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Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games
- bemmu 16y agoI remember Max Levchin mentioning in an interview that Slide would be a success to him if it sells for more than PayPal. I hope he is still happy with this outcome, looking forward to seeing what he will do next.
- ed 16y ago$182 Million may sound like a lot, but remember that not too long ago this company was raising capital at a valuation of $2 billion. I expect there will be little cash, if any, left for employees after investor payouts.
- dotBen 16y agoDo you have a source for the $2bn valuation. I've seen (+ personally remember) a $0.5bn figure but can't source $2bn. Thanks
- raquo 16y agoThat's from the same guy who says Facebook is worth $100b http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/01/vc-sees-2b-ipo/ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/01/vc-sees-2b-ipo/
- jonknee 16y agoIf they bought in at $2B valuation wouldn't that just mean they lost money and there would still be whatever percent of the shares / $182m that weren't sold to the investor's left?
- rgrieselhuber 16y agoDepends on liquidity preferences.
- vibhavs 16y ago"If Slide cashes out for $1.5 billion, Levchin 'would regard it as abject failure'," Slide investor David Weiden of Khosla Ventures told BusinessWeek in 2007. source: http://www.businessinsider.com/if-slide-cashes-out-for-15-billion-levchin-would-regard-it-as-abject-failure-slide-investor-david-weiden-of--2010-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/if-slide-cashes-out-for-15-bi... edit: note that PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- coryl 16y agoWow, talk about hype. That kind of quote is like bubble era speculation, just feeding the frenzy. I always wondered why Slide was kept in such high regard when all they made was slideshows and facebook apps. I mean, sure the guy has a reputation, but what were they making that was so noteworthy and game changing?
- jw84 16y agoWhat does Slide... do?
- unohoo 16y agoLast I heard, they were still trying to figure it out :)
- joshu 16y agoI've always wondered this myself.
- uuilly 16y agoAs near as I can tell it makes 14 y/o girls happy. I can wrap my head around a lot of small companies going big, but I never could find a way to rationalize the hype behind slide.
- seiji 16y agoI always thought it was another case of Founder-itis. Popular founder = press = perceived popular product (almost no matter what it does) = good exit or a pity exit.
- rokhayakebe 16y agoI think most people who have a Myspace account use Slide to display pictures.
- minalecs 16y agohad no ideas they were a game company.. thought they just did picture slide shows
- harscoat 16y agoSlide illustrates "Stick to the point and say it in a single sentence. I know it sounds a little crazy, but indeed I’ve come to agree that a clear, compelling elevator pitch is essential to growing a business. (And I’ve paid dearly for the evidence.)" http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2006/01/practicing-art-of-pitchcraft.html http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2006/01/practicing-art...
- prs 16y agoGiven that Slide has received $78M in funding this exit does not look very exciting to my eyes. Nevertheless, congratulations to Max for yet another sold company.
- leftnode 16y agoI saw that and wondered where $78 million goes in creating a games site. That seems like a tremendous amount of money. Oh well, congrats I suppose.
- rokhayakebe 16y agoSales force + marketing, maybe.
- ed 16y agoMost of it is ad spend, essentially insulating the company from challengers by creating an artificial barrier to entry. It's now nearly impossible to compete in the space unless you're very well funded or cater to a niche.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- zandorg 16y agoPossibly a talent acquisition of Levchin. If he doesn't quit, it seems like a good purchase.
- donaldc 16y agoIf that's the case, why not just pay him $100 million directly and cut out the middlemen?
- erikpukinskis 16y agoBecause he wants to do another startup, and he owes his investors BIG TIME. Those folks are taking a huge financial hit. He convinces Google to buy the company as a favor to them. If he just dumps the company and takes a huge bonus from Google, he loses a lot of friends, and has a hell of a time getting funding next time. So he's going to do his time at Google. 5 years of startup purgatory. And when he comes out, he'll have a few friends ready to put a couple million behind his next venture.
- jmtame 16y agoi hope he goes and works with wepay on the payments space
- aresant 16y agoBiz insider says sales price @ $228m Not a huge percentage more but I wouldn't complain about another $46m :) http://www.businessinsider.com/google-just-bought-slide-for-182-million-watch-out-facebook-2010-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-just-bought-slide-for-...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- betterlabs 16y agoMax is awesome and I love his attitude. But I just never ever understood Slide. And why Google would buy Slide is equally difficult to understand, if not more. Are they buying technology? Or users (on Facebook!)? Or revenues (most likely not!)? Or Max and his team?
- nivertech 16y agoWhy Google buying Slide? Probably some VC, who invested in Slide, also sit on Google's board. That's why ;)
- kmilden 16y agoI agree. This type of thing happens all too often.
- betterlabs 16y ago+1 to that. I think that is the best explanation. Sometimes the best way to get a face-saving exit in the Valley is to be VC funded and by the right guys who make sure all their bets get some sort of an exit. I know of a similar one in the recent past.
- jgilliam 16y agoIt's the same reason they partnered with Zynga. It's a backdoor way to get at large chunks of Facebook profile data for ad targeting.
- aspiringsensei 16y agoI hadn't considered this angle: are you able to flesh out the degree to which they will be able to do this? I'm non-technical, so it's not immediately clear to me: * the potential increase in cashflow yields from improving ad targeting (what change will it make? isn't google pretty good at this already?) * How the data from Zynga & Slide will flow out of the facebook ecosystem and into the broader web (is your slide identity linked to your google search identity somehow?) I'd appreciate any thoughts that occur to you. Still puzzling over the point of a back-door into facebook user data and what that might bring. Could they export that into a google profile? Would an understanding of what individuals "like" and "dislike" in concert with knowledge of their social graph's likes and dislikes lead to more targeted advertising? I guess those are the questions that google bought the company to answer: 182m is not that much in terms of earnings for them, and they might have been able to pay in stock. Thanks for getting my mind whirring.
