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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is/did Bebop make/do?

I'm posting from a throwaway because I have fairly intimate knowledge of Bebop.

The reality is that they built and rebuilt several "enterprise" applications and pieces of technology. At one point it was a API based database, and then an application, and the latest iteration was an ATS built on top of their proprietary database. No one at their company could tell me what they actually did because there wasn't an aligned vision from their management. Alas, they had senior people formerly from VMWare and Diane Green at the helm. The company existed for roughly 2 years and wasn't able to actually produce customer working software from what I could tell. The acquisition was a straight up acquihire to get senior enterprise software folks on board to help build Google's presence there.

What is "an ATS"? Applicant tracking system? Above top secret?

Can you share roughly how many employees would have come in the aquihire? $380M is a big number.

Interesting that Diane is donating her $148MM - why pay that much to acquire her if it's going to be just donated?

Not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just curious.

I think she is already wealthy enough from the VMW IPO (if not even before that). At this time, she's probably more concerned with her long term legacy, so putting this money into a charity account (DAF) is probably the best decision. The money gets to be invested tax free, and she still has the full option of what to do with it later when she's got more time and/or opportunities.

Isn't this exactly what the Zucks are doing with they wealth?

Or if she really wanted to be charitable distribute her shares to the rank and file employees before the sale via an EBT (assuming the USA has such a thing)

That would have been epic PR - but considering they may all land jobs at Google - I doubt these guys are suffering financially themselves

The USA is not like the EU where TUPE applies and every one moves over to the acquiring company.

And should not all the employees share in the windfall equally (sorry if thats a bit socialist for HN)

An ATS is typically an Applicant Tracking System.

I applaud Diane for her generous donation, but what about the investors and employees who basically got a huge payday from their rich uncle Google? It's hard to feel like this is not a rigged system.

As someone with almost 15 years experience developing and managing developers of enterprise applications (internally, within a large IT organization), I can say somewhat authoritatively that no one wants clicky-draggy app builders. No one wants Oracles or SAPs, either, but there is a relatively inexpensive, logical middle ground.

The kinds of Bebopy things that have succeeded (I guess, not knowing any financial details) are usually in the high-6, low-7 figures to license, and then you still need to build out your dev & support teams (thinking of things like PEGA Systems, for example). The other option includes things like the various BPMN platforms & front ends, but that only handles workflow apps. This is why companies like Capriza & similar have been successful: they screen scrape & leverage public APIs to let devs easily build mobile UIs on top of legacy enterprise cruft. The cruft still exists, but it's hidden. Win-win (except for the cost-containing CIO).

This was a long winded way of saying Google could have done a much better job of smartly hiring senior enterprise software folks.

I found a few bits and pieces searching around. The most specific thing was a few bullet points from the resume of a person that did an internship at Bebop:

• Implemented modular front-end components & architecture to enable rapid app development on the bebop platform

• Designed an intelligent peoples directory by surfacing relationships within an enterprise by analyzing the bebop entity dataset

So, some sort of cloud RAD tool.

Indeed it's very unclear, though some little bits from a previous announcement[1]: "bebop is a new development platform that makes it easy to build and maintain enterprise applications."

I guess it was vague on purpose[2]: "[bebop] had not publicly said anything about its technology, operating in so-called stealth mode."

[1]: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.tw/2015/11/investing-in-...

[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/technology/google-picks-di...

So a company with zero customers, brand, or other non-reproducible assets is worth almost $400m..? I'd be asking questions about this if I was a Google shareholder...

What was acquihired was the cream of the cream from a company that created a whopping $50B+ market at its peak. At its core you have ~30 distributed computing legends and a pretty neat leaders at the top.

Good question - I was wondering the same. A quick Google took me to their site, which did a wonderful job of telling me pretty much nothing:

"We build products based on how people work. We are focused on redesigning workplace tools so that everyone can be productive and communicate with ease."

So... they make/do what now? How does a company like that get bought out for so much?

Its kind of hard from their website to figure out what they do.

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