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Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak
- ynniv 10y agoSquare has an Atlanta office in Atlantic Station, which is ~ 15 minutes from where Yik Yak is located in Buckhead. This same Square office previously picked up the Google Web Toolkit team after Google closed their local office.
- posguy 10y agoHuh, well Square seems to be in the right place at the right time to make this acquisition of talent. I still don't get how Square intends to retain/gain customers at the price point their at, Mercury, Heartland, etc are eating their lunch.
- ryanwaggoner 10y agoHeartland is such an utter piece of garbage. I'd use almost anything before I'd touch it (or any typical shitty enterprise processor) again. Source: spent a year helping a client migrate from Stripe to Heartland to save a few basis points. Things like faxing docs to terrible APIs to constant lies from sales, who is a bunch of ignorant, rude good ol' boys, just like most of their competitors. Pure incompetence at virtually every point of interaction. Literally have not a single good thing to say. I'd invest a significant part of my net worth in Stripe if I could. They and companies like them are going to destroy Heartland in the long run, and it can't come soon enough.
- btown 10y agoAs someone who's worked with faxed API docs before, that's usually just the tip of the iceberg of despair. Never again.
- posguy 10y agoYeah, I'd avoid direct integrations entirely, semi-integrated CC/Debit processing like Pax or Dejavoo is much less painful to implement, and costs less on hardware too. See my other comment.
- posguy 10y agoHeartland is only strong in the terminal arena, their entire plan for EMV POS systems boils down to Datacap (fucking nightmare you should avoid) and Pax (which is meh). Mercury/Vantiv aren't bad, and are much more developer friendly if you need complex direct integrations, alternatively FD ISOs vary. The least painful way to integrate is semi-integrated with Pax or Dejavoo, and that way your customer can choose from the majority of processors with minimal work on your end. Typically I see grocers paying under 1% after interchange, network fees, processor fees, etc, hence why there is motivation to deal with the legacy good ol' boys. Helpful library: https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/PHPax https://github.com/AccelerateNetworks/PHPax
- jameskegel 10y ago>Mercury Vantiv Payments
- posguy 10y agoDepends who your dealing with, they may be owned by Vantiv, but the sales & support teams are still separate.
- huangc10 10y ago> The payments processor paid less than $3 million for between five and ten of Yik Yak’s engineers, according to the person. Classic acquihire scenario?
- EduardoBautista 10y agoAre they required to work there, what's stopping them from finding a new job?
- gonzo 10y agoGolden handcuffs.
- harryh 10y agoThat's not really the case here. Golden handcuffs refers to stock that was previously granted but either has not yet vested or has vested but the employee can't keep if they walk away from the job. While the employees in question surely own Yik-yak stock that stock is now worthless. They're starting at Square just like they would start at any other job. Thus they will stay at Square if it is a better job for them (for whatever reason) than they could otherwise get.
- ithinkinstereo 10y agoThey prob have various retention bonuses in place (either cash, square options, or both) to keep the acquired engineers at Square for x months/years.
- utmachina 10y agoI think the key problem was the hype train and the lack of product-oriented/technical leadership. remembered them doing very well on campus last two years of college. They had on campus reps to hand out "schwag"; probably not very fun to scale. The obvious bullying was the problem. If they had found some way to solve that and snuck their way back into high schools... then again, kids can be so cruel.
- madamelic 10y agoThe issue was their entire app. The exact same reason bullying could happen was the exact reason people loved it (anonymity). Group A (parents, schools, etc) wanted complete de-masking + real-world identity while Group B (the users) wanted some anonymity with no real-world identity. Yik-Yak could've never won as far as I can see.
- MichaelGG 10y agoCould be anonymous but still keep the unique phone ID and boot/hide disruptive users. Users probably want anonymity at a far weaker guarantee than, say, Tor offers.
- cgriswald 10y agoI was a frequent user for quite a while. It was never truly anonymous in that Yikyak obviously maintained some type of internal ID to identify you. This was fine with me. We had some deep, real conversations (along with the usual nonsense). I stopped using it when they added mandatory profiles. For online discussion, there is a huge difference between anonymous and pseudonymous. While anonymous, no persona is formed in the mind of other users, except within the context of a specific discussion. It is impossible to form factions. Group think is somewhat minimized, because no one knows it is you that is not following the party line on issue A, even though you are totally on board for issue B. When you are pseudonymous, factions form, grudges form, prejudices form. Suddenly someone remembers your position on gun control and assumes your position on the death penalty. If you say something stupid, it stays with you. I don't want to share my sexual interests and my political point of views with strangers and have those things be linked to the same account (from the user perspective). I DO want to do that without that link. I think it tends to focus more on the issues, and let's people avoid the artificial barriers that otherwise might come between them. When they made this switch, it was suddenly an entirely different app. It was no different than just finding a random web forum, except that you could be sure the people around you were geographically close to you (sort of). Completely non-anonymous Next Door is better in that regard anyway, and Yikyak no longer had anything to offer me.
- hamandcheese 10y agoThe phrasing makes it seem like Yik Yak itself is not being acquired. Is that a thing that ever happens? I doubt square is interested in their tech anyways. I've heard that the Atlanta tech scene is dominated by business types rather then techies. It wouldn't surprise me if leadership is selling off most their engineering team and planning to outsource as needed from here on out.
- mehrdada 10y ago> Is that a thing that ever happens? Yes. If you acquire a company, you assume all their liabilities as well as the assets. You might want to just buy the assets and have the acquisition owners dissolve it themselves to keep the liabilities at bay.
- CydeWeys 10y agoYeah, and it's so common there's a phrase for it: "acquihire". When a company (or even just its team) is acquired for the engineers themselves, not for any existing code, product, or business.
- alistproducer2 10y ago>I've heard that the Atlanta tech scene is dominated by business types... In ATL, can confirm. That's not to say there aren't good engineers here.
- sdflkd 10y agoCan you speak more on the ATL tech scene? I've always been interested.
- frogstomp19 10y agoNot OP but I'm a software engineer working for a startup in ATL. I'm not sure how we have a reputation for being "dominated by business types", but we do have a relatively high contingent of fintech and b2b companies here (our only unicorn, Kabbage, plus several others like Square, Salesloft, Salesforce). I think though that our pool of engineering talent is relatively high - I'd guess it's the most likely landing spot for good engineers from the southeast.
- hamandcheese 10y ago> The payments processor paid less than $3 million for between five and ten of Yik Yak’s engineers I feel like they could have saved money and created happy engineers by offering each employee a hefty sign on bonus.
- pjc50 10y agoIt would be interesting if there were a transfer market in programmers like there is in footballers, but I don't see it happening any time soon. (Partly this is because the rules of the game prevent replacing Lionel Messi with 1,000 cheap non-Western consultants hired through three layers of outsourcing)
- cheriot 10y agoWhat successful company has been built by "1,000 cheap non-Western consultants hired through three layers of outsourcing"? We don't need a rule against a losing strategy
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> We don't need a rule against a losing strategy Interestingly, these are common anyway. Some obvious examples are laws against suicide, incest, and infanticide.
- nikanj 10y agoWipro?
- hkmurakami 10y agoGoing one by one would present decision fear to any number of said engineers. "Am I going to be offered this deal as well, or will I be left out?" By going at it collectively, it reduces perceives downside risk. Also, it reduces Square side's risk that one or more key people it wants would balk at the individual offer. By offering a group deal, it pressures everyone to join, since human nature is to not want to sabotage the communal good for your own benefit, especially when you've worked together for years. It may also permit a more holistic retention package for the next 4 years for this team and keep VCs happy.
