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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

I guess the lesson to learn here is "never sell your company if you want to have any controlling influence over it". So we have WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus quickly in a row. Hundreds of killed-off companies acquired by FAANG, visions lost, money made.

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I know it's a useful acronym, but not quite accurate. Netflix doesn't do many [0] acquisitions [1] and isn't on the same scale as the other companies other than as a desirable tech company to work at.

[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/07/netflix-inc-just-m...

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/netflix-acquisition-abq-...

A list like Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo! is probably more accurate, even if the last has itself been acquired.

Term pedantry aside, your point is sound. Tech's incredible journey marches on.

It's a good acronym if you consider companies like the ones mentioned to be included. So because Google is there, Microsoft belongs there. Twitter goes with Facebook, and Spotify goes with Netflix. Yahoo! is missing but it should be IMO. It's neither huge like Google nor socially innovative like Netflix. The five mentioned companies encompass a wide range of powerful tech companies.

It's a concept that works if you don't take it too literally.

Yahoo! is gone, but until recently it used to be a tech empire of its own, acquiring startups (Flickr, Tumblr, etc.) and inventing technologies (Hadoop, Pipes, YQL). I figured they would belong on a list of big buyer tech companies.

Yahoo invented Hadoop?

A Yahoo! contractor invented Hadoop, and the company adopted it for internal use and greatly promoted it:

https://www.wired.com/2011/10/how-yahoo-spawned-hadoop/

I’d describe the acronym as ‘catchy’ more than I’d describe it as ‘useful’.

Yeah, if you lose the N, it becomes inappropriate. And GAF doesn't sound great.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all West Coast tech companies that are in the top 10 largest public companies in the world by market cap. Media should really replace Netflix with Microsoft and come up with a new acronym.

IMO Netflix got on that list because of its reputation for giving good cash-based compensation in ranges that, though they probably also exist at Microsoft, does not come as easily to the rank and file SWE at Microsoft.

Netflix is in there instead of Microsoft because at the point in time Jim Cramer started shouting "FANG" Nextflix stock was a hot buy and Microsoft stock was still firmly in the Ballmer doldrums.

I remember hearing the term on Bloomberg when FAANG stocks were experiencing fantastic gains. Especially Netflix.

GAFAM is pretty common in french. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM

How about MAAAF.

Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Intel, and Amazon = MAFIA ?

>A list like Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo! is probably more accurate

G for Google makes better acronyms, and you can throw in Netflix too: MAY FANG!

Netflix isn't a tech company. They are a media company that happens to use tech to deliver their content.

They're issuing a $2 billion bond offering in order to pay for content [1], and Moody's rates them Ba3 [2], junk grade. We should drop the inclusion of them with large tech firms.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-plans-2-billion-bo...

[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moodys-rates-netflixs-new-...

"Google isn't a tech company. They are an advertising company that happens to use tech to deliver their ads."

I don't know that this is an incorrect statement when looking at how they act. They are only a tech company in that they have decided that tech is their competitive advantage for the ads business.

If google found out tomorrow that focusing on underwater basket weaving gave them a 10% bump in ad revenue over focusing on tech, does anyone here really think they would stay focused on tech?

I guess that was my (badly made) point. It's not that the comment about Netflix isn't _true_, but that in the context of this discussion it's not particularly useful.

Accurate

If you replace alphabet with Google, here's a very catchy acronym: MAGAF.

You are missing Google, lots of Google acquisitions in the past.

What's the lesson here?

Notice how they all vested and then left. Once they are vested then they essentially are working for peanuts compared to what they already have (nobody in the right mind is going to re-grant stock compared to acquisition amount).

I don't see any surprises here.

There are plenty of people who made a bunch of money on an acquisition or an IPO and they are still working because they enjoy it.

The story is that people like that are leaving Facebook because they don't like working there. It doesn't seem like other large tech companies have a similar problem retaining such people.

Most founders of major acquisitions leave after a year or two. The founders of Instagram and WhatsApp were at Facebook for more than 5+ years. That's very rare.

No one is talking about not working, he was talking about working for a tiny amount compared to what they have already made.

Yep.

