Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games | Hacker News Reader

Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games

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101 pointsraghus61 comments

"If Slide cashes out for $1.5 billion, Levchin 'would regard it as abject failure'," Slide investor David Weiden of Khosla Ventures told BusinessWeek in 2007.

source: http://www.businessinsider.com/if-slide-cashes-out-for-15-bi...

edit: note that PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

Wow, talk about hype. That kind of quote is like bubble era speculation, just feeding the frenzy. I always wondered why Slide was kept in such high regard when all they made was slideshows and facebook apps. I mean, sure the guy has a reputation, but what were they making that was so noteworthy and game changing?

$182 Million may sound like a lot, but remember that not too long ago this company was raising capital at a valuation of $2 billion. I expect there will be little cash, if any, left for employees after investor payouts.

Do you have a source for the $2bn valuation. I've seen (+ personally remember) a $0.5bn figure but can't source $2bn.

Thanks

That's from the same guy who says Facebook is worth $100b http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/01/vc-sees-2b-ipo/

If they bought in at $2B valuation wouldn't that just mean they lost money and there would still be whatever percent of the shares / $182m that weren't sold to the investor's left?

Depends on liquidity preferences.

Max is awesome and I love his attitude. But I just never ever understood Slide. And why Google would buy Slide is equally difficult to understand, if not more. Are they buying technology? Or users (on Facebook!)? Or revenues (most likely not!)? Or Max and his team?

Why Google buying Slide? Probably some VC, who invested in Slide, also sit on Google's board. That's why ;)

I agree. This type of thing happens all too often.

+1 to that. I think that is the best explanation. Sometimes the best way to get a face-saving exit in the Valley is to be VC funded and by the right guys who make sure all their bets get some sort of an exit. I know of a similar one in the recent past.

It's the same reason they partnered with Zynga. It's a backdoor way to get at large chunks of Facebook profile data for ad targeting.

I hadn't considered this angle: are you able to flesh out the degree to which they will be able to do this?

I'm non-technical, so it's not immediately clear to me:

* the potential increase in cashflow yields from improving ad targeting (what change will it make? isn't google pretty good at this already?) * How the data from Zynga & Slide will flow out of the facebook ecosystem and into the broader web (is your slide identity linked to your google search identity somehow?)

I'd appreciate any thoughts that occur to you. Still puzzling over the point of a back-door into facebook user data and what that might bring. Could they export that into a google profile? Would an understanding of what individuals "like" and "dislike" in concert with knowledge of their social graph's likes and dislikes lead to more targeted advertising?

I guess those are the questions that google bought the company to answer: 182m is not that much in terms of earnings for them, and they might have been able to pay in stock.

Thanks for getting my mind whirring.

You can get some small amount of information about a person via Facebook publicly, but to really get at all the info, the user needs to authorize their Facebook account to the app. Zynga and Slide have tens of millions of people who've done this for their apps, if not more.

All Google has to do is put an ad on all the Zynga and Slide pages that passes them the Facebook UID of the current user, and it could become part of their ad targeting. Then they can get the actual Facebook data from Zynga and Slide.

Google wants everyone to give this info to them directly, that's what Google.Me, Google Buzz, and all their different social experiments have been about. But that hasn't been working out so well, so these deals are a cheap way to make sure they can still get at the Facebook profile data.

Really? I think Google, Microsoft and a couple others like RapLeaf already have a ton of Facebook profile data already.

Social network composes of three parts: social graph, reach applications, and games. Slide provides social media applications and the expertise to make them. The part about FB profile data is not true, and based on ToS, they wouldn't be able to use it.

This does not make sense.

I am the developer of two Facebook apps, Friend Interview and Quiz Monster. I would argue those two apps are more valuable than Slide's and there is no way they are worth $182 million.

What is Google buying?

Epic talent?

Google is buying distribution across many social networks in lots of countries, and a team 100+ smart engineers and product designers.

That Slide has 100 any human beings working on essentially a slideshow flash widget, a couple embedded video players, and a patronizing knock-off social game is incredulous. If they can fetch that number, then whateverlife should've been worth a billion.

This may be where we see Hunter Thompson's high water mark for the Social Web, where the tides broke and rolled back.

Quiz Monster and Friend Interview have a bigger userbase both international and in the US than Slide's apps. Granted I'm only looking at FB here, but IMO that is the only social network that matters. I work solo and believe that my apps could be run with just one educated rails developer. Isnt that a better buy than a smaller app that needs 100 eningeers?

And I'm not some special case here. There are a handful of Indy fb devs with bigger apps than mine.

This deal makes zero sense to me.

Buy some foosball tables and hire some engineers. You'll be rolling in it in no time.

I'll never understand why Max took his Paypal money and built an online widget company. Hopefully he'll attempt something meaningful next time.

Like his meaningful investing in WePay (which does seem meaningful) -http://www.businessinsider.com/max-levchin-is-pretty-excited...

Or Yelp.

Slide was originally supposed to be a revolutionary way to organize and share photos. But they found monetization in the social network sphere and seemed to focus on that.

Slide started out as a global recommendation push engine for shopping items. They pivoted to a widget company when it took off.

You can tell the suits have taken over at google, at least in acquisitions. This makes no sense at all.

Slide? Really? They couldn't have picked a much worse company to buy there, except RockYou. Slide got a bunch of users early by making Facebook apps that gave it functionality MySpace had like ability to post videos and photos to friends' walls. Those kinds of apps never monetized well, and all of that stuff unsurprisingly ended up on Facebook's roadmap anyway.

