"Google bought my first startup today. I learned to make stuff here on proggit."
reddit.com
reddit.com
Anything over a few hundred K deserves the benefit of the doubt.
If your service gets shut down after the acquisition that's not a good indicator that they bought the startup, that's an indicator that they bought you.
In a proper acquisition the team and the product matter, and the product will not normally be discarded after taking over (there are some exceptions to that, but this is not one of those by the looks of it).
In this case, the acquisition was for an undisclosed amount, the TC article guesses $6M but why is not detailed.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/08/google-confirms-acquisition...
So, I'm curious if plannr will be shut down or will be allowed to continue and develop.
The fact that "Having met at Stanford, Eidelson will be Product Manager and Prado will be Software Engineer of a new project they declined to mention at Google." does not bode well for plannr, after all with the two founders working on other stuff it might not survive for long.
Possibly a team of googlers will take over the running of the site or maybe it will be integrated in to other google services.
But even then, where you end up might be very different than where you were heading.
That said, either way, congratulations to the guy. It takes a lot of work to develop something that interests anyone (whether it's our users, Google, or someone else). Maybe his next one will be worthy of your appreciation and congratulations.
Then again, entrepreneurs learn early on that they can't and should not try to please everyone.
> I hope it wasn't a technical acquisition, because then obviously this guy was a failure and no where near as cool as rockstar dot com bazillionaires like you.
You seem to have a completely wrong impression of me, if you feel like discussing that further feel free to email me, address in my profile.
According to a screenshot in the Reddit thread of a mail allegedly sent by Plannr, it will be shut down.
Which is fine. It just begs the question:
How much would someone have to pay you to drown X months of development work and your entire userbase in the Deadpool?
It's an interesting question. For how many people is a buyout, a 9 - 5 job, and some 0s in the bank account a desirable, worthwhile exit strategy? How many 0s does it take to make an option that's viable into one that's desirable?
Destruction is so much easier than creation. They don't have to pay you, they just need to send the in-house destruction team.
> How many 0s does it take to make an option that's viable into one that's desirable?
How much does it take to fix a "man barely alive" into something that is "better, stronger, faster"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoLs0V8T5AA
After all if you believe Lean Startup ideas, the biggest problem that a startup faces is an idea that has not been vetted by costumers.
I assume that even though those startups don't have products that are interesting enough for Google to keep working on them, in order to get noticed (and eventually bought) those startups had to show solid traction numbers so those ideas are already vetted by costumers. The biggest startup risk has been removed.
All that's left is good execution. It might not be a good business for Google, but could be a good business for a small team.
With that said, I think I agree with the less hateful comments that Google bought the programmers behind the startup, not the product itself (though that was a bonus). Kind of like PG and others focus on the founders themselves as much if not more than their current product idea.
all you learn about, is the founder's age, location and a short description of what the site did. For a reddit post, I was expecting details on how they got the deal, traffic numbers etc.