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Comment by jonathanmarcus | Hacker News Reader

$200MM is a lot of money. It seems rather unsavory and uncool that Google bailed out Levchin and their investors.

Why are you convinced that this was a "bail out"? Why is it unsavory if Google thought that the team and its expertise was worth $200M? Google clearly was trying to get into social at the time, and this team did have a lot of interesting ideas in that space. Plus it seems that most of them are sticking around.

You seem to be attaching a lot of motivation behind the acquisition that I haven't seen elsewhere.

What were some of their 'interesting' ideas? Are you familiar with Slide's history as a start-up? Nothing but hype. Always jumping from one bandwagon (widgets and ad networks) to the next using every anti-consumer trick in the book to generate traffic. No authenticity to any of their pursuits, just a means to sell 'users' to advertisers. Talent acquisitions don't go for $200MM.

I hate to agree with you. Slide was never original at all. However they do have some social networking and gaming experience. This is just like Zynga snapping development companies.

Disco was fairly interesting app. Google even came out with a similar product in Huddles. On top of that, they had a fairly successful social app, which I suspect is exactly what Google wanted out of the acquisition (their social expertise).

But why would Google have any interest in "bailing" them out? Regardless of whether you think they were worth the money, I think it's a stretch to call it a bail out as if Google was using its corporate money to pay friends off. I suspect Google just saw a good team with some decent projects and interesting ideas, and used it to add to their social expertise.

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