Twitter and Yes, Inc | Hacker News Reader

Twitter and Yes, Inc

yesitsyes.com

28 pointscoloneltcb35 comments

WTF is "Yes, Inc"?

They're so insignificant, they don't even have an Alexa ranking. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yesitsyes.com

None of their products seem popular either: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/getfrenzy.com and http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/itswyd.com

This has SV nepotism all over it. Thankfully, Twitter doesn't have a monopoly so they can't afford to keep doing this.

If I was a Twitter investor, I would be outraged (assuming that this article is true).

>Frenzy is an app for making lightning-fast plans with friends.

So, another chat app? I assume there is some fancy tech behind the scenes?

Edit: These apps don't even have reviews, do they?

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/wyd-what-you-doing/id1106177...

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/frenzy-plan-less.-party-more...

What's going on with this?

My guess: Twitter spent $3,133,731.41 --- and spent at least a month negotiating which magic numbers to encode in the price --- and then flew to the Marianas Islands on Jack Dorsey's private dirigible to eat whale sushi. I read it somewhere on the Internet that that happens all the time with Twitter, the epicenter of valley nepotism: to get acquihired you have to think of at least 2 magic numbers and be the niece or nephew of an executive vice president at Twitter. That's the scam they're running on the public markets, you see.

How you know it's happening here is you can count the app store reviews for their apps. That's the tell-tale sign.

Too many 3s to be coincidence!

Looks like they have some sort of event coordinating app called Frenzy. Which is basically just phone alerts for when people are trying to start a flashmob-style event. https://getfrenzy.com/

And they have something else that just looks like Snapchat-style image overlays/editing called WYD. https://itswyd.com

The name of this sounds like a blatant rip-off of the "Verb, it's what you do" public health campaign in the US. Changed just barely enough to cover themselves from getting sued. https://www.cdc.gov/youthcampaign/index.htm

It also only has 41 likes on the app Facebook page.

Unless there is some IP or hires that they wanted to snatch up, there doesn't appear to be anything of value that couldn't probably be done cheaper in house at Twitter. This seems incredibly frivolous.

GetFrenzy.com, a service of Yes, Inc. for making flash plans is apparently unrelated to GetFrenzy.co, a service of Shopify for making flash sales.

The CEO is joining Twitter as their VP of Product.

Why haven't they just hired him? It's not like this company's products is worth anything as they are shutting everything down. It's shameless acquihire.

What is a "shameless acquihire"?

...the opposite of a "shameful acquihire"?

Maybe they couldn't get him/them to abandon the app without buying it out.

I believe it's being implied that the shame should be in spending all this money to hire a few people (that, supposedly, they could get cheaper on the market). Maybe that they should feel embarrassed in front of investors? That's what I understood.

"Spending all this money"? How much did they spend?

I think you can answer your own rhetorical question. Point taken.

Do you generally have the impression that these acquihires are bonanzas? They aren't: they're usually only marginally more lucrative than the signing package for a senior hire gets anyways, and sometimes less so. Employers gussy them up for team members by giving aggregate numbers, counting on team members not to divide them by 4 and compare them to competing offers. Investors hate them.

The acquihired team is usually only getting two things from them: the founders save face (publicly, not with future investors, who know what an acquihire is), and the whole team gets placed, rather than having to interview individually.

Even that last bit isn't always true.

I meant they are not even trying to act if their apps were gaining any traction. It's more an ego trip than an actual business operation. We live in a free country however.

I'm sorry, I'm not following. If their apps aren't gaining traction, how do you want them to act? Should they apologize for failing? Refuse the offer to allow their team to be acquired?

There's three kinds of hiring in the tech industry. The proles must take an agility course of whiteboard coding interviews that maintain a pretense of objectivity, but actually are loyalty filter tests that only measure how much time are you willing to spend on studying shit books like "Cracking the Code Interview" which have no application in the real world.

Then there's the networked hire who basically lets people know he/she is on the market, and can land a job without having to spend 6 hours at a whiteboard answering trick questions about the space-time complexity of the interviewer's socks.

Finally, the super-networked can get in through an acquihire, so they don't have to feel bad about having spent a couple millions of investor money on their startup sabbatical.

"Coding interviews are the devil" is my favorite HN meme. This post magically appears any time anybody mentions hiring of any kind.

This whole thread is so bad I flagged the story as a form of psychic self-defense.

Like, apparently, the rest of you, I have no idea what "Yes" does, or why I should care. I don't know why 'coloneltcb submitted the story --- they don't work at Yes.

What I do know is that if you run a company --- really any company --- and it winds down, it is a normal thing to write a post like this. In this case, the company apparently has many dozens of users, so it makes even more sense to do it. †

Meanwhile, another perfectly normal thing to do in 2016 is to "acquire" a company as a means of importing a gelled dev team all at once. If the acquired company has no other real prospects, this isn't a bad thing; it's a soft landing. The availability of soft landings makes it easier for all of us to start companies. Since most companies fail anyways, it's hard to see how they hurt users.

Almost every comment on this thread seems to be taking Yes to task for putting a brave face on an acquihire. "Spot the duress acquihire" is one of our less appealing sports here on HN. I wish we'd do some more self examination about where the impulse to play that game comes from.

† We just went through this ourselves, and the anticipation of a thread like this is a big part of why I haven't gotten around to writing it yet.

Each of their apps have 10-50K users. Based on the number of reviews on each, I'd say they're probably on the higher end of that. But let's say they have 100K combined users...how does a company like that even get on Twitter's acquisition radar? I doubt it's for very much - probably more of an acqui-hire situation - but even those can be in the low seven figures. It's interesting that they're doing acqui-hires in the wake of layoffs.

I guess it really is all in who you know.

Twitter seems to be learning best practices of Yahoo. Acquiring small/insignificant products and generate buzz (laugh?) in tech media.

Is there some other buzz I'm missing or is the only buzz we're talking about literally just the blog post the company they acquired wrote to announce they'd been acquired?

I still have a hard time understanding why an early stage acquisition is something to be celebrated in this industry.

Joining Twitter seems like a bad move for any company, hopefully those stock options paid out well.

Lots of acquisition announcements today. 'Tis the season.

Maybe it's a case of 'use it or lose it' for their acquisition budgets with the year coming to a close.

Has there ever been an acquisition announcement that didn't include the word "excited"?

obligatory: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Nice, thanks. Turns out the answer is "yes".

Surprisingly devoid of information.

What do they actually do/make?

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

This is awesome, and sad, just like the Valley.

Acqui-hire?

they joined the sinking ship...

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