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It's official: Google buys Zenter
- drusenko 19y agoCongrats guys : )
- akkartik 19y agoPlease update the link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-sharing.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-sharing.html
- mattculbreth 19y agoNice job!
- far33d 19y agoWell, now you have something to say to all those haters (the ones that think you abandoned your families or whatever such nonsense).
- abstractbill 19y agoAwesome - well done!
- zach 19y agoGood to hear, I hope it was a good payout for the founders!
- gibsonf1 19y agoAn incredible win-win. I'm looking forward to hearing the official buyout cost! (And I'm looking forward to using the app.) Will the founders survive at the Googleplex for long? Was Google's earlier vaporware announcement a strategy to get Zenter at a lower cost? Probably not, as they really need that app one way or another for the suite. Excellent recovery that Zenter got bought instead of ending up on ebay. Also congratulations to the Y Combinator team - yet another good call added to the record. The PR from this will be big.
- sharpshoot 19y agowow - well done!
- Alex3917 19y agoVery nice :-)
- trajan 19y agoReally exciting. Congrats.
- aston 19y agoThis makes the second service I know of (after Youtube) that Google's acquired despite already having internal teams working on a product.
- bootload 19y ago"... Will the founders survive at the Googleplex for long? ..." && "... second service I know of (after Youtube) that Google's acquired despite already having internal teams working on a product ..." I was wondering about this as well, then I read this post. It must have an impact on the 'engineers' who work there having groups of buyouts with vesting periods and larger payouts. There must be some level of resentment (it's human nature). How does google manage this?
- antirez 19y agoYeah, also it is not particularly cool after you sold that you need to go at Google to work on this stuff. I mean... ok... after some year the vesting period expires and you are rich and goodbye, but in some way after the acquisition you became a "worker" for Google with much less freedom than before: this sucks.
- pg 19y agoIt's standard procedure to go work at the acquirer after getting bought. I did it myself. It's not so bad. Having just become rich tends to put you in a pretty cheerful mood, which makes all the everyday annoyances of working at a big co slide off you. Plus Google is probably the most hacker-compatible of all big cos.
- antirez 19y agoPlus Google is probably the most hacker-compatible of all big cos. Maybe N years ago when google was a little startup. In every big company there is the rule that you need to do a specific stuff, and this is the worst thing that an hacker can suffer, at least in my experience: all the hackers I know tend to switch domain every few months, just the time to understand "how it works".
- ashu 19y agoWay to go, guys. Brilliant!
- vlad 19y agoHappy Father's Day (one of the founders is a father, right?)
- brezina 19y agophew, now I don't need to pay back Robbie for that dinner I owe him. Happy 1st Father's Day Wayne!
- gduffy 19y agoI can do you one better ... Robbie OWES me a pizza. I like my pizza with pepperoni and shares of GOOG.
- palish 19y agoHoly moly. Way to go!
- abstractbill 19y agoTechCrunch coverage here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/19/google-acquires-zenter-to-fill-out-coming-powerpoint-application/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/19/google-acquires-zenter-to-fill-out-coming-powerpoint-application/
- migpwr 19y agoCongrats to all yall as we say in the south!
- rokhayakebe 19y agoYC totally got a recipe.Paul G.tell us what it is. It has to be more than "Make something people want".
- brlewis 19y agoM.S.G.W.
- davidw 19y agoYeah... something Larry and Sergey want is better than something that joe schmoe wants:-) Congratulations are in order, in any case!
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- pg 19y agoYC's recipe is: make people make something people want. Seriously, making something people want was exactly what the Zenters did. Everyone could see at Demo Day that they'd made something users would like.
- bootload 19y ago"... The smart money is saying this is a build, not a buy. ..." ~ TC, April 17, 2007 ~ http://tinyurl.com/yo99gh http://tinyurl.com/yo99gh So if you make things that other want, did zenter purposefully make it's product to fill the gap in google office? If so it's a risky (ballsy) strategy to compete head to head with google if they have announced their intentions. What I want to know is what happened in the following 2 months? Was zenter X times better than the internal version?
- gibsonf1 19y agoGigaOM Coverage: http://gigaom.com/2007/06/19/enter-zenter-google-office-is-now-complete/ http://gigaom.com/2007/06/19/enter-zenter-google-office-is-now-complete/
- brett 19y agoCongrats.
- chris 19y agoCongrats dudes!!
- startupper 19y agoCongrats YC and Zenters!
- plusbryan 19y agoThat's really exciting. Congrats to the team. And woot!, you just raised all our valuations a little bit!
- Readmore 19y agoGood work guys!
- bk 19y agoWhat technology did Zenter use to build their service? Python? Java? I'm just wondering if Google has a preference for certain technologies.
- nostrademons 19y agoSomebody asked Chris Sacca (one of Google's main acquisition guys) this at the first Startup School. His answer was "Build it in whatever language will let you get to market and start getting users fastest. Usually when Google buys a company, we have to rewrite all the code anyway to take advantage of Google's infrastructure and scale to millions of users." This doesn't answer your question about Zenter, but it should about Google...
- SwellJoe 19y agoIt's predominantly JavaScript. I believe the back end is Java.
- paulgb 19y agoI think you are right. Whois.sc cached the server response headers before Google switched the server, and it was "Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_jk/1.2.21 SVN/1.4.4". mod_jk is a Tomcat connector, so it would make sense that the site would be written in Java.
- jamongkad 19y agoCongrats guys! happy to hear about your success!
- brianmckenzie 19y agoWay to go, Zenters!
- neilj 19y agoCongratulations to the Zenter team!
- mqt 19y agoIt's interesting that Zenter agreed to an acquisition before publicly launching. I don't recall seeing this too often. Would they have survived a presentation-ware duel with Google or would they have suffered a fate similar to Kiko's? I can't remember when I first heard about Zenter but it seems like I've been anticipating its release for a while. We generally hear that it's good to release early and update often so I'm interested in the story behind all of this. Would it have been better for them to hold out and build a user base so they could be acquired for more money?
- far33d 19y agoZenters - a question if you are around - did you ever end up hiring a non-founder employee?