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I get why Walmart would buy them, but it seems to me they could have waited 6-12 months and bought the company for $300m. There's just no way they were showing

I get why Walmart would buy them, but it seems to me they could have waited 6-12 months and bought the company for $300m. There's just no way they were showing growth. The only thing that makes sense is that Jet would have been damaged goods in 12 months and this was the only option for Walmart to build a millennial friendly competitor to Amazon.

harryh 10y ago
They're not just buying a pile of code. They're also buying an energized and engaged team that they hope will be able to modernize Walmart's ecommerce systems. They wouldn't have gotten that if they had purchased a broken failure of a company somewhere down the road.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  Doesn't Walmart already have pretty decent tech? I recall seeing some impressive scalability blog posts from the team st "Walmart labs."
  - argonaut 10y ago
    Funnily enough, Walmart Labs was the result of an acquisition.
  - harryh 10y ago
    Not compared to Amazon.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - drawnwren 10y ago
    Yeah Walmart labs is quite progressive. They're very active in the clojure community and do some interesting work.
  - blahi 10y ago
    As far as I know, Walmart labs is active in nodejs, front end and instrumentation. That's cool and all, but Jet knows how to build a lot more difficult things than that, like personalization, promotion planning, pricing strategies, etc.
  - throwaway324328 10y ago
    (Throw away for obvious reasons) It is all total crap. We dumped a bunch of time and money into rebuilding everything as SOA and on all the latest technologies. Most of the work was done by an army of Indians that couldn't get jobs elsewhere in the valley. Absolutely nothing scales. We have more servers in total than peak users to the site, and still can't get any respectable performance numbers. The few smart people left here are super excited to jump over to Jet ASAP.
    - Yhippa 10y ago
      I hear they moved their back end to Node on Black Friday last year. If true that's damn impressive right? Unless it was a facade.
      - throwaway324328 10y ago
        The node.js front end is on its second complete rewrite in the last 2 years, and a huge source of the scaling issues. Almost all the backend is still in Java.
        harryh 10y ago
        An army of below average engineers working in a language with no compile time type checking is a guaranteed recipe for writing unmaintainable code that needs to be constantly rewritten.
    - losteverything 10y ago
      Absolutely nothing scales Maybe that is the réal reason Doug bought it. From your perspective is .com able to grow (handle growth) from tech. Stand point??
    - titomc 10y ago
      https://jet.com/about-us https://jet.com/about-us - the photos shows there is a small army for Indians in Jet too. So do the "few smart people left here" want to jump over Jet now ?
- ryporter 10y ago
  For $3B, they could have hired are pretty energized and engaged team. Seriously, whenever I see these big acquisitions by companies of a product they have been trying to develop internally, I always think about the person in charge of that team. I imagine that they are thinking that they could have done a lot more if they had been given a couple extra billion dollars to hire an amazing team.
  - harryh 10y ago
    Ya, the thing is they probably couldn't. Not really. It's not just about money. Think about how many big companies (including WalMart!) have plenty of money but don't have the internal talent or culture to really drive change and innovate in ways they never have before. Companies are funny things. A lot of the time they can do what they can do and really just can't do what they can't do no matter how much money they throw at the problem. Sometimes (though definitely not always!) an acquisition can really help.
mikhailt 10y ago
Why couldn't they show growth? Amazon is getting worse for non-prime users. They've increased their free shipping limit, longer shipments, and kept pushing their deals onto Prime users only. I've bought more from Jet.com this year than Amazon in the last two years and Jet was faster with its free 2 day shipping than Amazon's free shipping.
- SixSigma 10y ago
  I just moved from the UK to the US. It is quite surprising how useless Amazon just became for me. So far, every item I wanted to buy has $49 min spend for free shipping attached to it, which is not something I have had to deal with - except for a few add-on items. So I just switched to eBay sellers instead. I realize the price may end up being similar but I want to know what that price is while browsing, not "add $5.99" at checkout.
- discodave 10y ago
  > Amazon is getting worse for non-prime users. But the number of non-prime users is also dropping.... so Amazon doesn't really care that much.
- steven777400 10y ago
  There could be an opportunity for a competitor depending on how some Amazon issue play out over the next year or so. A lot of commentors are focused on the tech (which makes sense, being HN and all), but Amazon has some issues with counterfeit products, unequal product commingling, and unreliable third-party sellers. Right now those issues are mostly side-line grumpling, but I could imagine a few big incidents could possibly blow up into a substantial reputation issue. The unknown, of course, is can/will Walmart do any better.