- pjhyett 16y agoI'll never understand why Max took his Paypal money and built an online widget company. Hopefully he'll attempt something meaningful next time.
- samratjp 16y agoLike his meaningful investing in WePay (which does seem meaningful) -http://www.businessinsider.com/max-levchin-is-pretty-excited-about-a-new-payments-startup-called-wepay-2010-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/max-levchin-is-pretty-excited...
- staunch 16y agoOr Yelp.
- basugasubaku 16y agoSlide was originally supposed to be a revolutionary way to organize and share photos. But they found monetization in the social network sphere and seemed to focus on that.
- jaspertheghost 16y agoSlide started out as a global recommendation push engine for shopping items. They pivoted to a widget company when it took off.
- dotBen 16y agoIf $182m is the true price it's a total firesale. They raised $78m at a $500m valuation. With costs, liquidation preferences, etc I wonder if the common shareholders will see anything. Even BI is correct at $228m it's pretty slim pickings. My guess is Google want Levchin to be GM of the new Google social network (he has experience of social thru Slide and payments thru PayPal of course) and this is really a talent acquisition as much as anything.
- hristov 16y agoFor 182 mil this has got to be a lot of talent...
- evgen 16y agoIsn't that toad from Microsoft who was previously heading up the Android effort the guy slotted to take over Google Me? As cute as Slide is I really don't see very much about it that screams "social"; its not much more social that Google Docs and if Google has any intention of playing in the next big game it has to do much, much better than this.
- redorb 16y agotoad from microsoft? Google Me? (its not named yet) you make it sounds like your an insider and know these guys personally (if so correct me) but it just seems inappropriate.
- Tycho 16y agoIt's funny: on one hand Slide seems such a feeble business proposition compared to the mighty PayPal, but on the other hand photo sharing has been the very thing that's fuelled so much consumer activity over the last decade (Facebook, MySpace, camera phones, memes...). What's the word on Slide's arch rival, RockYou or whatever it's called - valued higher than Slide? There was another idea that came out of the Maxcubator at the same time as Slide, can't remember what it was (i read it in The Facebook Story) may have involved Peter Theil, it seemed like the best idea but Levchin passed it up for The Slide concept.
- jimboyoungblood 16y agoThere was another idea that came out of the Maxcubator at the same time as Slide, can't remember what it was Maybe you're thinking of Yelp.
- Mistone 16y agorockyou is doing quite well- def bigger then Slide. They just signed a 5 yr deal with facebook for using fb credits in all social games http://tcrn.ch/adWPTK http://tcrn.ch/adWPTK
- davcro 16y agoThis does not make sense. I am the developer of two Facebook apps, Friend Interview and Quiz Monster. I would argue those two apps are more valuable than Slide's and there is no way they are worth $182 million. What is Google buying?
- pclark 16y agoEpic talent?
- BenS 16y agoGoogle is buying distribution across many social networks in lots of countries, and a team 100+ smart engineers and product designers.
- muhfuhkuh 16y agoThat Slide has 100 any human beings working on essentially a slideshow flash widget, a couple embedded video players, and a patronizing knock-off social game is incredulous. If they can fetch that number, then whateverlife should've been worth a billion. This may be where we see Hunter Thompson's high water mark for the Social Web, where the tides broke and rolled back.
- davcro 16y agoQuiz Monster and Friend Interview have a bigger userbase both international and in the US than Slide's apps. Granted I'm only looking at FB here, but IMO that is the only social network that matters. I work solo and believe that my apps could be run with just one educated rails developer. Isnt that a better buy than a smaller app that needs 100 eningeers? And I'm not some special case here. There are a handful of Indy fb devs with bigger apps than mine. This deal makes zero sense to me.
- ahi 16y agoBuy some foosball tables and hire some engineers. You'll be rolling in it in no time.
- aswanson 16y agoYou can tell the suits have taken over at google, at least in acquisitions. This makes no sense at all.
- mattmaroon 16y agoSlide? Really? They couldn't have picked a much worse company to buy there, except RockYou. Slide got a bunch of users early by making Facebook apps that gave it functionality MySpace had like ability to post videos and photos to friends' walls. Those kinds of apps never monetized well, and all of that stuff unsurprisingly ended up on Facebook's roadmap anyway.
- idoh 16y agoYou can't really compare the two. RockYou doesn't really focus on the widgets as much as games / ad network these days (although truth be told you can't really see it if you swing by rockyou.com or visit the crunchbase profile, which is really out of date). The ad network side of things is really strong and doing lots of interesting things.
- mattmaroon 16y agoI've run these ads on my apps, and purchased them. No ad network on Facebook is making anything substantial. They do have a couple games doing well lately.
- alanh 16y agoDoes Slide utilize Zynga-style dirty tricks to psychologically manipulate users to their detriment? If so, and if Google continues such products or starts their own using such tricks, that’s evil in my book.
- c1sc0 16y agoI don't get why you are being downvoted. I know game mechanics are hot right now but you are making a valid point. If we're not careful we're going to turn the whole internet in a giant skinner box.
- mlinsey 16y agoI always thought that Levchin's PayPal experience would give Slide an opportunity to dominate the micropayments space that is generating so much revenue for competing social games companies. That thought wasn't very well fleshed-out (what specific advantages would it have given Slide? Was handling payments really a key pain point for Zynga et al?), but it still seems like a big missed opportunity to me.
- jscore 16y ago$182M for a bunch of widgets? Looks like Google is getting desperate here.