Aardvark Mulls Over A $30+ Million Offer From Google | Hacker News Reader

Aardvark Mulls Over A $30+ Million Offer From Google

techcrunch.com

39 pointsdwynings22 comments

Who is in charge of acquisitions at Google? Not to say that there isn't awesome tech behind Aardvark, but really 2 ex-Google buyouts in as many days? If I were a shareholder in Google I would be wondering...

Work at Google -> Make friends with your boss -> Build start-up -> Cash in on nepotism?

I thought the same thing.

>> Build start-up -> Cash in on nepotism?

Calling it as nepotism is quite unfair, dont you think ? Both are quite awesome products. Even if these acquisitions might be made for the talent, it might be worth it for Goog.

I was not making a value judgment on these acquisitions.

However as Google is a publicly traded company, if I were a shareholder I would want to know if my money is being paid to friends of decision makers.

It would be interesting to see how many of Google's acquisitions have involved ex-Googlers?

I would also like to know about the quality/valuation diffrence between ex goog startups and non ex goog startups. May be ex googlers build better startups? a lot of ex paypalers made solid new companies. Had paypal acquired them I don't think we'd be criticizing them.

There's got to be a premium though for knowing if the founders of a company are going to fit in and be productive.

Here's another way to look at it: not only do they get their employees to spend 20% of their time working on their own cool stuff for Google, they have ex-employees spending 100% of their time working on their own cool stuff for Google. :)

Yeah, but for what price?

They've been doing it on Wall St. forever..... why not?

I fully expect this to arrive in my inbox:

(Aardvark) Help someone with a question about accepting an offer price from Google

This would be a steal for Google. The tech behind the scenes is impressive. The service is very intuitive and is so far tied as one of my favorite apps of the past few years (boxee and dropbox are the other 2). Part of me wants to see them stick it out, but the other part of me would love to see the team get a payday+give the service a boost to be a mainstream hit with google behind it.

agreed. the first time i saw their product, i was skeptical, and then after signing up i remember thinking 'this is awesome, it's like irc, but anyone can use it.'

I'm confused. How is Aardvark worth anything close to $30MM?

My guess is that there is an M&A department that is goaled on acquiring startups (i.e. someone gets a bonus for closing deals within certain parameters).

Can someone fill me in on what Aardvark is, what makes it so amazing and why it's worth $30 mill?

Type in a question and it will find people on Twitter and Facebook in your social network who are best able to answer that question.

It is for the specific situation where (1) someone you know should know the answer to a question but you don't know who and (2) you don't mind everyone in the world potentially knowing which question you asked and (3) you haven't asked too many questions like this which have been answered by the same people.

For example, any blog or twitter posts asking for advice might be turned into aardvark queries. Some emails as well.

The most killer app could be within companies. If this actually worked it would be like a telepathic routing protocol. Better than the distraction of a mass email, and potentially less maintenance than a wiki. Getting it to work in a biz environment would probably require a whole different set of features for prediction (especially mining of email networks like Palantir and Cataphora).

My main problem with it is that as currently formulated it would have to get amazingly intelligent to beat the speed and privacy of a search box.

Perhaps a revised version would just take my query and tell me who to ask rather than directly routing the query there. This way I can bother them only if I think they'll actually have the time, give a good answer, haven't bothered them before, etc.

Thanks for clarifying that. Sounds neat, but, for those features, I question the $30 million price tag.

So the decision comes down to sell now and take the guaranteed money, or roll the dice and go for the big win.

As anyone who watches Cash Cab knows, take the money and run.

I just tried Aardvark and I love it. My friend tried Aardvark and /everything went wrong/. Even unregistering crashed his browser.

I hope they sell, if only so that I don't have to give yet another service my e-mail address and password. I mean, they use Facebook Connect, but then they want me to also give them an e-mail address and password. So goddamn irritating. I'm OK with creating new accounts on a site that has my credit card information, but otherwise, this has to stop. Every important identity provider supports OAuth at this point.

if this is true, it's like Google is planning a big re-union.

I bet the offer went: how about 30mil to prevent you from bitching on hacker news when we launch this same functionality on wave?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com