Vizify acquired by Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

Vizify acquired by Yahoo

vizify.com

73 pointsdswiese37 comments

Sad. Another company failing and shutting down with its employees going to work at Yahoo.

Sorry, I mean they got acqui-hired.

EDIT: There are other comments saying that people are being unnecessarily negative. Maybe so. But this is a company with customers that is shutting down without a single apology to people that depend on their service. Overall, the post just feels like doublespeak, talking about "your transition" (to what?), and:

"we realized we’d found a partner who shared our passion for user experience, design, and visualizing information."

...which is why they've told us to shut down all the work we've been doing for the last few years and start something different!

It is not sad at all. These guys are talented and have been working on a product that very few people are really going miss. Hopefully they are now going to be working on products and projects that people actually care about.

Sad is when Napster shutdown.

Are you a customer of Vizify?

I am, and I'm also sad - just waiting for Vizify to have massive security flaws now.

There's a surprising number of negative comments here. Have any of you ever started a company and been involved in an acquisition process from the front lines?

If not, I'd suggest being a little more careful with your wording. Your statements come across as worse than naive--they come across as petty, with a tinge of idiocy. I'd just make sure I was more informed about these decisions/processes before making commentary on them.

Haters gonna hate, but they clearly have no clue what they're talking about.

They're closing. It's nice for them, but bad for users.

Our company is in the Portland Seed Fund portfolio also. We know Todd and his team and they are good people. They worked incredibly hard at building up Vizify.

While it may be a bummer for users, I hope this is a positive step for the team and congratulate them on their effort!

EDIT: It is worth mentioning that Vizify raised in the valley, but ran the company out of Portland. Only a few consumer internet companies have done this so far, but in each case it has brought a lot to the city by helping build out the startup ecosystem up there.

It is way different running a consumer internet startup in Portland from the valley. We couldn't do it--we moved down to CA.

More info and sentiment from Rick Turoczy, who is close to the Portland tribe: http://siliconflorist.com/2014/03/05/visualize-exit-portland...

The negativity around acqui-hires is pretty ridiculous. Every single tech company pays for the ability to hire smart people, and the basis of the hiring process is centered around the quality of a candidate's resume. In this case, there is a group of smart people (Vizify) who have a very real accomplishment (Vizify), which trumps a fact-laden piece of paper any day.

Ratio of "acquihire haters" to "haters who would turn down a well-priced acquisition offer on that basis" = ERROR DIV0

Funnily enough, I've actually walked from an acquisition before. But for a very different reason: BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T OFFER ENOUGH MONEY. That's it. Full stop. I am running a business, after all.

>> "Ratio of "acquihire haters" to "haters who would turn down a well-priced acquisition offer on that basis" = ERROR DIV0"

You sir/ma'am, are hilarious.

There are only a handful of comments in this thread and they're already seething with vitriol. Can anyone give context? Or is this just general "Yahoo, blech," sentiment?

There's a difference between celebrating an profitable 9-digit acquisition and celebrating a mercy buyout from a company fond of mercy buyouts. (per TechCrunch, Vizify's last raise was about $1.5M in its life with the last raise in 2012, and it's likely that their options were raise more money, get acquired, or die.)

There's just general antipathy around acqui-hires. The team gets a nice payday, but existing customers get burned.

I suspect that poisons the well for other startups as those customers become more cautious. I'm also generally uncomfortable with concentrating innovation within a small set of megacorps.

Also, your data ends up with a megacorp, who you've been carefully avoiding in the past.

> The team gets a nice payday

Part of my naive negative reaction to acqui-hires is that the investors/founders get more of a payday (not VC-dream 100x but I assume more than 1x) than the team really does (maybe some retention bonuses, minor bonuses from vested stock, etc.).

This is basically not rewarding the investors for backing a great business idea, or the founders for great execution, but for being great recruiters.

E.g. "yay, I'm/the team are awesome at my/our jobs, so my founders/investors get a huge 'referral bonus'...and I get to go work at Yahoo..."

(Granted, if the acquirer only wants the founders anyway, and the rest of the engineering team is more of a tangential bonus, I guess it makes sense. Perhaps this is usually the case anyway? Not sure.)

My friend was recently ac qr - hired and he definitely did not see big payday. It was slightly better offer than what he would have got as a regular new hire but only slightly. Value of his options (after working for 3 years) was less than 10k.

Ouch.

The thing I have noticed is that there usually seems to be a lack of humility towards the customers that are being burned in these kind of write-ups.

It is all happy sunshine, rainbows and unicorns and no mention of the trouble they are causing to people who use the service.

It kind of smacks of "Thanks for signing so that we could get noticed by big company, so long chumps!"

I also worry about the well poisoning. It is almost like a lot of start-ups are not being run as companies but as portfolios to demonstrate skill for aqui-hiring.

I've had a Vizify profile for a while and have been underwhelmed with the product. I'd like to hear from someone who really likes it and/or gets value from it.

A great result for Todd and team! Having worked with the people at Vizify I know they'll do some great stuff at Yahoo!

I don't know any details of the transaction - but I'm very excited to see Yahoo picking up this team and their social data visualization tech. Yahoo seems to be testing its boundaries as a content provider in a lot of good ways.

Sad to hear that their company and product failed. Did anyone use their paid service?

I knew the name sounded familiar, and then I realized why. I've been to these sites listed in twitter profile bios and they all looked so spammy/useless/devoid of content when I visited them.

This is a great group of guys, congrats to the team. Startups a hard, very hard. They made a great product and worked on what they love, if they get to continue to work on what they love at Yahoo, more power to them. I just hope they are able to keep their scrappy and inquisitive style.

Congratulations Todd and team!

What's the use of this? I would imagine Facebook's end of year review was a clone of Vizify's idea? Anyhow, how was this idea be profitable for this startup to stay alive? I have never heard of it to be honest. To me this looks like http://osrc.dfm.io/ and FB's end-of-year review

Fuck the haters. Congrats to the team!

As a Vizify user, I'm saddened that they will be shutting down. I really enjoyed their service and it served as a great "bio" website.

Pleased for the designers and developers, though, they had great success, IMO, and I hope they will make their mark at Yahoo.

I don’t understand: one comment (politely) regrets their closing their service; half are encouraging and short; therefore, why is the other half of the comments about how people are so negative about the whole thing?

Congrats to Todd and the team; this is a positive outcome.

Congrats! Go PDX!

Congratulations!

Congrats to the Vizify team!

"Since last summer, we’ve been engaged in a conversation with some of the incredible folks at Yahoo about the ways this more visual approach to data can inspire and entertain. As our conversations progressed, we realized we’d found a partner who shared our passion for user experience, design, and visualizing information."

This shit makes me cringe, such bullshit. They offered the right price, we wanted money. That is all

Congratulations on being acqui-hired by Yahoo! We have automated our acqui-hire process so please complete the following steps and then push the submit button.

1. Shutdown your service.

2. In the provided announcement template, you must replace [NAME OF COMPANY] with your company name, and after the words "shares our passion for" enter a [SHORT DESCRIPTION OF YOUR SERVICE]

3. Replace your current home page with the completed announcement template

4. Report to Yahoo! headquarters on 9:00AM Monday for Aqui-hire Orientation. Please refer to your acquisition confirmation id number [9342645] at the registration desk. Bring a photo id and recent immunization records.

hahah, well done sir

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