6 ms·

OpenTable Acquires FoodSpotting for $10 Million

53 points by jamesjyu 14y ago

brianbreslin 14y ago
considering they raised $3.5 or so in funding, what do you guys think of $10M exit. yay or nay? and why?
- awolf 14y ago
  Who are we to judge the motivations of the founders and investors? Everyone has different priorities and goals for their careers. We have no basis for saying "yay or nay".
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  Two years since their Series A suggests that they were at or very near the end of their runway. An exit is an exit is an exit, but from my perspective it looks like this is a larger-scale acquihire. edit: oh yeah, I should mention that I was (past tense) a founding engineer at a company that (I guess technically) competes with FoodSpotting. But, FWIW, I haven't worked there in a year.
- PanMan 14y ago
  According to Crunchbase, they raised $3,750K. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/foodspotting http://www.crunchbase.com/company/foodspotting I would roughly guess their 3 mln A round would be around 10 million valuation. So then the exit would be oke, but not super: No raise in valuation since its A round.
- argumentum 14y ago
  It's a good exit.. don't think they were going anywhere really. They do have have good UI/UX talent, probably worth the acquisition price.
  - AdamTReineke 14y ago
    Is a 12 person team [1] really worth a $10M acquihire? [1] http://www.foodspotting.com/about/team http://www.foodspotting.com/about/team
    - Cyranix 14y ago
      Is a food-oriented photo app worth anything?
      - anthonycerra 14y ago
        It can be if those photos get you to make a reservation at one of the restaurants in OpenTable's network. Chances are you won't knowingly spam your friends to tell them to use OpenTable. Maybe you had a great experience with it and you post it once on Facebook. You're not going to continue posting how amazing your experience with OpenTable was. You MIGHT think some/most/all of the dishes you eat at restaurants are amazing. You MIGHT post those dishes on Facebook. If those dishes are tied to restaurants that OpenTable serves, they just landed on an amazing advertising model.
      - selectout 14y ago
        instagram sold for a billion.
      - morganb180 14y ago
        Foodspotting reportedly had 2MM users. Depending on the % active, etc. OT is picking up users at $5/per is probably in decent range of what they typically will pay for an active user through other marketing channels. Add in the talent, the app, etc. and they get a good deal out of it as well.
    - randall 14y ago
      The general rule is $1mm / engineer, as I've heard colloquially.
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  Call it a chop. The founders will stay as long as they need to vest and move on to something else bigger and better. An exit is still an exit and that's enough cachet to get funding for another project. What's more interesting to me is whether Yelp wanted in on the action. As they move towards more discretionary data and including menu information while letting people review individual menu items this would have been a no brainer for $10MM. That's the real buried lede. Something's up, either Yelp fumbled or Foodspotting as a concept and database just wasn't valuable at all. But "tech journalism" being "tech journalism" we just get reblogged PR puffs. The gossipy comments were more interesting than the article itself.
- jcampbell1 14y ago
  Massive Yay. Growth was likely stalled or slow, they had no revenue, and were running out of runway. The investors are getting their money back, and the founders are getting checks for $1M+.
- kareemm 14y ago
  Off the top of my head, let's do some math (keeping it simple, I have no idea of actual #s): Before fundraising: 84%: 3 Co-founders @ 28% each 16%: option pool 1st round - $750k @ $3.75M post. No liquidation prefs or ratcheting. Now the cap table looks like this: 67.2%: 3 Co-founders @ 22.4% each 12.8%: option pool 20%: Angels 2nd round - $3M @ 10M post. 1x straight preferred liquidation pref (not participating), no ratcheting. Cap table: 47.04%: 3 co-founders @ 15.68% each 8.96%: option pool 14%: Angels 30%: Blue Run A $10M exit looks like this: $3M: Blue Run $4.70M: 3 co-founders @ $1.568M each $896k: option pool payout $1.4M: Angels Not bad, not great, but that assumes no participating preferred preference, which would have everybody but Blue Run doing a heck of a lot worse.
