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Comment by sama | Hacker News Reader

Happy to answer any questions I'm able to. Looking forward to the great stuff we're going to do at Green Dot!

If the 2005 instance of sama knew what the 2012 instance of sama knows now, what would he have done differently?

that is a very long and hopefully interesting post i am still gathering my thoughts on.

Any chance we'll see a retrospection? You've been building Loopt for 7 years - I'd love to hear how you managed team morale, the high points, the lows, etc. There's bound to be some amazing stuff.

And congratulations, I'm personally excited to see where you go with this.

yes when the dust settles.

1 - Would you say you guys were too early to market?

2 - Was your monthly active user base above 2M?

3 - What contributed to Loopt loosing its appeal over the past 12/18 months?

1. yes, although that gave us some advantages as well.

2. not for our core loopt app.

3. i think in general location services have lost some luster over the last 12/18 months, but i also think a lot of the things that we've been doing--real-time deals, loyalty offers, etc are generating a lot of interest among users and we'll hopefully be able to take that to the next level at green dot.

Per http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/09/loopt-dau/ daily active users were below 500 prior to the sale.

On the spectrum of 1 (abysmal failure) to 10 (raging success), where do you place Loopt?

obviously it's not going to go down as a massive success (although i hope what we do at green dot does!) but i feel pretty good about it. it's hard for me to put a number on it, though.

Thanks. I'm sure the lessons you learned will be applicable to whatever you do next. You could do a hell of a lot worse than having a $40M+ exit the first time around, even if you raised $17M.

Sam, did you guys raise any additional money besides what's listed in Crunchbase? It says you guys were backed by Maverick capital as well?

Congrats on the sale!

Congratulations!

How long did the deal take to bring to this point (if that's public)?

i think i can answer this but let me double check.

Why did you sell?

We realized that to be really successful, we needed to be about finance and payments as well as location--I think the most interesting things will happen when those two come together. We talked to a number of companies and were most excited about the team and vision at Green Dot.

When did you realize that? Was it a slow change, or was there an epiphany? And was it a company-wide realization, or was there a champion behind it?

slow change i'd say, and lots of discussion about it although i was probably the strongest champion.

sequoia made them.

not true at all.

* ready to sell business because it wasn't going anywhere, sequoia knew greendot well and got them to get a return on the $ put in so it wasn't a total buss. Hence the huge (relative to the sale) incentive for founders to stick around since they got nothing from the sale. is my guess.

Not sure if you figured this out, but sama = Sam Altman = ceo of Loopt. I think sama's words on this situation carry a little more weight than your guess.

Oh - so he's going to tell the truth then? I guarantee he has confidentiality agreements about all of that - so I don't believe anything he says for a second. Loopt was a total bust for VC returns.

if it was true, would you admit to it?

What has been your biggest mistake(s) so far?

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