Xobni Closes $7 Million Series B Financing | Hacker News Reader

Xobni Closes $7 Million Series B Financing

xobni.com

63 pointsauston31 comments

Speculation: Cisco wanted to buy Xobni, but Xobni said they wouldn't sell for less than $too_much, so Cisco invested instead and will end up buying them later if they do well.

Cisco worries me in general.. Are they gonna be the real gate keepers or what? Like a sneakier low level Google.. Whats their market share for "delivering data packets"?

Who needs country borders when you control all the routers ey!

Congrats guys, and sorry for calling you XnobiXnob all these years!

That same logic would seem to apply for Microsoft wanting to invest. Perhaps MSFT had a chance, but they didn't like the valuation at all.

If you read "High Stakes, No Prisoners" (a book that both founders of Xobni recommend), the author recommends getting non-VC Series B investors so that you don't have the same genetic pool (i.e. Series A VCs colluding with Series B).

I think the more likely scenario is that this Series B is strategic for Cisco, wonder what they're cooking up.

11.4mm is an amazing amount of money to raise, congrats. This is one of the applications I think add real value to offline software; I just wonder how they deal with the pressure that Microsoft could duplicate the feature of search or otherh features in the next outlook... and this has to push the price (20mm wasn't enough from microsoft) - how much do they need now to accept the offer? - probably in the 100mm range eh?

especially in this market

GOOG and MSFT were founded in similar market conditions.

Yeah, but they didnt depend on the existance of another product(like Outlook).

"the IBM PC", "the consumer internet/www"

Is this like an IQ test question?

    Which one doesn't belong in this list?

    1) The IBM PC
    2) The Internet/Web
    3) Outlook

"organizing the world's information"

None. The poster's point stands: all of the above successful companies built themselves within the ecosystem of yet another product. There's no need to own everything end-to-end, Outlook is a popular enough product that relying on it is not too bad a bet in the short to mid term.

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to imply here. I bet there are substantially more people using outlook today than IBM PCs in the early 80s, or web users in 1998. There are viable alternatives to outlook of course, but I suspect it'll be around for some time. At the time the IBM PC was released there were also plenty of viable alternatives, and I suspect it wasn't so obvious which one would win at the time.

Taking money from Cisco is a very smart move. Congrats on the round guys!

I wish I knew why that is. Could you please elaborate?

I bet staunch got it in the above comment

I bet the only reason is because it is Cisco...

2 things: help with enterprise sales to Fortune 500s plus Cisco are a potential acquirer.

I'm generally wary of Cisco, and hope it doesn't end up affecting Xobni negatively in the end. We used to use WebEx until CISCO bought them which bolstered them to jack up prices, fortunately, Citrix updated their GoToMeeting product, which is better and more cost effective solution than WebEx. Hopefully, something like this won't happen to Xobni, I would hate to see a $579 bill for an hour of xobni usage.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Because you don't like the prices of WebEx, Xobni is going to start (somehow) charging you by the hour. And not just by the hour, but for almost $600 an hour.

congrats matt and adam (and the entire team)! excited to see what you guys do in 09

Just out of curiosity, why does this get modded so high? A tech company takes investor money, great! But is it truly hackerous?

Xobni is a YC company.

A number of users here are YC "alumni" and presumably know the Xobni guys in one way or another. Even non-YC people (myself included) enjoy reading stories like this. It's just nice to follow people's success stories, particularly when you can relate to those people, and in this case, when they're also Hacker News users.

Any time a Hacker News startup (YC or otherwise) kicks ass, it makes everyone feel like one of their own succeeded. It's awesome.

Congrats, guys!

This seems like kept woman money, like a mash note. I can't imagine what they need with this much money, so it seems to me to just further inflate their evaluation to make them unacquirable by anyone else.

Except MS, of course, with more money than god, but...

Xobni could be reproduced by Microsoft for less than their alleged $20m offer, too. Even with their lumbering corporate inefficiencies.

I don't know about you, but I don't look at massive funding rounds as success. They're not exactly debt, but they're not exactly your money, either.

I'd so love to try Xobni, but, I am not forking out $110 for Outlook 2k7 for the privilege of doing so. :/

building a business on top of a customer base that has proven to open their wallets is a good move. Would you rather be trying to pry money out of people that think email is not worth $110?

I am a mac user, so its not an option for me. But I were still on Windows, I would pay for Outlook as the alternatives are significantly less interesting.

Or just do what I do, get a hosted Exchange email service. Then they give you a copy for free. You could cancel after one month and get a copy for $8 if you don't want to keep it.

Just to be pedantic, this is normally against the ToS of the hosting company, and violates the license that comes with Outlook.

If you're going to pirate it, so be it, no one is going to stop you, but going through the 1 month registration doesn't really change the moral or legal issues involved.

For instance- https://www.mailstreet.net/exchange/outlook_order_1.asp?SOUR...

"As a MailStreet account holder in good-standing you may download or order Outlook 2007 media for use with the MailStreet service. You may install the software on each computer that you have MailStreet service with. If you do leave the MailStreet service you must uninstall the Outlook software or purchase a retail version from your regular software vendor. If you have multiple computers, you only need to order one copy of the software. "

Yeah, you're right. Just pirate it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com