You can't really compare the two. RockYou doesn't really focus on the widgets as much as games / ad network these days (although truth be told you can't really see it if you swing by rockyou.com or visit the crunchbase profile, which is really out of date).

The ad network side of things is really strong and doing lots of interesting things.

I've run these ads on my apps, and purchased them. No ad network on Facebook is making anything substantial.

They do have a couple games doing well lately.

If $182m is the true price it's a total firesale. They raised $78m at a $500m valuation.

With costs, liquidation preferences, etc I wonder if the common shareholders will see anything. Even BI is correct at $228m it's pretty slim pickings.

My guess is Google want Levchin to be GM of the new Google social network (he has experience of social thru Slide and payments thru PayPal of course) and this is really a talent acquisition as much as anything.

For 182 mil this has got to be a lot of talent...

Isn't that toad from Microsoft who was previously heading up the Android effort the guy slotted to take over Google Me? As cute as Slide is I really don't see very much about it that screams "social"; its not much more social that Google Docs and if Google has any intention of playing in the next big game it has to do much, much better than this.

toad from microsoft?

Google Me? (its not named yet)

you make it sounds like your an insider and know these guys personally (if so correct me) but it just seems inappropriate.

Given that Slide has received $78M in funding this exit does not look very exciting to my eyes.

Nevertheless, congratulations to Max for yet another sold company.

I saw that and wondered where $78 million goes in creating a games site. That seems like a tremendous amount of money. Oh well, congrats I suppose.

Sales force + marketing, maybe.

Most of it is ad spend, essentially insulating the company from challengers by creating an artificial barrier to entry. It's now nearly impossible to compete in the space unless you're very well funded or cater to a niche.

I always thought that Levchin's PayPal experience would give Slide an opportunity to dominate the micropayments space that is generating so much revenue for competing social games companies. That thought wasn't very well fleshed-out (what specific advantages would it have given Slide? Was handling payments really a key pain point for Zynga et al?), but it still seems like a big missed opportunity to me.

It's funny: on one hand Slide seems such a feeble business proposition compared to the mighty PayPal, but on the other hand photo sharing has been the very thing that's fuelled so much consumer activity over the last decade (Facebook, MySpace, camera phones, memes...). What's the word on Slide's arch rival, RockYou or whatever it's called - valued higher than Slide?

There was another idea that came out of the Maxcubator at the same time as Slide, can't remember what it was (i read it in The Facebook Story) may have involved Peter Theil, it seemed like the best idea but Levchin passed it up for The Slide concept.

There was another idea that came out of the Maxcubator at the same time as Slide, can't remember what it was

Maybe you're thinking of Yelp.

rockyou is doing quite well- def bigger then Slide. They just signed a 5 yr deal with facebook for using fb credits in all social games http://tcrn.ch/adWPTK

I remember Max Levchin mentioning in an interview that Slide would be a success to him if it sells for more than PayPal. I hope he is still happy with this outcome, looking forward to seeing what he will do next.

Possibly a talent acquisition of Levchin. If he doesn't quit, it seems like a good purchase.

If that's the case, why not just pay him $100 million directly and cut out the middlemen?

Because he wants to do another startup, and he owes his investors BIG TIME.

Those folks are taking a huge financial hit. He convinces Google to buy the company as a favor to them. If he just dumps the company and takes a huge bonus from Google, he loses a lot of friends, and has a hell of a time getting funding next time.

So he's going to do his time at Google. 5 years of startup purgatory. And when he comes out, he'll have a few friends ready to put a couple million behind his next venture.

i hope he goes and works with wepay on the payments space

Does Slide utilize Zynga-style dirty tricks to psychologically manipulate users to their detriment? If so, and if Google continues such products or starts their own using such tricks, that’s evil in my book.

I don't get why you are being downvoted. I know game mechanics are hot right now but you are making a valid point. If we're not careful we're going to turn the whole internet in a giant skinner box.

$182M for a bunch of widgets? Looks like Google is getting desperate here.

Biz insider says sales price @ $228m

Not a huge percentage more but I wouldn't complain about another $46m :)

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-just-bought-slide-for-...

What does Slide... do?

Last I heard, they were still trying to figure it out :)

I've always wondered this myself.

As near as I can tell it makes 14 y/o girls happy. I can wrap my head around a lot of small companies going big, but I never could find a way to rationalize the hype behind slide.

I always thought it was another case of Founder-itis. Popular founder = press = perceived popular product (almost no matter what it does) = good exit or a pity exit.

I think most people who have a Myspace account use Slide to display pictures.

had no ideas they were a game company.. thought they just did picture slide shows

Slide illustrates "Stick to the point and say it in a single sentence. I know it sounds a little crazy, but indeed I’ve come to agree that a clear, compelling elevator pitch is essential to growing a business. (And I’ve paid dearly for the evidence.)" http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2006/01/practicing-art...

I think a lot of products are trivial. I don't use facebook. the slide slideshow thing looks ...stupid. But then I do understand that if you plague the entire internet with your "stupid" widget, you build a broadcasting platform. Even to the extent of that article about companies monetizing internet-user browsing profiles (beacons, 3rd party tracking cookies etc). Slide can make money installing these shady cookies across all of its trillion of pages. Sure don't know the actual numbers, but being a plague on the internet does have value.

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