Ted Mann is now president of Slyce, the public company that acquired SnipSnap

On Jan. 29, 2015, CEO Ted Mann announced that his couponing app, SnipSnap, had been snapped up by Toronto-based public company Slyce for $6.5 million. Mann, who had funded the company with local investors and grown it to more than 4 million users, said he’d keep the company at its Center City headquarters.
“This is a great outcome for us,” Mann told us back in January 2015.
Is this an even better outcome? Late on April 4, 2016, Slyce announced that Mann would run the entire company.

So honored and humbled to be asked to lead @SlyceIt, the parentco that acquired @snipsnapapp a year ago. #BIGday https://t.co/CkQr51Cug8

— Ted Mann (@turkeymonkey) April 5, 2016

He’ll be Slyce’s president, replacing president and CEO Mark Elfenbein.
“Although a difficult decision, it is the right time for me to step back and let the team take the vision that we have now, execute on it, and make the Company stronger,” Elfenbein said in a statement.
Dale Johnson, Slyce’s board chairman, said the board had “a very high level of confidence in [Mann’s] proven skill set, passion and leadership.”
The move comes as Slyce’s stock price hovers around 8 cents a share, just above the 52-week low of 7 cents a share. Since the time of the SnipSnap acquisition, the stock price has tanked precipitously (though, it should be said, the all-time high is just $1.17). Slyce’s stock price momentarily jumped when, in November 2015, Toronto venture capital firm Quest Ventures made a hostile bid to take over the company, which Slyce rejected.
The hiring announcement may still be good news for Philadelphia’s tech scene: Mann currently runs a 14-person shop out of Center City — Slyce’s consumer app division, which includes SnipSnap and two other apps — but plans to grow operations here.
“Nothing to announce yet,” he wrote in an email, “but we will have some new folks joining soon.”
After Artisan Mobile got acquired last summer, Mann scooped up Chris Baglieri, now SnipSnap’s VP of engineering, and Audrey Troutt, SnipSnap’s director of mobile development.
But it also sounds like his new job will involve cutting staff. “Mr. Mann and Slyce’s Board have collaborated on a plan to continue reducing non-essential operating expenses, while also increasing sales velocity via channel partnerships and authorized resellers,” the press release said.
Slyce, a venture-backed company that’s traded on Canada’s TSX Venture Exchange, employs 86. Most of the company’s employees work on the B2B side of things, on a white-labeled visual search function that powers apps for big brands like Best Buy, JCPenney and Home Depot.
Since the acquisition, SnipSnap has launched a new image recognition of their own called Scout. Unrelatedly, NBA star Stephen Curry recently launched a social media startup called Slyce.