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Google Buys Wavii For North Of $30 Million
- bshastry 13y agoThis [1] makes one feel if Google is really interested in acquisitions like these or just tossing some money around. [1] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/02/google-closes-aardvark-social-search-as-part-of-labs-shutdown/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/02/google-closes-aardvark...
- gwern 13y ago'Interested' is a hard to prove word. The best one can really say without statements from Google VIPs is that acquisitions frequently do not seem to lead to successful services and so they're probably better seen as either expensive acquihires or gambling on hits. (I have an in-progress analysis of Google service/product shutdowns at http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns and one of the solider looking results so far is that even being generous and marking as 'alive' any acqusition's products which were merged into something like Maps or Google+, products which were part of an acquisition are much more likely to be shutdown than internally-developed products.)
- bshastry 13y agoThanks for the link to your analysis. Should give it a read :)
- swohns 13y agoLooks like they're headed to the Knowledge Graph team, but I'd like to see some love for the news division, especially from NLP badasses like Wavii.
- Shooti 13y agoSince Knowledge graph is a team, not a division that may actually be the case since it's possible the author actually meant "Google Knowledge", which is the catch all internal unit for all of Google's search-related products (of which News is a part).
- ttrreeww 13y agoI'm guessing the average employee get's to cash out a little under $100k or do they get locked in? I wonder what the Google retention bonus is like?
- vabmit 13y agoCrunchbase says Wavii only has five employees and only took ~$2MM in funding. So, I would bet it's more than $100K total. The funding is all listed as a 2010-07 seed round. I expect they raised more than that. But, given their acquisition price and business model it sounds like things worked on well for them and at least the founders were well vested. Or, did you mean actual cash excluding any GOOG options/RSUs? My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4.
- kloncks 13y ago4 year lock-in only applies to non-execs? What is it for execs? With this, an engineer at a startup has a worse deal?
- vabmit 13y agoI'm sure it's situation dependent with execs. If you have a very mature company in a new vertical w/ significant revenue (like a YouTube) and they want you to continue to run the product that would be a very different situation than a small acquihire where the execs may just be essentially engineers or dev team leaders at Google. Of course, the execs likely organized their start-up governance in a way that gives them negotiating strength in the deal. I can't imagine a start-up where the engineers would be involved in the negotiation and decision making beyond their own transition/retention.
- yekko 13y agoLots of execs go on and found the next startup when the deal closes.
- rdl 13y ago
- micheleg 13y agoNLP is on fire at the moment...
- njohnw 13y agoIn what context?
- mandeepj 13y agofirst summly now this
- jreichhold 13y agoInteresting historical point is this is the same rumored valuation for PowerSet back in 2008. Doesn't speak highly on valuation increasing for NLP.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoDidn't Hinton say he was going to be working on NLP applications at Google?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- brendano 13y agoCongrats, folks!
- agscala 13y agoThis one makes a lot more sense than the yahoo acquisition considering Wavii actually developed their own algorithms
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- drakaal 13y agoYou could just build your own... http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/04/23/how-to-make-30m-without-spending-any-of-your-money-in-your-spare-time/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/04/23/how-to-make...
- mandeepj 13y agofrom the article - "Don’t worry if your app is down most of the time. It just needs to work well enough to demo and take screenshots of." ... ha ha They laid down the whole plan on the paper to get bought so easily. Ideally this is what it takes rest is up to us...how we execute it.
- salimmadjd 13y agoIf I was google or Apple, I would have gone after Prismatic. I've used both and Prismatic seem to have much better technology.
- MojoJolo 13y agoYeah. I think Prismatic has the best technology in terms of machine learning and NLP. With it, maybe Prismatic is worth more than their budget.