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Api.ai is joining Google
- HugoDaniel 10y agoThis kind of text reads like something that is going to end up in https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- GBond 10y agoI'm pretty sure the second line is a tongue-in-cheek reference to this meme. At least I'm hoping it is.
- Kenji 10y agoWhen I read this kind of stuff, I feel like it never makes sense to sell out if you care about your company unless you wanted to get rich all along. I just feel like the majority of companies that get bought up die a slow and painful death - and sometimes a quicker but equally painful one. It would pain me so, so much to see all the work I put into something like that go down the drain.
- imron 10y agoIt would probably pain me too - until I looked at my bank balance.
- Kiro 10y agoSo what? Don't you think starting and selling your own company is an incredible journey?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hackthisbird 10y ago> It has been a long and fun journey. Using the word "journey" is this context is rather... risky. https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
- dabeeeenster 10y agoTBH it has got to the point now where I just assume people writing these posts are in on the joke and doing it on purpose. At least, I hope that's whats happening.
- Kiro 10y agoWhy? What's the problem with calling it what it is? That site smells jealousy.
- Veen 10y agoWhy are you so intent on telling everyone off for criticising what, at the very least, is a unimaginative, cliched, and clumsy way of describing a cash grab.
- Kiro 10y agoBecause it's ridiculous and I'm tired of seeing that site in every acquisition thread.
- Veen 10y agoI guess everyone else is tired of seeing the same old rhetoric every time a company sells — it's great news for the founders and maybe the employees, usually not so great news for the users. There's a podcast called "The Distance"[0] that investigates businesses that have been serving their customers for decades. Those stories are "incredible journeys". Two years of development and marketing ending in an aqui-hire isn't an incredible journey, and it certainly isn't a long journey. Selling to Google is an accomplishment. It's an interesting accomplishment, but the rhetoric of journeys and battles is tedious. These people have an idea, implement and market it well, work hard, and achieve a solid exit. They haven't changed the world, done anything particularly praiseworthy, or struggled very hard compared to the "journeys" of millions of other people. They built a business based on a promise to their users, and then more or less said: "screw you guys, we're off to Google now. Thanks for the journey." Pompous SV bullshit. [0]:https://thedistance.com/ https://thedistance.com/
- kchoudhu 10y agoI'm assuming Google doesn't need any of the company's business, and that it is being acquired for its talent. So, my real question: how much, on average, does a founder get as part of one of these acquihires? And does s/he actually, y'know, have to do any work after getting paid?
- hackthisbird 10y agoThe buyer typically pays $1M per engineer they keep. What the founders get depends on how much they were diluted by funding rounds.
- kchoudhu 10y agoWhat do the founders typically do within the acquiring corp after the acquisition? Do they have any agency? Or are they just another set of middle managers for the meat grinder?
- jaxomlotus 10y agoIt's unusual for an acquihire to have real agency in a big company. It's usually the middle management route - or worse - the limbo of having nothing real to do like the parody scenario in the Silicon Valley tv show.
- colinbartlett 10y agoAnother one of those services I wish I'd heard about before its acquisition. But at least this one does not appear to have been shut down on day one?
- xorgar831 10y agoThat's interesting they just bought apigee which does about the same thing?
- imron 10y agoConsolidation.
- zellyn 10y agoWith Firebase expanding to form an entire ecosystem of services, and being kept alive for a long time now, I have renewed hope that being acquihired by Google won't just be the death knell - at least for this type of service.
- sashagim 10y agoWas Firebase acquihired? I would think not. Without knowing the details of the amounts paid, the fact itself that Firebase is still around and Google seem to actually keep investing in it - tells me it was more than just an expensive hiring process.
- guessmyname 10y agoOf course they are, what else would they do; ~2 years old and already sold [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaktoit#Api.ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaktoit#Api.ai
- georgeportillo 10y agoFucking impressive.
- georgeportillo 10y agoI'm actually excited for this. API.ai us a great set of tools to use.
- keithwhor 10y agoCongratulations to the api.ai team. Unrelated to the acquisition directly, but fantastic logo placement. I can't be the only person that looks for their color-changing sign every time I drive down the 101. Awesome advertising / growth hack. :)
- threeio 10y agoMotorola has one over by Moffett Towers if you are looking for a new muse :)
- eitally 10y agoDon't forget Rambus behind them!
- eschutte2 10y agoI think a sign on the 101 might be better for advertising to acquirers than to end users.
- tomtang0514 10y agoYeah their logo is one block away from my apartment so I saw that 7 days a week
- hkr_mag 10y ago+1. Success factor, API.ai, Evernote — three logos from my memory
- largote 10y agoWhere in 101?
- ssalazar 10y agoIn Redwood City if i recall correctly.
