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Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)
- swannodette 15y agoI wonder what affect this will have on the open sourcing of Storm.
- gvnonor 15y agoI think you meant effect.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- icey 15y agoA) Congratulations to the BackType team! I wonder if they're the first Clojure-heavy startup to be acquired. It will be interesting to see what happens to their technology stack after a couple of years. B) Does this impact the open-sourcing of Storm?
- plam 15y agoFlightcaster is even earlier. FC might have been the first.
- icey 15y agoOh you're right - I totally forgot about Flightcaster's acquisition!
- kumarshantanu 15y agoVelocitude got acquired too by Akamai.
- beagledude 15y agoStorm will be rewritten in scala
- nickik 15y agoDo you really know that or are your just guessing?
- nathanmarz 15y agoWe're going to continue using Clojure just like before.
- dpritchett 15y agoYour blog has been one of my favorite reads for a while now. Please keep it up!
- chrisvallejos 15y agoCongratulations to BackType!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- plinkplonk 15y agoOld readwriteweb article "Secrets of BackType's Data Engineers - How do three guys with only seed funding process 100 million msgs a day?" http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/secrets-of-backtypes-data-engineers.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/secrets-of-backtype... HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097926 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097926 I am not a Clojure fan, but I found BackType engineer Nathan Marz's fusion of Datalog, Clojure and Hadoop to create Cascalog very impressive, and was looking forward to Storm.
- thecoffman 15y agoCongrats guys! I worked with Nathan, and he's a brilliant guy. Well deserved success.
- swombat 15y ago[ YC08 ] BackType has raised a total of $1.32m according to http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype No speculation as to the size of the acquisition, but I guess anything between $10-100m is possible, which would give YC a return of about 3% (6% adjusted down to 70% twice) of that, or somewhere between $300k and $3m? "YCombinator: turning $15k into $300k in 3 years" Not bad. Edit: This is based on the idea that BackType is successful, and had other options (which may not be the case, since their QuantCase/Compete graph is going down)... if they were about to go bust, the price could be considerably lower... but if they were doing well, I imagine investors would have blocked a sale lower than $10m.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI think it is more sub $10M. Their product will be discontinued, so it appears they are buying the team. Bactype looks like a company with a handful of employees so you probably want to count $1M/engineer or maybe $1.2M.
- webwright 15y agoI've heard $1-3M per engineer is common math at BigCo (from the horse's mouth). In this case, the BackType engineers are pretty damn epic, so I'd wager it's towards middle/high side of the range.
- DanielRibeiro 15y agoAnd just 34 days ago AdGrok was joining the flock: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603541 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603541 Guess YC/Twitter relationship was only at the very beginning when Avi Bryant helped pg adopt @paulg: http://twitter.com/#!/avibryant/status/22303889283 http://twitter.com/#!/avibryant/status/22303889283
- webwright 15y agoTwo thoughts: Quantcast/Compete is almost no relationship to reality when you are talking about b2b startups or startups with sub-10M/month uniques. They are wrong in magnitude and growth trends as often as they are right, in my experience. Also, if an investor DID block a sale, that fact would come up any time they were competing to fund future YC companies, so it probably wouldn't be worth it for an investor to do that... Yet another value that YC provides.
- brlewis 15y ago"we will discontinue the BackType product and API services" Besides Google Alerts, what alternatives are out there?
- siculars 15y agoI was using some of BackType's API's myself. Now I'm taking a look at http://corp.topsy.com/developers/api/ http://corp.topsy.com/developers/api/.
- whatwhatwhat 15y agoThis kind of sucks, actually.
- joblessjunkie 15y agoI wish that when a headline announced "Big company acquires little startup you've never heard of" that it would be accompanied by some explanation of what the little startup actually does, and why it is interesting.
- scorpioxy 15y agoYou would typically know about it if you're into social media analytics and metrics and its effects on advertising and so on. Their technology stack is very cool. The amount of data it needs to process is staggering. And this whole field is relatively new so there are tons of potential in it.
- retube 15y agoYes but even the fairly niche demographic of HN extends to those with interests outside of social analytics.
- vegashacker 15y agoThe interest here (for most people I assume) is the YC funding they got in 08. (Or "O8" as it seems to be written in the headline.)
- retube 15y agoYeah agreed. And their site doesn't seem to say anything either, other than they've been acquired by Twitter. Looking at Google search results it appears to be social analytics. I guess they spit out metrics on brand mentions, retweets, compute scores or ranks on "buzz", and probably do sentiment too. But I'm guessing wildly.
- pdelgallego 15y agoCongrats to the guys of BackType. I have been very tempted to apply to their internship during the winter.
- nestlequ1k 15y agoI don't get it. Are startups now just a new resume? How are BackType users supposed to react to this? How are users supposed to trust other API startups if they can just get the rug pulled out from them like this? I'm happy for the team, but is there not any way they could have transitioned the project to other developers and still joined twitter fulltime?
- andrewljohnson 15y agoStart-ups are businesses. They make money for their investors and founders. Handing off the code sounds like hippie poppycock to me. I suppose they can do it if they want to, but they don't have to.
- amirmc 15y agoSure, but it reinforces the notion that you can't put too much faith in a startup sticking it out. Normally that's because people think they might go bust and you'll lose that thing you got used to having. It also applies to when a startup gets acquired and the service is then shut down. Folks who've been stung by this once might think twice before using/buying stuff from a small company in future.
- endlessvoid94 15y agoSo far, I haven't heard a PEEP from anyone paying backtype. If what you say is true, where is all the press about how horrible this is for their customers?
- amirmc 15y agoI'm making a general point about why people don't always like to use products from startups and how this particular case reinforces their views. I wasn't suggesting that backtype had paying customers. Also, a lack of press coverage does not mean there aren't unhappy users out there.
- benjiweber 15y ago
- randall 15y agoBlack shirt acquired! Congrats guys!
- apgwoz 15y agoIf you're referring to the "I made something people want," is it true? It sounds like they really want the engineers, which they didn't make (their parents did, I guess they deserve the shirt then?). Yes, I'm joking. Congrats to the team! They should wear their shirts proudly!
- edawerd 15y agoCongrats guys. Well deserved.
- siculars 15y agoLooks like they shut their free api down around noon today. Not even a tweet. Boo.
- ddemchuk 15y agoand yet no profit has been had...good job twitter, good job
- chr15 15y agoCompanies rarely buy other companies for their profits. Most of the time it's a strategic move e.g. Twitter purchasing Tweetdeck to protect itself from aggressive moves by UberMedia
- ddemchuk 15y agoIt baffles me how, with the number of investors involved and the huge amount of money on the line, Twitter is making any strategic move other than "how do we get profitable"