Seesmic Turns to Craigslist for Cheap Programmers

Update: Seesmic’s ad has curiously disappeared from Craigslist but for posterity’s sake, I’ve posted a copy of it here. I’m sure that its disappearance was a mistake and that Loic Le Meur will get it reposted ASAP once he gets done dealing with more important business in Davos with Seesmic investor Michael Arrington. I hear they’re close to wrapping up a arrangement to stimulate the economy using Seesmic. Or maybe they’re just stimulating each other.

Loic Le Meur loves to wax philosophical about the joys of entrepreneurship but running a startup is hard work. Le Meur’s company, Seesmic, hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm and Le Meur was forced to lay off a third of Seesmic’s staff last year.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done and thanks to a tip from a reader, we know where Seesmic now turns when it needs to pretend that it’s still getting shit done: Craigslist.

According to an ad on the popular classifieds site, Seesmic is looking for a contractor who can complete a herculean task: 3 widgets, 2 weeks, $1K. Sounds like the basis for a reality TV show to me.

That’s right. The San Francisco-based startup that has raised $12 million in funding from a bevy of high-profile investors including Jeff Clavier, Michael Arrington, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, Steve Case and the investment vehicles of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis apparently doesn’t have anyone in-house with enough knowledge of its own “comprehensive API” to knock out a feed widget, profile badge widget and “chiclet” widget.

But that’s good news for one lucky “experienced web programmer savvy with widgets” who now has the opportunity to earn $1,000 to $1,500 building them out for Seesmic over the next week (two if absolutely necessary).

Now I don’t know what the people who still work at Seesmic are doing or where the $12 million in funding that Seesmic has raised has gone, but Jeff Clavier, Michael Arrington, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, Steve Case and Seesmic’s other investors may as well have given their money to Bernie Madoff. If Seesmic, which launched in October 2007 and is not even a year and a half old, doesn’t have enough resources to employ a single competent programmer who can develop three simple widgets, all of these investors have been screwed. Royally.

Sad, isn’t it?

But it’s not surprising. Seesmic is emblematic of Web 2.0 and Silicon Valley over the past several years. Lots of money was thrown at half-assed startups and most of that money has clearly been wasted.

It’s one thing to try and fail. Even the very best of us will try and fail more times than we try and succeed. But it’s quite another to not try and fail. Far too many startups, like Seesmic, fall into that category.

When times were good, it was far too easy to overlook the misallocation of capital and waste that existed in so many startup investments. But now as millions upon millions of people find themselves out of work, major financial institutions find themselves on the brink of insolvency and whole nations play a game of Russian Roulette with their economies, perhaps the $12 million that was invested in Seesmic can be looked at with more perspective.

How many working class Americans could be employed for a year with $12 million? How many young people could be sent to university with $12 million? How many mortgages could $12 million pay off? How many mouths could $12 million feed?

Of course, these questions are entirely theoretical at this point given that Seesmic has apparently taken $12 million in capital that was ostensibly given to build a legitimate company and managed to reduce it to a modest contract programming gig.