Today BitTorrent, Inc. moves to close one chapter and start another, as we announce the launch of Resilio, Inc. and the exit of our former CEO, Eric Klinker.
Eric is a personal friend and former colleague of both Jeremy and mine. Eric worked with Jeremy at Excite @ Home, and then joined Jeremy’s start-up netVMG as the head of software development. He would go on to become the CTO of the company that acquired netVMG, InterNAP.
When Eric joined the BitTorrent family in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, he faced many tough obstacles. Despite those obstacles, he was able to persevere and show the market over the next eight years that the BitTorrent protocol, originally conceived as an HTTP replacement, was the world’s premier tool to enable fast, efficient file transfer on the Internet.
Eric and the company invested in a number of use cases for the protocol, including direct-to-fan media distribution, file syncing, and private chat during his tenure. Collectively, these helped turn BitTorrent, Inc. into the profitable business it is today.
As Jeremy and I entered BitTorrent, Inc. in late 2015, we, along with Eric, began to assess BitTorrent’s business and look to the future. It was clear from the growing user base and interest from enterprise companies that Sync offered an amazing business opportunity. It was also clear from the more than 30,000 creators and hundreds of millions of fans attracted to our Bundle program that we had a massive opportunity by focusing on media.
We realized that the company would be much stronger, and would unlock tremendous shareholder value, if we were to split the company into distinct consumer media and enterprise businesses. Naturally, the plan was to have Eric lead the part of the business that he knew best: B2B. Jeremy and I are likewise doing the same in the consumer media space.
Thus, as family we made a practical decision to set up Sync as the stand alone company Resilio, while ensuring that our friendship and common commitment to BitTorrent continued.
So now BitTorrent, Inc. is solely focused on building a global consumer media platform, which utilizes the BitTorrent protocol to enable creators to monetize their art and distribute their work to our global network of 200 million fans.
Eric and the Resilio team are well capitalized and have BitTorrent, Inc. as a strong partner. They will focus on building an enterprise business while maintaining the broad base of Sync users established over the past three years. We have confidence in the technology and suite of products on offer. We are excited to see what Resilio can do with a laser focus on that market, and that’s why we have invested in them.
– Robert Delamar, with Jeremy Johnson
Read move over on the Resilio blog:
