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Neeva acquired by Snowflake
- sf4lifer 3y agoSequoia an investor in both. Soft landing to return their invested capital...
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoGotta love that free and open market where everyone is playing on the same field
- nova22033 3y agoWhich part of the transaction is against the principles of a free and open market?
- RestlessMind 3y agoAccess to huge upfront principal/capital in order to build a talented team and compete against a Trillion dollar corp: gated on your connections. A cushy exit when your ambitious plans fail: gated on your connections. So the market is technically open but plebs do not have credentials to play at all. Or to quote someone, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." Not a rap on Neeva team, btw. They did nothing wrong and kudos for tackling a big problem even if they failed at it.
- warthog 3y agoI was also thinking in these terms. The reality is there is virtually no possibility of starting a startup, getting VC money and making a buck without connections in your customers or investors. This is especially true with VCs. Kind of disappoints the romantic story but it is what it is
- monero-xmr 3y agoIsn’t “connections” just another word for “networking”? If I’m an investor I want a warm introduction. There are enough scammers and fraudsters out there that a basic filter on “who can vouch for you” is important. Furthermore I like entrepreneurs that had a history in industry, working for other successful people and orgs, before they strike out on their own. That’s my personal preference. And it’s through that history that they make the connections and have people vouch for them. It’s not some injustice that private firms raise money and then direct it to who they want. That’s just a mechanism for reducing risk in a game where everything is extraordinarily risky.
- rgbgraph 3y ago[flagged]
- askafriend 3y agoDo you trust people you know more than people you don't? How about let's start there.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoIs there any provably consistent reason that you should trust people you know more than strangers? I see no statically compelling reason that should be the assumed position for most people
- askafriend 3y agoBecause I'm not a computer. I'm a human.
- spacebanana7 3y ago> virtually no possibility of starting a startup ... without connections in your customers or investors. I feel this frustration is strongest with enterprise software which is usually the most capital intensive to build and requires a lot of trust to sell. The number of people who get to make decisions about, for example, data warehousing services is already pretty small and the subset of those willing to be somebody's first customer is even smaller. However, there are plenty of other startup opportunities outside of that space. Consumers, media people and developers are generally easier to chat with than CIOs and still need software to do what they want to do.
- ActionHank 3y agoIt's a bit like shaking your own hand, you can surely see that?
- noogle 3y agoThe government printing the fiat money that fueled a lot of this seems to be one. Besides, the "free market" is not a goal on its own. It's a method that is frequently the most beneficial one, but not always.
- no_butterscotch 3y agoI'm curious what the implications would be for Snowflake if they legit didn't want the asset that a board-member was trying to pressure them into buying. What if they didn't want Neeva but Sequoia knows Snowflake can absorb the loss for them? What's the procedure then?
- scrum-treats 3y agoPower play. Excited to see what's next!
- toomuchtodo 3y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013783 ("We will be shutting down neeva.com")
- dpflan 3y agoThe statements says mainly "That’s why Snowflake is acquiring Neeva, a search company founded to make search even more intelligent at scale. Neeva created a unique and transformative search experience that leverages generative AI and other innovations to allow users to query and discover data in new ways." Was Neeva providing useful tooling for this kind of search? I am unfamiliar with Neeva, never used it before. Is this a really useful thing or an acquisition for the investors for a startup to make sure their fund meets a return target?
- refulgentis 3y agoBoth. It’s v. nice to have a package deal of 50 xooglers who can build a search stack
- dpflan 3y agoWhat kept Neeva from "succeeding" on its own? I know there were previous discussions, but I am not in a position the moment to dig in (apologies). Is their current technology that good?
- refulgentis 3y agoAs a Googler…way I see it, too big too quick too much google and wrong time. Launch a year later and you’re legit have some rocket fuel via LLMs to build something new. I never used it till it shut down, and it looks like about 70% of google to me. That’s great, but you gotta avoid the xoogler trap of rebuilding the 20% of google you want to fix as a startup.
- radlad 3y agoI agree - Neeva was just Google-that-you-pay-for, which might've worked as a niche... but then LLMs came out and afaik they didn't do anything to integrate with them. It was the wrong product at the wrong time.
- 3y ago
- aiappreciator 3y agoThe stock market reacted quite positively to this acquisition (Basically confirmed a few days ago). Buying a soon-bankrupt startup is very cheap, and getting a strong tech stack and already formed team with strategic synergies with the main business is going to be valuable. This is contrasted with panic acquisitions like say Adobe & Figma.
- CharlesW 3y ago> The stock market reacted quite positively to this acquisition… How is Snowflake stock dropping 12% "reacting quite positively"?
- nycdatasci 3y agoParent mentions this was basically confirmed a few days ago. Today's drop is related to earnings.
- dotBen 3y agoAnd so, if this is the first time you have heard about Snowflake acquiring Neeva you now know the level of asymmetry of information that exists in the 'public' market. Use this as a lesson to exercise caution when personally investing in individual stocks in the public markets - even if you are buying tech stocks and feel as though you follow tech trends closely because you work in the industry. Wall Street already knew and priced it in before you did.
- cj 3y agoWhich is totally fine, unless you’re day trading, which you probably shouldn’t be if your goal is to maximize returns. Day to day and month to month ups and downs don’t matter if your investment time horizon is long. The dips are actually great because they create opportunities to buy more of the stock cheaper, assuming you’re not planning to sell it all in a few days.