And with nine houses in California(1) alone, including one of the best oceanfront properties in Laguna Beach(2) bought for $30.8m thanks to Oculus, he is more than okay.

(1) http://www.yolandaslittleblackbook.com/blog/2017/05/08/brend...

(2)http://www.yolandaslittleblackbook.com/blog/2016/06/23/brend...

I would agree with your assessment for IG founders but perhaps less so with Oculus. For IG founders, after you've vested, you are just working on another photo sharing platform, albeit the largest one in the world. The Oculus founders are in a new product category, bring VR to the world. It's perhaps more glamorous, for lack of a better word.

That's always a good lesson, but you have to consider the alternate path. When I look at the list of top shipping VR headsets, every one is from a major company, and all except the Oculus are from hardware companies:

https://www.pcmag.com/article/342537/the-best-virtual-realit...

If Oculus hadn't sold, where would they be? Would they have been able to raise enough money to get even this far? Would they be able to afford to continue? The founders not only got fat paychecks, they got 4 years of backing from one of the richest and best-known companies on the planet.

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who turned down or didn't pursue acquisitions, got crushed by better-funded competitors, and now wish they had sold out early on.

Oculus lost its way by been too serious. Nintendo has shown that fun simple can win. JavaScript has shown that simple to use is a win. Oculus should have focused on great and tooling that made it easy to build VR. They should have provided asset library, JavaScript, so easy that middle and high school kids can do it. At first it will be shitty and a toy but it will find its way. I bought the dev kit because it had Linux support, they dropped support and I tossed the kit

I think far more pragmatically is the moral of story is 'fancy demos do not a company make'.

Facebook really put a lot behind this - far far more than any little company could have.

Also - Facebook has so much power, that when they say 'we're doing this' - a lot will follow suit. Little companies can't do it.

Given the string of failures, what's more likely is that the cost/benefit/value ratios are simply not there yet for consumers.

Yes, it might have been possible for Ocular to just 'keep on truckin' with smaller amounts of VC ... but I significantly doubt it: the market facts are inexorable ...

Facebook gave it a good shot. It is what it is.

If you have > 1 billion dollars anything that you were going to do with the company is likely trivial. Whatsapp was making 1 million in revenue when it was bought by Facebook. The founders became billionaires. If they want they can redo their company (without the users) and still have a billion left. No risk.

Especially if you're more interested in making an exciting toy for rich people instead of a mass market product, Facebook might not be the company you want to sell to.

People with a computer that want true instead of toy VR are hardly ‘rich people’.

Maybe I exaggerated, but $1200 (figure $800 for a computer and $400 for the Rift) is a much bigger ask than $400. So they’re basically targeting a subset of the existing high-end PC gamer market and would have a very hard time growing it beyond people who already own a computer with the required specs. It’s a much more expensive toy and much harder to sell. You also need to set up a bunch of cameras for tracking, and to get the most out of it requires a 10x10 open space near your computer, which is something I’ve never managed to have.

Plus the high requirements are pegging the whole product’s market viability on “I hope blockchain people don’t fuck up the whole GPU market for several years again!” Price of a GTX 1070 is basically the same as it was at launch more than two years ago ($400ish), and it went up and back down in the meantime. Oculus owning the complete unit sidesteps this concern.

I think it’s a bit of a bummer, especially since OC5’s presentation touched on neat PC focused stuff like their VR Substance Painter demo. But it’s unsurprising from a Facebook perspective.

I was hoping that the Quest’s USB-C charging port secretly implements VirtualLink and would effectively become a new higher-res Rift with inside-out tracking in addition to its standalone capabilities, but with Iribe’s departure that seems less likely.

> So we have WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus quickly in a row.

> FAANG

Well, all those you mentioned are all in Facebook.

Many have their first clash when investors push for some direction. However many of those "startups" never are profitable. A new owner not only wants to change that, but also integrate with their remaining company to improve synergies ...

Or rather be careful with who you sell it to. Companies like Omnicom generally let companies they acquire do whatever they want within a wider pool of resources. Though, it seems as if 'tech companies' are a bit more controlling...

They always tighten the noose, year by year.

Maybe a little less than some other companies, depending on how the acquisition contracts are written.

He'd LOVE Hewlett Packard /S

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