- inthewoods 10y agoCongrats to them. I do find this sentence a bit awkward: "It has been a long and fun journey. Since API.AI’s launch in 2014..." I think the CEO referring to the total time into the company (including the Speaktoit phase), but it comes across badly - leaves me thinking "You think 2 years is a long time???" I don't think that's what the CEO meant to say.
- imron 10y agoMy guess is it was an attempt to avoid saying 'incredible journey'. https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- Kiro 10y agoWhat's the point of that page? Starting and selling your own company is an incredible journey. I don't see the problem with that phrase.
- imron 10y agoI'm sure it is an incredible journey. It's just become cliché for companies to put up a page thanking customers (that are mostly likely getting screwed by the deal) for partaking in their incredible journey. It's not so incredible when a service you were relying on stops providing that service.
- amix 10y agoTried API.ai a few months ago and was very unimpressed with the results (things were slow, expensive and not very powerful. Rebuilding the models was also broken at times). I am unsure why Google are acquiring them, especially given that they have DeepMind and TensorFlow teams.
- ginger_beer_m 10y agoCan it do anything that can't be done locally using off-the-shelves packages like nltk etc?
- ausjke 10y agonot sure what google gains by doing this, hope google can leverage this and give its customer more AI-APIs, the more the merrier, especially better speech-APIs(similar to Alexa but more open)
- octaveguin 10y agoDoes this signal a continued push for bots and conversational UX? Where does the belief in the tech come from? Are there any examples of real success with this tech? Bots can't solve discovery in a novel way without big advances in NLP. There doesn't seem to be a bridge from here to there where it makes sense as a user. Is this just irrational exuberance? I'd love to understand why microsoft/google/facebook are all continuing to bet big here.
- Disruptive_Dave 10y ago> I'd love to understand why microsoft/google/facebook are all continuing to bet big here. Because they can afford to. And because if you wait for success examples, you might just be too late.
- euyyn 10y agoDo you mean discovery as in me figuring out which bots would I like to install from a "bots store"? If so, I think Apple's approach in iMessage widgets is fantastic: If you send third-party content to a person that doesn't have the plugin installed, they'll also get a link to install it. So it boosts word-of-mouth.
- octaveguin 10y agoI could have been clearer because you're right that it's ambiguous. My sense of discovery was meant in the UI sort of respect. When a feature is hidden from the user, that feature might as well not exist. Bots (and command lines, for that matter) are awful unless you know exactly what they're capable of. There is an extrinsic knowledge you need. That is, you can't expect a bot to know whatever you throw at it but you're unsure what you /can/ expect it to know. The problem is that command lines are sort of made for the expert users whereas bots are said to be the opposite.
- euyyn 10y agoAh, I agree. Bots need to understand language (within their domain) very broadly to be able and overcome that.
- the_common_man 10y agoI wonder how engineers at Google feel about all this. I guess they feel they should be joining these startups instead of slogging at Google. They can just easily retire/do their own thing if they are part of these acquihires.
- largote 10y agoWorking at a startup "for the money" is like playing the lottery, you may hit it big, but a lot of startups just crash and burn. In the meantime you're making a lot less than someone working at a large company. You could take the $50K/yr pay difference and buy lottery tickets with that.
- the_common_man 10y agoYou are right but it's not like the startup is not paying you anything. So it's not exactly the same odds of a lottery. Most startups pay from 100-125k and Google is not that far off from that range.
- largote 10y agoThe gap in base-pay+bonus is usually like 20-30%, plus there's the fact that you're getting stock you can actually sell on top of that.
- lettergram 10y agoI honestly don't think this is a aquire-hire. It seems much more of an attempt to get access to additional data not made public from companies using api.ai, at the same time boosting Alphabets capabilities.
- dschiptsov 10y agoWhat they did? Yet another interface wrapper to Stanford Core NLP for over hyped chat bots?
- stackUnderFlow 10y agoGoogle acquired APIgee and now API.AI. Why Google is so interested in API's now?
- braaap 10y agoTrue they both have API in the name, but api.ai is more of an API for AI tasks like intention inference and sentence parsing. Apigee is an API management platform.
- braaap 10y agoFacebook acquired wit.ai in January 2015, and I wonder if this acquisition is Google's quite belated response to that?
- visarga 10y agoCould be, if you think about it. "Api.ai" is very similar because it also has a three letter name and an ".ai" /s
- zump 10y agoLiterally never heard of this company. Serious question: How can I find a company that is likely to get acquired by Google?
- dshah 10y agoCongrats to the api.ai team. I love when great companies do well. I'm a happy customer (and wish I were also an investor, but I'm not).
- imron 10y ago> I'm a happy customer What are your plans for transitioning off their service? The script for this sort of acqui-hire is pretty well known at this point.