Google Acquires Omnisio (YC Winter 08)
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Just for my education: say that TechCrunch is correct and they did sell for $15 million and that YC took 6% equity in the company. Does that mean that that YC gets a $900,000 payday too? Or is it more complicated than that?
That's interesting though. Sacca is an Omnisio advisor, and also was the Director of Special Initiatives at Google.
Doubt they had any scaling issues with virtually no traffic.
I assume they did an angel round and took tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars. Probably just so that they could afford to pay for salaries and whatever minimal necessities they had.
First found out about Omnisio from the synced DHH talk at Startup School, and thought it was brilliant. Awesome that Google thinks it is too :)
Why did Google/Youtube spend $15mil acquiring the company instead of creating a similar service? I think more than the technology itself, Google would like to hire the Omnisio team.
When you make an acquisition, you inherit not just code, but you inherit the massive amounts of iterations the product went through. That's part of the problem these days: everyone looks at a product and they forget the painstaking amount of time and dedication that went into getting it that far. It took a lot of sleepless nights and coffee.
Not to mention, you're inheriting the users (which also have an acquisition cost, even to Omnisio, it may have been going around and talking to people individually about feature requests and bugs, etc).
In addition, you're acquiring the talent behind the startup. These are people who not just understand how to code, but they develop products with the user in mind. They have the determination and persistence to get updates done and out the door. If you sit these guys in front of a board, or in front of investors, they have already proven that they will not flake out or give up. This is something that sounds trivial, but a lot of people lack the self-motivation to direct a project like this into completion and market adoption.
I'm missing a lot of other things, but that gives you an idea that the startup you look at is far more than just pages that show stuff.
Also, major props to the really strong UI work at Omnisio. UI is becoming one of the most overlooked aspects of technology. People focus a lot on the engineering or code or architecture or scaling, but forget that the usability is really what makes it enjoyable to use the product in the first place.
http://omnisio.com/startupschool08
But, if one sells out, the startup never goes on to acquire other companies as seen at Sun, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc. Perhaps only early players in any industry or application type can obtain such growth to stave off the gorillas and sharks, and resist the temptation to be acquired in order to vye for a shot at the IPO brass ring.
Well done all at Omnisio!