Pinterest Acquires Hackermeter (YC S13)
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Perhaps I should use this approach the next time I apply for a job. "You're going to have to acquire my side project in order to get me to start working here."
Maybe I could make techcrunch.
But, like you said, they probably wouldn't have gotten the signing bonus.
When you're funding dozens of startups a year, this kind of thing is going to happen once in a while. It's an expected outcome. I'm glad the founders had an exit that makes them happy.
One concrete consequence is that Y Combinator funding lets you sell early, if you want to. It can sometimes make sense to sell yourself when you're small for a few million, rather than take more funding and roll the dice again. Google likes to do early-stage acquisitions, and we expect them to become increasingly common as other companies learn what Google has.
If you take a large amount of money from an investor, you usually give up this option. But we realize (having been there) that an early offer from an acquirer can be very tempting for a group of young hackers. So if you want to sell early, that's ok. We'd make more if you went for an IPO, but we're not going to force anyone to do anything they don't want to.
If they sold hackermeter for "a few million" I'm giving up on capitalism. It was good while it lasted.
Snark aside, I assume they didn't get a few million because they didn't disclose the amount. It would have to be an amount that neither side wanted to brag about.
Don't assume that just because you don't know about something, it's inconsequential.
Mean-spirited comments are rarely completely false. They're mostly nasty ways to use (usually partial) truths.
Most companies will only acquihire once a startup is pretty mature, and has thousands/millions of people relying on its service--even though it would be equally easy to judge whatever attributes of the startup's product/service signals "good team, do buy out" from much earlier on in its lifecycle. I had never even heard of Hackermeter, but on reading the pitch in the article, and seeing a bit of the product, it's immediately obvious what kind of tech/UX/design/product-sense expertise would be required to produce it, and what I could do if I could put the same talent behind my own venture.
Maybe this should be the start of something. I'm picturing a PR-wire-like service for startups to post their MVPs, which bigcorps can subscribe to, and offer to buy out the talent that catches their eye before the service is even out of closed beta. (In fact, just to go a bit crazy: imagine if the use of this service became commonplace. Acquihiring a startup with traction might be considered "bad business!")
-The author predicts that the business side of entrepreneurship will become increasingly commoditized, with programs like YC supplanting business school as the expected qualification for executives. The author parallels the unique skills required by railroad and steel entrepreneurs (access to funding networks, an ability to act on incomplete and indistinct market data and so on) with those of today's tech entrepreneurs and then observes how those skills became less valuable as the railroad and steel markets matured and consolidated to the point where the risk-taking entrepreneurs were no longer necessary and were replaced by dry MBA-types.
-The author predicts that the tech side will evolve into something like the guild system used by artisans prior to the industrial revolution, since engineers are still the gatekeepers to technology.
-Finally, the author predicts that both of these groups will become increasingly beholden to finance-types, albeit with the engineers having quite a lot more leverage if they can manage to establish some kind of collective bargaining platform (i.e. a guild). By nature of being individually indistinct and for the most part interchangeable in terms of skills as tech markets become less risky, business-oriented entrepreneurs are therefore the new labor in the way that manufacturing jobs were the old labor.
By the way, I thought it was a long but pretty fantastic read and would highly recommend it if you can find a few hours of free time.
Whole swath of middle management can be replaced with a little bit of automation and ML.
I wonder if some investors might take the $ currently raised as a proxy for interest. Investors already follow a herd mentality. I wonder if this open + crowdfunding model might actually make it even harder to raise money.