Two execs out at Faraday Future; DreamHost’s dreamy $18 million deal; Tinder ventures into advertising
Faraday Future Loses Senior Leadership
Nick Sampson, co-founder of Gardena -based electric vehicle manufacturer Faraday and Future Inc., resigned after calling the company “effectively insolvent.” Sampson’s Oct. 30 departure comes a day after the company’s vice president and chief engineering designer Peter Savagian left, according to The Verge. Savagian is a former lead engineer on General Motors Co.’s electric EV1 vehicle who started at Faraday in 2016. Sampson is one of three Faraday co-founders and served as senior vice president of product strategy for the company. Faraday received an $800 million installment in a total $2 billion investment from a Hong Kong real estate firm, but spent it in nearly two months, prompting dissatisfied investors and a wave of layoffs, which began last week.
Downtown-based website hosting and management firm DreamHost raised $18 million through a J.P. Morgan & Chase Co. credit facility, Socaltech reports. Founded in 1997, DreamHost reports it offers website hosting to more than 400,000 clients and will use the capital to reinvest in its web hosting of blog platform WordPress.
Tinder Ponders Programmatic Advertisements
Dating app developer Tinder Inc., based in West Hollywood, is considering using Alphabet Inc.’s Google advertising tech to sell programmatic advertising on Google’s ad server. Advertisers can buy impressions from the ad server at a fixed price and will roll the official program out by the end of 2018 if it’s deemed successful, Digiday reports. Tinder is looking to capitalize on “different buying channels,” according to its parent company Match Media Group’s General Manager Peter Foster.