  - ssx 14y ago
    You have to consider the fact they probably didn't give out all of the optional pool. Depending on how many employees they hired and at what skill level. My hunch is they only gave out 8% of the optional pool. At most.
  - guynamedloren 14y ago
    Interesting perspective from the comments here. $1.5M per cofounder over 3 years puts them at $500k/year. Pays more than most jobs I can think of. And you can certainly do a lot with $1.5M in the bank (no mega mansion in SV, but endless traveling, comfort, etc). All relative, I guess. Us Hacker News folk have a skewed vision on the world :)
    - rorrr 14y ago
      You can't compare a rare successful startup exit to a regular salary. You could, but you need to multiply both by the risk factor. $1.5M is quite low, in my opinion. Not even close enough to retire in the US.
      - guynamedloren 14y ago
        Who said anything about retiring? These people are 30 years old. I don't think the avg 30 year old has $1.5M cash in the bank (and a comfy position at a tech company). All I'm saying is that it's very respectable.
hiroprot 14y ago
Full disclosure: I work for Forkly (http://forkly.com http://forkly.com), a FoodSpotting competitor. I think that it was probably an okay exit for the founders (but definitely no homerun), and for most of the early angels. As for BlueRun Ventures (who put in the bulk of the last round), it probably wasn't that good of a return. Of course, these exits often don't get paid out based on equity, but on some negotiated deal that will make investors at least somewhat happy. As for the founders, I'm pretty sure they got signing bonuses, probably tied to staying at OT for a year or two. It will be interesting to see what happens to FoodSpotting (apparently it will stay standalone), and how OpenTable will make use of it.
- dmor 14y ago
  How do you feel this impacts the exit opportunities for Forkly?
  - quellhorst 14y ago
    I feel that it puts a fork in it.
  - hiroprot 14y ago
    I don't want to speculate too much around this, but I think it shows that the space is starting to heat up, so this is actually good for us. Obviously, we would have liked to see a higher price tag for that acquisition ;)
- iusable 14y ago
  Nice to see an open dialogue on here. How do you see this space moving forward? I wonder if there are a lot of 'nice-to-have' and not enough 'must-have' apps, if any at all.
masiello 14y ago
All this food services bubble is making me itchy. Allergy?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
unstoppable 14y ago
Until opentable can actually get reservations right, it sounds pretty irrelevant to me. EVERY time I've tried to get reservations on opentable, they're either not available for 2+ hours, or not available at all. Then when I call, they invariably have tables for every time slot. Basic functionality is missing here...
- kareemm 14y ago
  This is by design. Restaurants will sometimes only give OpenTable a few slots a night as OT often takes a good chunk of margin from the restauranteurs: 'The access fees can be substantial, particularly for restaurants operating on thin margins. One independent study estimates that OpenTable’s fees (comprised of startup fees, fixed monthly fees, and per-person reservation fees) translate to a cost of roughly $10.40 for each “incremental” 4-top booked through OpenTable.com. To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back (and hopefully book by telephone the next time).' From http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2010/10/18/is-opentable-worth-it/ http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2010/10/18/is-opentable...
- enjo 14y ago
  Where are you at? Here in Denver it's fantastic.
salimmadjd 14y ago
Big congrats to any team that has an exit. Sure, I think early angels and Dave McClure probably got better returns on their money than BlueRun ventures(I'm guessing this). And most employees probably didn't get much. But food being so saturated with so many different players makes this a respectable exit. Nothing is worst than spending our valuable time on this planet on something that goes nowhere, with this exit, Foodspotting is ensured to be around as long opentable is around. Which is something any founder should be proud of.

