Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

The scale I'm thinking about is "Are you really in the store you say you're in?" where all users are from the same fairly dense city. So geolocating the IP isn't good enough. Accuracy to a city block or two seems good enough though.

My best idea so far is to submit a list of available wifi access points, and use that as a "password" to prove that you're where you say you are. If your list is 80% like the list of other users at that location, we trust you.

Unfortunately in iOS you can't get that list! It requires a private API, so calling that method will get your app rejected from the store.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

I used it up until they asked for a real phone number. It was kinda cute, but yea, mostly filled with college students. Depending on where I travelled in the world, there may have been messages from three weeks ago on the top for that area. I was surprised how many remote areas had at least a few yackers; although very few non-English posts.

I think my favourite Yak: "If you ever feel down about Uni, just remember there's still someone from your home town trying to make it as a rapper."

There do need to be two conditions met to bring in the big bucks though: 1) you need to perform, such that your value to the employer is > $1M, and 2) they need to be afraid of losing you. Many employees fail on one or both conditions. They either slack off or don't work on the right things (so they're not actually worth that much), or they're "company men" who will unquestioningly stay with the company regardless of whether they're compensated fairly.

I think this would be a cool thing to have, but one of the key things for YY was the anonymity. Linking with FB would have killed that (as forcing users to create usernames did).

(Partly this is because the rules of the game prevent replacing Lionel Messi with 1,000 cheap non-Western consultants hired through three layers of outsourcing)

By going at it collectively, it reduces perceives downside risk. Also, it reduces Square side's risk that one or more key people it wants would balk at the individual offer. By offering a group deal, it pressures everyone to join, since human nature is to not want to sabotage the communal good for your own benefit, especially when you've worked together for years.

It may also permit a more holistic retention package for the next 4 years for this team and keep VCs happy.

It's called an "acquisition" as a face-saving mechanism for the company's founders and investors. It lets them go to investors for their next startup [or fund] saying "Yeah, we [our portfolio company] were acquired by Square", which sounds a lot nicer than "We shut down the company and then Square hired all our people." The acquirer wins, the employees win, the founders & investors save face, and the losers are future investors who don't delve too deeply into what "acquired" means.

The exact same reason bullying could happen was the exact reason people loved it (anonymity).

Group A (parents, schools, etc) wanted complete de-masking + real-world identity while Group B (the users) wanted some anonymity with no real-world identity.

Yik-Yak could've never won as far as I can see.

The unique commentary was what made it, there was essentially humor that everyone could relate to and the unique perspectives people felt were too uncomfortable to share with their persona attached. It was fascinating to watch what would come up over the day

Yes. If you acquire a company, you assume all their liabilities as well as the assets. You might want to just buy the assets and have the acquisition owners dissolve it themselves to keep the liabilities at bay.

In ATL, can confirm. That's not to say there aren't good engineers here.