- gonzo 10y agoThe two co-founders attended Furman University and were fraternity brothers who met in a coding clsss. Square probably doesn't need more brogrammers.
- shallot_router 10y agoHN probably doesn't need more culture war-baiting.
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14187223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14187223 and marked it off-topic.
- Svexark 10y agoYik Yak destroyed itself by ignoring their users and making changes that undermined the reason people used their app in the first place. They're only "struggling" because of a series of self-inflicted wounds.
- huac 10y agoThey faced legal trouble for the anonymity.
- PM_NAKED_PIKS 10y agoActual legal cases? Or just online petitions mumble jumble?
- tsumnia 10y agoThat doesn't mean users wanted something else; I used it originally because it was a "localized 4chan". When they started adding usernames and whatnot, I uninstalled. That was the thing users wanted, take it away and why use the app? There are hundreds of social communities I can join, so what is YikYak's MVP? From that perspective, you have to choose what battle you want to fight - maintain anonymity and deal with the ramifications or lose your userbase by becoming just another social app?
- ng12 10y agoI don't think that's true, could you provide a source?
- brightball 10y agoI don't know about legal challenges, but they basically created an anonymous area broadcast. There's a lot of complications that come along with that.
- ng12 10y agoI really don't think there are. As long as they complied with authorities when somebody used Yik-Yak to do something illegal they're in the clear.
- guelo 10y ago> The company’s reputation suffered from cases of cyber-harassment, hate speech, and threats that appeared on Yik Yak’s platform. Angry young white men strike again. It's one thing to be threatened by anonymous mobs on Twitter or Reddit but when you know the attackers are phisically within a mile or two things can get seriously scary.
- pklausler 10y agoI'm missing something. Were these engineers under a transferable contract? What, specifically, did Square buy with their "less than $3 million", and from whom?
- jdavis703 10y agoWhat this likely means is that the engineers at Square get some kind of vesting stock options (i.e. golden handcuffs) that are valued in aggregate at less than $3 million. It also means the engineers get to have a well-recognized brand on their resume, and not a gap of a few weeks to months that then needs to be explained (not to mention the hit their bank accounts would take). This is generally what's called an "acquihire."
- ProfessorLayton 10y agoPity, mainly because there seems to be a market for local anonymous communications, but a relatively small, and very vocal subset of users can ruin it for everyone. I wonder if some sort of anonymous reputation system could have saved them from making product decisions that were counter to the reasons for using the app in the first place.
- notadoc 10y agocomment karma like here on hackernews is sort of an "anonymous reputation system" is it not?
- pjc50 10y agoPseudonymous, not anonymous. People can recognise your username and treat you accordingly. Conversely if you start a new username it doesn't retain any karma from your "main".
- murtnowski 10y agoBeen running anonember.com for a while now without issue
- noamhacker 10y agoThe posts would get auto-deleted if their vote count got to -5. It was popular enough at my university that this kind of community moderation worked reasonably well, but in a lot of other locations it got abused.
- kevinmchugh 10y agoA hackernews user, `pkfrank, wrote about some of the strategies for mitigating bad posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663064
- alistproducer2 10y agowhisper is a much superior, still alive platform that does the same thing.
- fencepost 10y agoI played with it briefly, curious about whether it might on any way become similar to the "local" view that was in Google+ for a while, but it seemed mostly to consist of dig jokes and a little bit of high schoolers trashing mostly students from other schools.
- blizkreeg 10y agoI've found most acquihire situations unfair to existing employees. It seems that those coming in from the acquihire have a higher reward/payout that talented employees already at the company can never negotiate. Are the incoming acquihired engineers that much more worth than the ones you already have? There are certainly exceptions but by and large I can't imagine this being the case.
- 31reasons 10y agoBut in the end if you look at the opportunity cost the Acquihired engineers paid brings them to the same level of compensation as others. e.g Working 2 or more years at low pay.