- CharlesW 3y ago
- candiddevmike 3y agoSnowflake seems like it's been losing relevance ever since Clickhouse became more popular. Seems like they're struggling to maintain performance vs the other competitors out there. Not sure how this acquisition will help here. I don't think decoupling storage and compute was a good bet in the long run.
- CharlesW 3y agoMicrosoft is also taking shots across Snowflake's bow with solutions like Microsoft Fabric.
- quadrature 3y agoThats interesting, i don't see these as occupying the same space. Clickhouse is in the space of realtime analytics and Snowflake is a data warehouse. Although you could use Clickhouse for similar things it will fail at doing large distributed joins and similarly Snowflake will have trouble meeting a subsecond SLO. also FWIW Clickhouse's cloud offering also decouples storage and compute using an object store, but they found a good middleground where they keep local caches of hot data.
- riku_iki 3y ago> doing large distributed joins but ch supports large distributed joins?..
- quadrature 3y agoThanks, looks like i need to update my priors.
- atwong 3y agonot really. CH times out on TPCH join scenarios. https://celerdata.com/blog/clickhouse-vs.-starrocks-a-detailed-comparison https://celerdata.com/blog/clickhouse-vs.-starrocks-a-detail...
- esafak 3y agoSo who's going to Snowflake, and who's going to their other, web3 company, nxyz?
- gizmodo59 3y agoBeing in enterprise software I have heard AI/Generative AI so many times since chatgpt became mainstream. Every fortune company I have spoken to wants to get on this train.
- justinclift 3y agoYeah, this is the typical thing that happens when marketing (collectively) finds a new thing to hype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle That's not in any way to dismiss the real usefulness of the technology, it's just that in the short term it will likely be blindly applied to everything. Some of which will stick and become useful.
- cubefox 3y agoIt seems the AI hype is quite justified, considering the massive progress that was made over the last ten years. Edit: The Gartner diagram seems especially not suited for AI. Advanced AI is, in a clear sense, the final technology. The technology with the potential of creating new technology, including better versions of itself. Anything that is technologically achievable at all (consistent with the laws of physics) must be solvable with sufficiently advanced AI. Gartner, at best, applies to some forms of narrow AI.
- dools 3y agoPersonally I'm just glad to see the back of blockchain hype. AI seems to me to be much more consequential.
- gigatexal 3y agoAny word on how much they paid?
- WalterSobchak 3y agoNope.The companies did not reveal the terms of the deal.
- dehrmann 3y agoThat's code for "not much."
- Der_Einzige 3y agoHopefully not 700 million like they paid for streamlit
- 71a54xd 3y agoCould anyone with more info potentially speculate on what a theoretical acquisition of this kind would look like for the founders? I have to assume founders are basically wiped out entirely by preferred shares / levered shares given to investors? Staff with equity obviously wiped out as well? Seems like a situation where early investors enter the FIFO queue to recoup as much of their original investment as possible?
- cj 3y agoEven if founders are wiped out, they are usually still paid as consultants (or employees) at the acquiring company to help facilitate the transition. Compensation for these arrangements are often (well) above market in order to incentivize the founder to stay long enough to facilitate the transition. But yea, in general if a company is bought for less than they raised in VC, the returns usually aren’t huge.
- 71a54xd 3y agothanks!
- Beefin 3y agoNeeva raised $70m pre ChatGPT. Why is anything they're building better than the gajillion open source LLMs out there? Why did Snowflake do this?
- eightys3v3n 3y agoI am both unhappy and excited. Hopefully Snowflake does something interesting that is consumer facing so I can utilize it. But god I wish there was more innovation and competition in the premium search engine space; I was so happy with Neeva and excited for its future
- jxmorris12 3y agoWhy were you happy with Neeva? I used it for several years and never saw much benefit. The sports results were quite bad. Recipes were decent. But in general felt myself unconsciously going to google for any complex queries.
- debarshri 3y agoWhat happens to neeva's "crypto business"?
- rvz 3y agoAnother 'incredible journey', that has failed to beat Google and ran out of VC money to even begin to challenge them or make any money. Most likely got acquired for less than the valuation the founders desired.
- peanuty1 3y ago> Most likely got acquired for less than the valuation the founders desired. That's probably why the acquisition price is undisclosed.
- asimpleusecase 3y agoNeeva was positioning itself as private search, that was high quality and was going to deliver “answers”. They looked oh so cool and useful until ChatGPT erupted on the scene and got 10billion in funding. Then Bing began to offer many of the features of Neeva minus the privacy. Now Snowflake has a team of smart kids with AI skills, and it makes total sense to accelerate their product roadmaps this way. Tough for the Neeva crew, they got caught in an innovation tidalwave.
- version_five 3y ago> Now Snowflake has a team of smart kids with AI skills. Or they have a bunch of people that wanted to work at a startup, now with golden handcuffs who have to keep going through the motions until their stock grants vest.
- steveBK123 3y agoThis guy gets it.. haha
- emrah 3y agoThese are not necessarily good excuses for their failure. Kagi has the same USP and they are doing fine presumably (I have no relation to either) Maybe they mismanaged their money and/or time or failed to deliver on the tech maybe.
- 1123581321 3y agoSimilar USP now, but I thought Kagi built up to it the right way by building just a few features on search engine APIs and repeatedly asking people what they would actually pay for. They also appeared not to overstaff in anticipation of future revenue.
- achow 3y agoKagi founder's comment. Quite interesting.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013945