5 ms·

Waze Co-Founder Skips Google to Try Startup World Again

102 points by gwendolynregina 13y ago

Tloewald 13y ago
A little more than [the customary] six months, but not much.
- philip1209 13y ago
  Are golden handcuffs not typical at that deal size?
  - brown 13y ago
    2-4 years is standard. I bet he left a lot of cash on the table.
  - jusben1369 13y ago
    It depends. I think acqui-hires have kind of impacted that impression. For larger startups that are acquired many times it's assume that the founder/entrepreneur will not go over with the acquisition. All parties understand they just won't be interested/do well inside a bigger corp. So the COO/CFO/Head of Sales often is the new "number 1" that stays and ensures a smoother transition. It's hard for me to undertsand if that's what happened here: "After selling map-software provider Waze to Google for $1.1 billion last June, the 49-year-old Israeli decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer." that would seem to read like he never went over at all.
  - hueving 13y ago
    It really depends. If Waze was large enough the founder may have been hands off from the engineering side at that point so he wouldn't have much value to Google at that point. Golden handcuffs are usually attached to the employees that have essential technical knowledge.
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  > [Uri Levine] decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer I think that means he was not acqui-hired. He didn't work for Google after the sale. He just took his money and moved on. Lots of employees of acquired companies don't join their acquirer for one reason or another. I suppose that can work for founders too. I've read of a few founders that were disappointed once they were acqui-hired because they lost control of something they had built... but still have to work on it.
  - oznathan 13y ago
    Uri wasn't full-time at Waze for a while now.. he co-founded Feex almost 2 years ago, and he's also not full time there. He does a lot of angel investments. I don't think that him joining Google was every a possibility.
coreymgilmore 13y ago
The guy has drive, can't doubt that.
jack-r-abbit 13y ago
That article has four links to other articles but not a link to the company it is profiling. I hate when they do that. https://www.feex.com/ https://www.feex.com/
- privong 13y ago
  It is annoying. But on the flip side, if the link was included, someone would have invariably commented that the "article reads like an ad". The authors can't win.
  - jonathanjaeger 13y ago
    I disagree. I think it's MUCH worse when, for example, you read an article about a Kickstarter project on Mashable or TechCrunch only to find that clicking on the hyperlink leads to other articles on those sites about Kickstarter and not the actual project link. I think those sites have gotten better at linking directly when commenters complain.
    - privong 13y ago
      Oh, I wasn't saying one was better than the other. Just observing that no matter what one did, someone would be unhappy about it :)
- corresation 13y ago
  This is a growing anti-web trend -- the tendency of web properties to only self-link. I assume someone somewhere has actual metrics justifying this, but it's the antithesis of what the web is about, but it's exactly why the only links in this article are to other Bloomberg Business Week articles.
  - lauradhamilton 13y ago
    I think the idea is to pass your SEO juice to your other pages rather than external pages.
d0ugie 13y ago
Has Google done anything with Waze other than buy it, or with Google Maps, incorporating some Waze treats? Haven't seen any noteworthy changes to either Waze or Google Maps that one might have (optimistically) expected as becoming both feasible and worthwhile from the deal.
- Scaevolus 13y ago
  Yes, Google Maps now includes realtime traffic updates based on the Waze app.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- snarf 13y ago
  I'd be really surprised if they do a whole lot with it. My impressions was that the main reason they bought Waze was to keep Facebook from acquiring it.
  - eliben 13y ago
    Your comment looks really silly in light of the two directly above it.
- jedberg 13y ago
  If you hover over accidents in Google Maps, sometimes it says "reported by Waze". I assume there is lots of data mixing happening on the backend that we can't see.
- mjcohen 13y ago
  When is Google Maps going to restore "Save as Contact"? I keep my old Galaxy Nexus around so I can use Maps 6. The new Maps is a definite downgrade.
oznathan 13y ago
They did a successful pilot in Israel this past year. A lot of people use them and saved significant amounts of money. They use the Waze founder for PR but he is not the real story, the service is.
humannature 13y ago
is it safe to give my retirement login credentials to feex?
mathattack 13y ago
Awesome idea. The fees on 401Ks are awful. My company has fees on index funds 4 times the competition. When I asked why, I was told, "Because that's the only way we can make money." Umm...... Fidelity does fine with 1/4 the fees, so does Vanguard.
- technotony 13y ago
  This could be a scale effect. Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run, so if your company only has 1/4 the assets under management then their comment might be true.
  - zhte415 13y ago
    > Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run It is, but not an overly expensive one. I worked for a couple of years in an asset management operation where we managed a variety of funds, all with different risk-return mixes. The smallest fund was a few hundred thousand pounds, the largest around three billion. Total assets under management were about five billion pounds, the most complex of which was a pension fund. Front office consisted myself (the most junior member of the front office) plus 4 others, including the chief investment manager. Middle office consisted one person who was also the back office manager, and back office, including the department secretary, was four people. Total department budget was less than a million per year - including office rent, taxes, information services (Bloomberg, Datastream, etc) yet we substantially outperformed (usually within one standard deviation, occasionally outside) performance and risk budgets, as they were defined to us by trustees. And we worked eight hour days, a rarity in the City at any institution. In hindsight, what we did was quite simple - invest in what we thought was wise, and not worry too much. Much mainstream investment management seems to be embodiment-in-large of the Peter Principal: create work in order to seem busy / important. The upside of the Peter Principal is to collect large bonuses by virtue of seeming important, of which none of us did, as it was simply a job - look after the organisation's funds and the pensioners' pensions. This organisation was somewhat unique in both mandate and people attracted to it. tl;dr Fund management costs, for a collection of a pretty good performing funds, was 0.02%. This excludes broker fees and management fees of indirectly invested funds. Byline: I am of course aware that having a single middle office manager is far from ideal, and that the middle office manager managing the back office is bad from an operational control perspective. This was changed after I left.
up_and_up 13y ago
> the 49-year-old Given the prevalence 'youth worship' articles on here lately it is good to point his age out to people. Get out there and make an impact regardless of your age or situation.
- josefresco 13y ago
  Like you I immediately thought of the recent ageism articles on HN and specifically PG's comment about the "cut off" age for consideration for tech-investors being 32.
  - harel 13y ago
    What a silly thing to have a 'cut off' age for techies. Like a good Single Malt or Wine, we get better and better with time. Age delivers on certain pragmatism not found in the youth of today :)
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - andrewfong 13y ago
    I think it's only 32 if you're relatively unknown or unproven. If you're Biz Stone, raising outside financing (in addition to your own cash) shouldn't be a huge barrier. Likewise, I doubt Uri will have a hard time with that 32-year cutoff now that he's had a $1.1 billion exit.
  - kirubakaran 13y ago
    Link to the said comment please. I'm unable to find it.
    - corford 13y ago
      In the middle of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-silicon-valleys-start-up-machine.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...