harryh 10y ago

They're not just buying a pile of code. They're also buying an energized and engaged team that they hope will be able to modernize Walmart's ecommerce systems. They wouldn't have gotten that if they had purchased a broken failure of a company somewhere down the road.

chatmasta 10y ago
Doesn't Walmart already have pretty decent tech? I recall seeing some impressive scalability blog posts from the team st "Walmart labs."
- argonaut 10y ago
  Funnily enough, Walmart Labs was the result of an acquisition.
- harryh 10y ago
  Not compared to Amazon.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- drawnwren 10y ago
  Yeah Walmart labs is quite progressive. They're very active in the clojure community and do some interesting work.
- blahi 10y ago
  As far as I know, Walmart labs is active in nodejs, front end and instrumentation. That's cool and all, but Jet knows how to build a lot more difficult things than that, like personalization, promotion planning, pricing strategies, etc.
- throwaway324328 10y ago
  (Throw away for obvious reasons) It is all total crap. We dumped a bunch of time and money into rebuilding everything as SOA and on all the latest technologies. Most of the work was done by an army of Indians that couldn't get jobs elsewhere in the valley. Absolutely nothing scales. We have more servers in total than peak users to the site, and still can't get any respectable performance numbers. The few smart people left here are super excited to jump over to Jet ASAP.
  - Yhippa 10y ago
    I hear they moved their back end to Node on Black Friday last year. If true that's damn impressive right? Unless it was a facade.
    - throwaway324328 10y ago
      The node.js front end is on its second complete rewrite in the last 2 years, and a huge source of the scaling issues. Almost all the backend is still in Java.
      - harryh 10y ago
        An army of below average engineers working in a language with no compile time type checking is a guaranteed recipe for writing unmaintainable code that needs to be constantly rewritten.
  - losteverything 10y ago
    Absolutely nothing scales Maybe that is the réal reason Doug bought it. From your perspective is .com able to grow (handle growth) from tech. Stand point??
  - titomc 10y ago
    https://jet.com/about-us https://jet.com/about-us - the photos shows there is a small army for Indians in Jet too. So do the "few smart people left here" want to jump over Jet now ?
ryporter 10y ago
For $3B, they could have hired are pretty energized and engaged team. Seriously, whenever I see these big acquisitions by companies of a product they have been trying to develop internally, I always think about the person in charge of that team. I imagine that they are thinking that they could have done a lot more if they had been given a couple extra billion dollars to hire an amazing team.
- harryh 10y ago
  Ya, the thing is they probably couldn't. Not really. It's not just about money. Think about how many big companies (including WalMart!) have plenty of money but don't have the internal talent or culture to really drive change and innovate in ways they never have before. Companies are funny things. A lot of the time they can do what they can do and really just can't do what they can't do no matter how much money they throw at the problem. Sometimes (though definitely not always!) an acquisition can really help.

mikhailt 10y ago

Why couldn't they show growth? Amazon is getting worse for non-prime users. They've increased their free shipping limit, longer shipments, and kept pushing their deals onto Prime users only. I've bought more from Jet.com this year than Amazon in the last two years and Jet was faster with its free 2 day shipping than Amazon's free shipping.

SixSigma 10y ago
I just moved from the UK to the US. It is quite surprising how useless Amazon just became for me. So far, every item I wanted to buy has $49 min spend for free shipping attached to it, which is not something I have had to deal with - except for a few add-on items. So I just switched to eBay sellers instead. I realize the price may end up being similar but I want to know what that price is while browsing, not "add $5.99" at checkout.
discodave 10y ago
> Amazon is getting worse for non-prime users. But the number of non-prime users is also dropping.... so Amazon doesn't really care that much.
steven777400 10y ago
There could be an opportunity for a competitor depending on how some Amazon issue play out over the next year or so. A lot of commentors are focused on the tech (which makes sense, being HN and all), but Amazon has some issues with counterfeit products, unequal product commingling, and unreliable third-party sellers. Right now those issues are mostly side-line grumpling, but I could imagine a few big incidents could possibly blow up into a substantial reputation issue. The unknown, of course, is can/will Walmart do any better.