Nearly Entire Staff Laid Off at Eons, Says Founder Jeff Taylor

[Updated with additional information, Nov. 18, 2010]–-Boston baby boomer and social networking site Eons, which has raised $32 million in two rounds of financing led by two venture capital giants—General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital—yesterday laid off nearly its entire remaining staff, founder Jeff Taylor said tonight.

Taylor, who previously founded Monster.com, revealed the layoff news during his keynote talk tonight at a VIP dinner leading up to tomorrow’s MIT Venture Capital Conference. We could not directly follow up with Taylor but will report back as we gather additional details. The fate of Eons itself could not be confirmed.

Eons launched in 2006. Its latest venture round was a $22 million Series B round that closed in March 2007. Since then Eons has struggled to reinvent itself. Originally founded as an Internet portal for the aging Baby Boomer crowd, it had the slogan “Lovin’ Life on the Flip Side of 50.” But after spending a lot of money with little traction, it removed its over-50 age limit early in 2008 as part of a bid to remake itself as a more general social networking site.

Update, November 18, 9:40 pm—

We caught up with Taylor briefly after his talk tonight. He says he laid off seven of the 12 remaining Eons employees, leaving it with just five staffers. He said the intent behind the move was to focus his remaining resources on Meetcha.com, an Eons-developed dating site for people over 40 that launched in December 2009.

Author: Erin Kutz

Erin Kutz has a background in covering business, politics and general news. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Erin previously worked in the Boston bureau of Reuters, where she wrote articles on the investment management and mutual fund industries. While in college, she researched for USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell’s book, Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. She also spent a semester in Washington, DC, reporting Capitol Hill stories as a correspondent for two Connecticut newspapers and interning in the Money section of USA Today, where she assisted with coverage on the retail and small business beats. Erin got her first taste of reporting at Boston University’s independent student newspaper, as a city section reporter and fact checker and editor of the paper’s weekly business section.