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 Re/Code. 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 Re/Code. 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 [...]
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