Google Buys Wavii For North Of $30 Million | Hacker News Reader

Google Buys Wavii For North Of $30 Million

techcrunch.com

92 pointsLightning33 comments

This one makes a lot more sense than the yahoo acquisition considering Wavii actually developed their own algorithms

You could just build your own... http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/04/23/how-to-make...

from the article - "Don’t worry if your app is down most of the time. It just needs to work well enough to demo and take screenshots of." ... ha ha

They laid down the whole plan on the paper to get bought so easily. Ideally this is what it takes rest is up to us...how we execute it.

Looks like they're headed to the Knowledge Graph team, but I'd like to see some love for the news division, especially from NLP badasses like Wavii.

Since Knowledge graph is a team, not a division that may actually be the case since it's possible the author actually meant "Google Knowledge", which is the catch all internal unit for all of Google's search-related products (of which News is a part).

If I was google or Apple, I would have gone after Prismatic. I've used both and Prismatic seem to have much better technology.

Yeah. I think Prismatic has the best technology in terms of machine learning and NLP. With it, maybe Prismatic is worth more than their budget.

This [1] makes one feel if Google is really interested in acquisitions like these or just tossing some money around.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/02/google-closes-aardvark...

'Interested' is a hard to prove word. The best one can really say without statements from Google VIPs is that acquisitions frequently do not seem to lead to successful services and so they're probably better seen as either expensive acquihires or gambling on hits.

(I have an in-progress analysis of Google service/product shutdowns at http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns and one of the solider looking results so far is that even being generous and marking as 'alive' any acqusition's products which were merged into something like Maps or Google+, products which were part of an acquisition are much more likely to be shutdown than internally-developed products.)

Thanks for the link to your analysis. Should give it a read :)

NLP is on fire at the moment...

In what context?

first summly now this

Interesting historical point is this is the same rumored valuation for PowerSet back in 2008. Doesn't speak highly on valuation increasing for NLP.

Didn't Hinton say he was going to be working on NLP applications at Google?

Congrats, folks!

I'm guessing the average employee get's to cash out a little under $100k or do they get locked in? I wonder what the Google retention bonus is like?

Crunchbase says Wavii only has five employees and only took ~$2MM in funding. So, I would bet it's more than $100K total. The funding is all listed as a 2010-07 seed round. I expect they raised more than that. But, given their acquisition price and business model it sounds like things worked on well for them and at least the founders were well vested. Or, did you mean actual cash excluding any GOOG options/RSUs?

My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4.

4 year lock-in only applies to non-execs? What is it for execs?

With this, an engineer at a startup has a worse deal?

I'm sure it's situation dependent with execs. If you have a very mature company in a new vertical w/ significant revenue (like a YouTube) and they want you to continue to run the product that would be a very different situation than a small acquihire where the execs may just be essentially engineers or dev team leaders at Google. Of course, the execs likely organized their start-up governance in a way that gives them negotiating strength in the deal. I can't imagine a start-up where the engineers would be involved in the negotiation and decision making beyond their own transition/retention.

Lots of execs go on and found the next startup when the deal closes.

This is IMO an example of why Crunchbase is unreliable and essentially useless.

I imaging the average employee got less than 1% of the company, assuming .5% of 80% of 30 million, each is looking at at most 120k. I say most of them got less then 100k. Hopefully not locked in for 4 years, which is like 25k a year. Sigh. My bonus is more than that....

Less than 1% seems low to me. Also, we'd be talking about options or stock (likely RSUs) not cash. GOOG was trading around $390/sh 4 years ago. So, if 4 years ago you were offered $150K (which I still think is low) in RSUs @ $390/sh for your start-up equity with some small vesting tranches each year and a large full vesting at the end of 4 years (and you held onto it all), you'd have a little more than $310K today plus your GOOG salary and bonuses for those four years. Not bad for doing ~5 years as dev ops at a start-up like Wavii.

GOOG has pretty much topped. and I know several early stage startup that gives out .1%.. Developers are so stupid sometimes....

Less then 1% is pretty typical when you consider an option pool is 10-20% at the most. With 20 employees, I'd bet only a quarter of the options at most have been doled out since you usually save the big grants for exec hires.

They also get a nice job at google and probably relocation to somewhere warmer.

That lock-in is on the bonus Google offers, not the payout on equity. At least in the two acquisitions I've been privy to details about.

Acquisition prices in the news are usually vague, and could be cash + earnout over the golden handcuff period.

Techcrunch says 25 employees.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/google-buys-wavii-for-north...

"My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4."

Or as one of the people I met at Google related "Sometimes they let you leave early, sort of like time off for good behavior or something." :-)

I've seen retention contracts run the gamut from 12 months to 5 years, and with and without earnout clauses. It really depends on way to many factors like how directly applicable the tech is and how special the people who built it are (intrinsic expertise).

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