Lanyrd acquired by Eventbrite | Hacker News Reader

Lanyrd acquired by Eventbrite

lanyrd.com

285 pointschrisdinn46 comments

This is exactly the kind of acquisition that can help drive even more adoption of a service since it's obvious to users how the two companies complement each other.

This is also one of the very few acquisitions where I've read "[acquirer's] vision sits well with ours..." and not had to scratch my head and figure out why.

Congrats on a great pairing and sorry that we're losing Simon and Nat to the US.

I'm working on a business in a similar space, and what got me excited by this news was the natural overlap. It doesn't come off as a talent grab. Rather, there are natural parallels between the two services, and it seems like they're going to explore how they can (yup, I'm gonna say it), synergize, their two respective domains.

Podium (http://hellopodium.com) is the service we're working on. Excited about this space :)

Side project on their honeymoon??? That must be the geekiest thing that I have ever heard.

Geeks shall inherit the earth.

To clarify: we did have a solid three months of honeymoon before we started the company!

Here's a longer version of the story: http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/lanyrd-the-early-days/

I remember reaching out to them a couple years ago asking about their stack, and I got a really nice/informative response back (actually they linked me to a page on their site that listed all the info). These two deserve it!

A lot of Americans say 'reaching out' when they mean 'talk', it sounds ludicrous to me- as if it were the bloody Creation of Adam ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo_-_Creation_of... ). So naff.

It's from a twentieth century Bell telephone advertisement.

http://www.govdelivery.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/a...

Neat! Thanks for the history lesson.

A lot Brits say 'naff' when they mean 'unfashionable', it sounds ludicrous to me- as if we were still in the 1980's ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s ). Not fly.

(to be more serious about it: different countries use different phrases. So what?)

They mean different things - reaching out is more specific about who is initiating the conversation, and it also doesn't necessarily imply success. I may have reached out to Bill Gates yesterday to see if he fancies giving me some career advice, but it's unlikely I talked to Bill Gates yesterday.

Congratulations as all have said, and also some excitement, as this seems like a well-matched pair of services. I am very optimistic for the outcome of this acquisition/collaboration. Best of luck to all involved!

Simon and Natalie, and all the team, congratulations on your continued rise of success. Yours has always felt like one of the most human and utterly useful services out there; long may it be so. Enjoy the new phase.

I wonder how much they paid?

Congrats Simon and team! Great outcome for one of my favorite services. Can't wait to have you in SF.

Is Lanyrd leaving London? I didn't see that mentioned anywhere...

In the Eventbrite notice - http://blog.eventbrite.com/eventbrite-acquires-eventioz-and-... - it says the Lanyrd team will be moving over to San Francisco to join the main Eventbrite engineers.

It'll be a shame to lose them to the States again.

Great news for Lanyrd and Eventbrite, hope they can use the Lanyrd team to fix their horrendous platform! So much potential.

Congratulations, guys! This seems like a really natural fit. The slidedeck was a thoughtful touch to explain it, too. :)

A successful YCombinator exit. Congrats guys. Will miss you from London. When's the party? ;-)

Congrats! What a shame that you're off to the states :(

Congratulations Simon and Nat - sorry to lose you from London but SF will be a fantastic move. All the best.

You already pinched them from Brighton. Now you know how it feels ;-)

Maybe we'll finally get an API!

My guess is this is a ~$10 million acquisition. Not too shabby for a 3 year old startup.

Congrats to the team, both on the acquisition and being acquired by a great company.

Makes perfect sense. Congrats.

Congratulations! You will be much missed in London.

Congrats simonw :)

A great gift for your next anniversary

Congrats Simon and Natalie!

Warm congrats!

Congrats

congrats simon et al.

congrats

Why founders sell it so early ? If you want to sell it so early why start in the first place ?

There are at least 31 reasons why a founder might sell. Money is a popular one.

Good point!

> If you want to sell it so early why start in the first place?

Uh, what? Are you genuinely suggesting that if your intention is to sell a business quickly, you shouldn't start one to begin with? I.e. "if you want to sell a business, don't start a business."

Utter nonsense.

you missed "so early". They could have sold it for twice the price if they grew little bit more and become bigger competitor. Like all decisions, no selling a company is also an investment decision. Do you want to invest in founders who sell within 3 years or someone who grow the company much bigger in 10 or 15 years ? Mark Zuckerberg was offered $1 billion dollar by yahoo when no one even heard of facebook and he declined the offer. If you want to call it "Utter nonsense" its your choice.

Yeah, and how much were the Foursquare guys offered at one point? And the various groupon sites? Lots of people end up kicking themselves for not flipping a company when the going was good.

Lanyrd has had a good run, all considered.

Agree. Gambling. Ignoring the downside risk of something can be a huge mistake. It's one thing to pass up selling your macbook and oops they just released an updated model now I will get $300 less on ebay. Another thing to pass up a billion dollars for a company no matter what you think the future is. Or for that matter any large amount of money for your company.

Just for your note - Yahoo decreased the offer to $700-$800 million after few days and that was one of the reasons why Zuck declined their offer.

They raised $1.4MM almost exactly two years ago and have a team of six in London. Maybe their options were limited. They deserve our congratulations regardless.

Early? It's three years almost to the day, for a service which, albeit very nice, was basically without a real monetization strategy (at least from what I saw -- I only attend a couple of conferences per year, so I'm not a heavy user or anything). In Europe, such services tend to die much earlier than what Lanyrd managed.

Besides, it makes a lot of sense as an add-on or content-sink for services with a more solid outlook... like Eventbrite. So it's a good move for everyone involved: SimonW and friends get their payout and Eventbrite gets a nice set of features ready to go. Win-win :)

Am I the only one that read that as Lavabit?

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