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Comment by npalli | Hacker News Reader

>> Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

>This ... is wild, I had no idea Twitch wasn't profitable

Indeed very wild. Ironic too, considering the co-founder (Michael Siebel) is a managing director of YC and has advised hundreds of startups about creating businesses.

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I wouldn't mind being advised by someone who created a business and sold it to Amazon for a billion dollars, lack of profitability notwithstanding.

So they found the “greater fool”?

Mark Cuban also sold broadcast .com to Yahoo for 5.7 billion

I guess one could also argue in these cases that the founder started a very promising company, and the buyer failed to realize its potential.

You must be in marketing

That broadcast.com to Yahoo and Tom selling Myspace to Murdoch are 2 of my favorite flop acquisitions. Honorable mention: Digg selling its soul to their own sales team.

However, Geocities to Yahoo is one of my least fave.

I'd never heard of broadcast.com before, it is the inspiration for ROI (Radio on the Internet) and Russ Hanneman?

Probably! It was literally putting radio broadcasts on the internet. Tuning in to a radio frequency of a sporting event far away was avant garde and wanted by many. No idea why Yahoo needed to buy someone's janky website with an idea I just explained in 1 sentence, but yeah Yahoo managed to tank it from several billions of $ down to nothing in about a year.

Coulda been the first music streaming service. I hope someone has the minutes to those Yahoo board meetings and makes a cartoon out of it.

Tumblr to Yahoo for 1.1 billion in the hopes it becomes "The new PDF" was pretty good too.

All YC and VC-types care about is that the companies they either invest in or are associated with get a fat check from an acquisition or IPO. After that, they can fail for all they care.

> is a managing director of YC and has advised hundreds of startups about creating businesses.

If I was a startup, I'd think hard about whether a guy who may well just have been lucky (and certainly didn't do anything significant after his first big win) rather than skillful, should be talking to me about conducting my business.

But I'm not a startup, and thank my stars for that.

I think it’s fair to say you’re not the type to ever run a business, successful or not, with that attitude.

He actually left Twitch pretty early on though.

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