- blizkreeg 10y agoThat's not the acquiring company's problem. Certainly engineers at the acquiring co don't care about this. They took that risk fully knowing and willingly.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 10y agoI've seen $1M+/engineer compensation (over a 4-year vesting period) given to ordinary employees at big companies. It's actually not that out of the ordinary. One of the things that surprised me about working for a big company is that the compensation structure is not quite as lopsided (in favor of acquisitions) as I thought. There do need to be two conditions met to bring in the big bucks though: 1) you need to perform, such that your value to the employer is > $1M, and 2) they need to be afraid of losing you. Many employees fail on one or both conditions. They either slack off or don't work on the right things (so they're not actually worth that much), or they're "company men" who will unquestioningly stay with the company regardless of whether they're compensated fairly.
- blizkreeg 10y ago
- huehehue 10y agoBit of a tangent and, for those not familiar, Yik Yak is an anonymous, upvote-downvote, location-based forum (kinda) where posts are automatically deleted if they net -5 votes. In college, I was really interested in how Yik Yak worked and found out that, given a list of N user ids (which were super easy to generate), one could send downvote requests to the server and instantly delete any post with a score <= (N - 5). Infinite loop + pass in a list of locations (e.g. a list of colleges in the US), and it's pretty darn easy to disable Yik Yak for the entire country. There was no location checking to see if a user id was being used in both Florida and Montana at the same time, and there was no real throttling. I hit up their support, and tried to reach out to their devs, but I kept getting brushed off. Of course this is just one small thing, but I'm not exactly surprised at how things are turning out if this was the level of interest that the Yik Yak team showed in their own product.
- problems 10y agoHonestly, I'm continually amazed by the level of absolute garbage people can ship with any level of popularity. And worse, get funding to ship it.
- ng12 10y agoBut it doesn't really matter does it? It's a social application, not a banking system. If your garbage gets users it's not garbage.
- pcwalton 10y agoIf a company gets users but fails to retain them, causing the product to fail and the investors to lose their funds, then it certainly isn't a success.
- ng12 10y agoSure, but it's a calculated risk -- maybe they decided that growth features were more important than uptime or data integrity. That still doesn't mean the app is garbage.
- Kpourdeilami 10y agoThis app used to be very popular on my university campus up until last summer that they removed the anonymous posting feature! Almost all of their users were upset and were threatening to leave the app but yik yak didn't take them seriously. That resulted in them losing 90% of their active users within a few weeks They brought back anonymous posting a few months after in a desperate attempt to bring back the old users but that didn't save them
- dheera 10y agoI loved the idea of Yik Yak, but every time I tried to start a semi-intelligent conversation I was downvoted to death. And this was smack in the middle of MIT. I guess the people I was hoping to interact with was exactly the opposite of the actual user base. It would be potentially interesting if the upvote/downvote thresholds and ranking took into account your Facebook or other social graph, and then extrapolated to other people that might find your posts interesting. Yik Yak could have been Waze. Yik Yak could have been a tool for students to ask questions during class when they didn't understand what the professor said. But it wasn't.
- peruvian 10y agoPeople go on social apps to waste time and have fun. I get your frustration but it's not surprising no one cares about discourse in Yik Yak.
- fspacef 10y ago> It would be potentially interesting if the upvote/downvote thresholds and ranking took into account your Facebook or other social graph I think this would be a cool thing to have, but one of the key things for YY was the anonymity. Linking with FB would have killed that (as forcing users to create usernames did).
- EGreg 10y agoSquare pays less than $3M for a whole team doing some declining startup and refuses to comment. So Bloomberg makes a whole article about it?
- sortaThrowaway 10y ago>The site became a point of contention on campuses across the >country, with many universities debating banning it. Yes universities could "ban" an app
- sebleon 10y agoSad to see things end this way - Yik Yak was pretty dope at Berkeley. However, I felt like the content got stale and predictable, and met the classic homogenous fate of every upvote/downvote community ever.