we’ve done to date and the rapid user expansion we’re now undertaking gives us this opportunity. It allows us to walk before we run.
The stealth mobile payments startup will reportedly use sound waves to transmit payment information to the point of sale. While certainly innovative, this path is not unique to Clinkle. Pixeliris, a French payments startup, is working on the same idea.
Clinkle has done a poor job managing its corporate image and explaining what it is doing with all its money. (It recently received additional funding totaling “several million dollars” from the Stanford StartX fund.) In December, an anonymous ex-employee of the startup took to Quora to blast Duplan for lying about stock options and being a nightmare to work for. The company’s social media feed has been nearly silent as well, merely tweeting out the latest executive hirings.
Last week, another tweet went out, accompanied by a press release: Clinkle had hired a new vice president of design, Josh Brewer of Twitter. The tweet announcing Brewster’s hire was deleted some time yesterday.