53 points by jamesjyu 14y ago

brianbreslin 14y ago

considering they raised $3.5 or so in funding, what do you guys think of $10M exit. yay or nay? and why?

awolf 14y ago
Who are we to judge the motivations of the founders and investors? Everyone has different priorities and goals for their careers. We have no basis for saying "yay or nay".
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
Two years since their Series A suggests that they were at or very near the end of their runway. An exit is an exit is an exit, but from my perspective it looks like this is a larger-scale acquihire. edit: oh yeah, I should mention that I was (past tense) a founding engineer at a company that (I guess technically) competes with FoodSpotting. But, FWIW, I haven't worked there in a year.
PanMan 14y ago
According to Crunchbase, they raised $3,750K. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/foodspotting http://www.crunchbase.com/company/foodspotting I would roughly guess their 3 mln A round would be around 10 million valuation. So then the exit would be oke, but not super: No raise in valuation since its A round.
argumentum 14y ago
It's a good exit.. don't think they were going anywhere really. They do have have good UI/UX talent, probably worth the acquisition price.
- AdamTReineke 14y ago
  Is a 12 person team [1] really worth a $10M acquihire? [1] http://www.foodspotting.com/about/team http://www.foodspotting.com/about/team
  - Cyranix 14y ago
    Is a food-oriented photo app worth anything?
    - anthonycerra 14y ago
      It can be if those photos get you to make a reservation at one of the restaurants in OpenTable's network. Chances are you won't knowingly spam your friends to tell them to use OpenTable. Maybe you had a great experience with it and you post it once on Facebook. You're not going to continue posting how amazing your experience with OpenTable was. You MIGHT think some/most/all of the dishes you eat at restaurants are amazing. You MIGHT post those dishes on Facebook. If those dishes are tied to restaurants that OpenTable serves, they just landed on an amazing advertising model.
    - selectout 14y ago
      instagram sold for a billion.
    - morganb180 14y ago
      Foodspotting reportedly had 2MM users. Depending on the % active, etc. OT is picking up users at $5/per is probably in decent range of what they typically will pay for an active user through other marketing channels. Add in the talent, the app, etc. and they get a good deal out of it as well.
  - randall 14y ago
    The general rule is $1mm / engineer, as I've heard colloquially.
alaskamiller 14y ago
Call it a chop. The founders will stay as long as they need to vest and move on to something else bigger and better. An exit is still an exit and that's enough cachet to get funding for another project. What's more interesting to me is whether Yelp wanted in on the action. As they move towards more discretionary data and including menu information while letting people review individual menu items this would have been a no brainer for $10MM. That's the real buried lede. Something's up, either Yelp fumbled or Foodspotting as a concept and database just wasn't valuable at all. But "tech journalism" being "tech journalism" we just get reblogged PR puffs. The gossipy comments were more interesting than the article itself.
jcampbell1 14y ago
Massive Yay. Growth was likely stalled or slow, they had no revenue, and were running out of runway. The investors are getting their money back, and the founders are getting checks for $1M+.
kareemm 14y ago
Off the top of my head, let's do some math (keeping it simple, I have no idea of actual #s): Before fundraising: 84%: 3 Co-founders @ 28% each 16%: option pool 1st round - $750k @ $3.75M post. No liquidation prefs or ratcheting. Now the cap table looks like this: 67.2%: 3 Co-founders @ 22.4% each 12.8%: option pool 20%: Angels 2nd round - $3M @ 10M post. 1x straight preferred liquidation pref (not participating), no ratcheting. Cap table: 47.04%: 3 co-founders @ 15.68% each 8.96%: option pool 14%: Angels 30%: Blue Run A $10M exit looks like this: $3M: Blue Run $4.70M: 3 co-founders @ $1.568M each $896k: option pool payout $1.4M: Angels Not bad, not great, but that assumes no participating preferred preference, which would have everybody but Blue Run doing a heck of a lot worse.
- ssx 14y ago
  You have to consider the fact they probably didn't give out all of the optional pool. Depending on how many employees they hired and at what skill level. My hunch is they only gave out 8% of the optional pool. At most.
- guynamedloren 14y ago
  Interesting perspective from the comments here. $1.5M per cofounder over 3 years puts them at $500k/year. Pays more than most jobs I can think of. And you can certainly do a lot with $1.5M in the bank (no mega mansion in SV, but endless traveling, comfort, etc). All relative, I guess. Us Hacker News folk have a skewed vision on the world :)
  - rorrr 14y ago
    You can't compare a rare successful startup exit to a regular salary. You could, but you need to multiply both by the risk factor. $1.5M is quite low, in my opinion. Not even close enough to retire in the US.
    - guynamedloren 14y ago
      Who said anything about retiring? These people are 30 years old. I don't think the avg 30 year old has $1.5M cash in the bank (and a comfy position at a tech company). All I'm saying is that it's very respectable.

hiroprot 14y ago

Full disclosure: I work for Forkly (http://forkly.com http://forkly.com), a FoodSpotting competitor. I think that it was probably an okay exit for the founders (but definitely no homerun), and for most of the early angels. As for BlueRun Ventures (who put in the bulk of the last round), it probably wasn't that good of a return. Of course, these exits often don't get paid out based on equity, but on some negotiated deal that will make investors at least somewhat happy. As for the founders, I'm pretty sure they got signing bonuses, probably tied to staying at OT for a year or two. It will be interesting to see what happens to FoodSpotting (apparently it will stay standalone), and how OpenTable will make use of it.

dmor 14y ago
How do you feel this impacts the exit opportunities for Forkly?
- quellhorst 14y ago
  I feel that it puts a fork in it.
- hiroprot 14y ago
  I don't want to speculate too much around this, but I think it shows that the space is starting to heat up, so this is actually good for us. Obviously, we would have liked to see a higher price tag for that acquisition ;)
iusable 14y ago
Nice to see an open dialogue on here. How do you see this space moving forward? I wonder if there are a lot of 'nice-to-have' and not enough 'must-have' apps, if any at all.

masiello 14y ago

All this food services bubble is making me itchy. Allergy?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

unstoppable 14y ago

Until opentable can actually get reservations right, it sounds pretty irrelevant to me. EVERY time I've tried to get reservations on opentable, they're either not available for 2+ hours, or not available at all. Then when I call, they invariably have tables for every time slot. Basic functionality is missing here...

kareemm 14y ago
This is by design. Restaurants will sometimes only give OpenTable a few slots a night as OT often takes a good chunk of margin from the restauranteurs: 'The access fees can be substantial, particularly for restaurants operating on thin margins. One independent study estimates that OpenTable’s fees (comprised of startup fees, fixed monthly fees, and per-person reservation fees) translate to a cost of roughly $10.40 for each “incremental” 4-top booked through OpenTable.com. To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back (and hopefully book by telephone the next time).' From http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2010/10/18/is-opentable-worth-it/ http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2010/10/18/is-opentable...
enjo 14y ago
Where are you at? Here in Denver it's fantastic.

salimmadjd 14y ago

Big congrats to any team that has an exit. Sure, I think early angels and Dave McClure probably got better returns on their money than BlueRun ventures(I'm guessing this). And most employees probably didn't get much. But food being so saturated with so many different players makes this a respectable exit. Nothing is worst than spending our valuable time on this planet on something that goes nowhere, with this exit, Foodspotting is ensured to be around as long opentable is around. Which is something any founder should be proud of.