LinkedIn Is Acquiring Contacts Start-Up Rapportive (YC S10) | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn Is Acquiring Contacts Start-Up Rapportive (YC S10)

allthingsd.com

169 pointssahillavingia35 comments

Rapportive is best amongst the products that add social profiles so this is an awesome outcome. Congratulations to the team!

I always wondered how they could turn it into a business, though. Its useful but tough to say you'd pay for it and Google and others could add it easily, which they have done.

One of my Fav tool. I hope its here to stay :) I am not sure if its talent hire.

Rappotive can go to places where even google can't. Google People ( alternative to rappotive ) gives you info only from Google network. They are restricted in a way to go beyond their own network.

Truly a great product ! Congrats to the team.

Sometimes I wonder if its the investors who push for this acquisition. Reading though their blog it seemed Rappotive was building a premium product.

I hope this doesnt get shut down. Rapportive is one of the few things I use every day. LinkedIn kept CardMunch going so I hope they do the same with Rapportive.

I doubt they'll shut it down. This is likely a play to compete with Xobni's Smartr for Gmail (though they have a bit different functionality).

http://www.xobni.com/download/gmail

Is that a market that LinkedIn want to compete in? I can see a tenuous link, but it doesn't seem to be part of their core business. I am sure that time will tell, but I suspect that they bought Rapportive for the talent.

Linkedin is completely embedded in my email experience, and they have Rapportive to thank for it. I suspect I'm not the only one, so it probably makes sense to keep the service running.

I didn't realise it was such a big deal. Any chance you could spell out what the key benefits are to you? I use LinkedIn to read up (i.e. spy) on people quite a bit if I am going to be working with them but I don't know why this would be useful for people who are already emailing me.

Sure. The key benefit in a nutshell: it makes context switching less painful.

I'm introduced by email to a lot of people I don't know - new and potential customers, new and potential partners, lots and lots of potential hires, etc. A fair number of these introductions evolve into two-way conversations. And, as probably everybody here, my overall dose of email is way too high.

The result of all this is constant context switching between too many mental threads. Rapportive makes each context switch slightly easier. In aggregate that saves me immense amounts of mental cycles.

Are you on any mailing lists ? do you receive unsolicited business emails ?

Rapportive completely removes the friction from looking up people.

I don't use Rapportive, but the idea that when I receive an e-mail it might tell me "you don't know this person, but your coworker Bob knows him from their old company together" (which is what LinkedIn generally provides) is compelling enough that if I used Gmail I'd be installing it right now.

Title should be "LinkedIn may be acquiring Rapportive".

Neither company has commented, and Gannes' unnamed source doesn't appear to know whether the deal has closed.

is acquiring works too, as they are in process of getting acquired. :)

For context, this submission's original title on HN was "LinkedIn Acquires Contacts Start-Up Rapportive (YC S10)". About an hour ago, it was changed to "is acquiring" to better reflect the linked article's headline on AllThingsD, as I'd suggested above.

I invested in etacts which didn't get very far, so I ended up passing on Rapportive. Wonder if I made a mistake.

At this point it looks like you might have answered your own question.

Not all acquisitions are good for investors.

Based on numbers from TechCrunch, looks like investors got a 3.75x.

According to TC: Rapportive raised 1M on 3M pre and got acquired for 15M.

I still miss Etacts and would miss Rapportive in a similar way, I hope the two early exits will inspire a new take.

I love the idea.

Early exits are not necessarily a positive (or negative) sign.

Wow, congratulations! I wonder if they'll post about how being bought by a public corporation is different from a late-stage private startup.

Great for them! I've used Rapportive for a while and always been happy with the service, even though I've never paid a dime.

Congrats to a fellow YCS10 company! The Rapportive team rocks.

Great tool & a great outcome for Rahul & team. Congratulations.

Has been one of the most useful tools for me as it just pulls up all the necessary profile information based on email id. Hope it doesn't get shut down or trivialized because of the acquisition.

Not a half bad deal, as long as LinkedIn doesn't screw with the already working systems Rapportive has. Maybe they can add more data from LinkedIn profiles with it?

Congrats to the founders! I hope they keep it going as it is. Maybe with some deeper LinkedIn integration! (that would be great)

This bodes well for the other start-ups in the personal CRM arena, Contactually, Xobni, etc. More funding and M&A to follow.

I think the business model is definitely to sell to someone else consolidating in the sector. I use this and have used Xobni but don't need the services enough to pay for them like most people I suspect. It's genuinely useful for people who don't know how their email search works and for those who want to track people down though.

Used this product from its early beta. It is pretty useful. Happy for the Rapportive team. They have slacked off in the recent past, probably because of the acquisition. I have started using Xobni's Smartr for the past week, because of their mobile app.

Did Gmail not integrate similar functionality into the latest version? A good acquire.

Anyone have any insight into LinkedIn's strategy with this acquisition? Have seen them nab a few other companies in the space. Talent grabs? Curious to hear your thoughts.

Great, now I'll have to stop using this tool. Rapportive is great, but who knows how long before I'll have to opt out of LinkedIn putting my photo next to ads or something crazy like that. Not that a company would ever do something so audacious...but never know.

Wow, congratulations guys.

Odds that LinkedIn shuts the service down if they are acquired?

Not as high as many other companies. They've acquired 2 consumer-facing startups so far: CardMunch, which they rebranded and re-released, and Connected, which they've kept going without any changes.

I think the word "acquired" is used a bit too loosely these days. If this business' operations get shut down then it's not really an exit in the traditional sense, and I don't think people shouldn't be congratulating a whole company for giving up, quitting their jobs, and getting 9-5 jobs at a corporation.

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