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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

We all know SimpleGeo was a failure. It doesn't count as an acquisition. It failed, and the founders moved on to Urban Airship.

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The co-founders left to work on new ventures. There's Joe Stump's Sprint.ly, and Matt Galligan's Circa.

For anyone that is trying to find something on Circa ... seems it is still in stealth. Might save you some time Googling.

To be fair, that's not true at all. It was an acquisition in every sense of the word at the time. SimpleGeo, customers, tech and team were acquired (apart from us founders).

Was SimpleGeo not profitable? Is there a particular part of the service that is more popular?

It seems this is the accepted wisdom among the posters here. For those of us not in the Valley/Portland, what were the signs that an acquisition was due to business failure?

One poster said most companies that get acquired are shut down within the year (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458414). This appears ridiculous on its face (or there needs to be a mass migration from Heroku), but what other symptoms should folks have been looking for here? I'm interested in objective measures that one might reasonably use in evaluating vendors. I'm specifically not interested in things like how many/few job postings they run on Stack Overflow, the chatter at the last San Jose Ruby Meetup, VC blog posts, etc.

Well, one sign is that the exit price was about a third of the money they raised.

Thanks for the help, but that's not exactly what I was looking for. For instance, I'd have needed ready access to the amount of their total capital raise and the exit price. Exit prices are usually not published, and I don't believe this one was published. So that's still kind of an "Inside Baseball" answer. I was looking for more objective answers, but perhaps the only way anyone here knew SimpleGeo was doomed was by staying current on the scuttlebutt. Unfortunately, that doesn't really scale.

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