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Comment by matt1 | Hacker News Reader

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matt1

Good article.

Does anyone know about how much DropSend sold for?

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Unfortunately the buyer wouldn't let me say. Needless to say, it was pretty nice :)

You could cough n times and sneeze m times, where your sale price is nem.

[edit: nem as in n*10^m]

Actually, all we care about are the sneezes.

Hey Ryan, I've been following this from a distance ever since you'd started blogging about what it took to build dropsend and heyamigo. I think there's probably a lot of people here that haven't seen the barenakedapp website that would love to. Any chance you could put it back up?

Good Job btw, it takes a lot of courage to buck the trend and be so open about the whole process, but I'm learning a lot from your experiences, so thanks.

> [serious buyers] don’t want [the price] available to competitors

Anyone know why?

This is normal business practice. If you know, then the companys competitors know too. From the price they can infer all kinds of things. If you paid above market price maybe it is a strategic asset, if you paid below market price maybe it isn't central to the core strategy but too good to pass over. Etc.

It's normal business practice but that doesn't mean it's logical. The real reason in most cases is just that most people and businesses consider anything to do with money to be private.

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This has some well-known negative side-effects. I've occasionally wondered what it would be like to work in an environment where internal transparency at least was the rule rather than the exception.

I suspect it would only work for organizations that were less than the non-exclusive Dunbar number in size.

In the organisation I work in we deliberately have an explicit transparency rule. We are quite small at this point, but it is very nice to be able to have open discussions around just about anything.

Richardo Semler's company Semco has been working for years on very open internal information flows with good results, in larger organisations than what we have. I recommend reading his book Maverick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

They declined to say: http://www.carsonified.com/dropsend/carsonified-sells-dropse...

They blogged about the process in 2006.

http://www.carsonified.com/misc/dropsend-acquisition-talks-f...

http://www.carsonified.com/misc/things-potential-buyers-are-...

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