Team That Landed $1 Million After Answering Branson Tweet Sells Company The young founders who cosmically met Richard Branson and got him to make a nearly $1 million investment just sold their company. See what they plan to do next.
By Dinah Wisenberg Brin •
The young brother and sister entrepreneurs who turned a tweet from Sir Richard Branson into a $1 million investment have, nearly two years later, transformed it into an exit.
Scott and Stacey Ferreira's three-year-old startup, MySocialCloud, has been sold for an undisclosed amount. Reputation.com of Redwood City, Calif., announced Wednesday that it acquired the cloud-based platform, which allows people to manage all their logins and passwords in one, secure place.
"This acquisition marks another strategic milestone in privacy for Reputation.com and its customers," Reputation.com CEO and founder Michael Fertik said in a press release. "With MySocialCloud, we're adding a highly valued platform, a creative team, new capability and customers to our portfolio."
MySocialCloud, he said, "is a natural fit with one of Reputation.com's most important projects: the consumer data vault."
Related: How Young Entrepreneurs Turned a Tweet from Richard Branson into $1 Million
The company, Fertik noted, was the brainchild of Scott Ferreira, 22, Stacey Ferreira, 20, and Shiv Prakash, 27, who saw a strong market for technology to simplify the login and username process. Reputation.com focuses on online reputation management and digital privacy.
As YoungEntrepreneur reported last summer, the Ferreiras, who come from Scottsdale, Ariz., responded to a tweet from Virgin Group founder Branson offering a chance for people to meet him at a Miami party if they donated to his Free the Children charity. As a result, the pair met famed entrepreneur and in 2011 landed a nearly $1 million investment from him and Colorado venture investor Jerry Murdock of Insight Venture Partners.
MySocialCloud received another investment from Photobucket co-founder Alex Welch last year.
Related: Can Your Startup Snare the Likes of Billionaire Investor Richard Branson?
While some of the MySocialCloud team will remain with Reputation.com, Stacey Ferreira said by email today that she and her brother "have decided to transition things over to Reputation and then move on to start our next things, which are already in the works!"
What would you do with a $1 million investment from Richard Branson? Let us know in the comments below.