Tloewald 13y ago

A little more than [the customary] six months, but not much.

philip1209 13y ago
Are golden handcuffs not typical at that deal size?
- brown 13y ago
  2-4 years is standard. I bet he left a lot of cash on the table.
- jusben1369 13y ago
  It depends. I think acqui-hires have kind of impacted that impression. For larger startups that are acquired many times it's assume that the founder/entrepreneur will not go over with the acquisition. All parties understand they just won't be interested/do well inside a bigger corp. So the COO/CFO/Head of Sales often is the new "number 1" that stays and ensures a smoother transition. It's hard for me to undertsand if that's what happened here: "After selling map-software provider Waze to Google for $1.1 billion last June, the 49-year-old Israeli decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer." that would seem to read like he never went over at all.
- hueving 13y ago
  It really depends. If Waze was large enough the founder may have been hands off from the engineering side at that point so he wouldn't have much value to Google at that point. Golden handcuffs are usually attached to the employees that have essential technical knowledge.
jack-r-abbit 13y ago
> [Uri Levine] decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer I think that means he was not acqui-hired. He didn't work for Google after the sale. He just took his money and moved on. Lots of employees of acquired companies don't join their acquirer for one reason or another. I suppose that can work for founders too. I've read of a few founders that were disappointed once they were acqui-hired because they lost control of something they had built... but still have to work on it.
- oznathan 13y ago
  Uri wasn't full-time at Waze for a while now.. he co-founded Feex almost 2 years ago, and he's also not full time there. He does a lot of angel investments. I don't think that him joining Google was every a possibility.

coreymgilmore 13y ago

The guy has drive, can't doubt that.

jack-r-abbit 13y ago

That article has four links to other articles but not a link to the company it is profiling. I hate when they do that. https://www.feex.com/ https://www.feex.com/

privong 13y ago
It is annoying. But on the flip side, if the link was included, someone would have invariably commented that the "article reads like an ad". The authors can't win.
- jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  I disagree. I think it's MUCH worse when, for example, you read an article about a Kickstarter project on Mashable or TechCrunch only to find that clicking on the hyperlink leads to other articles on those sites about Kickstarter and not the actual project link. I think those sites have gotten better at linking directly when commenters complain.
  - privong 13y ago
    Oh, I wasn't saying one was better than the other. Just observing that no matter what one did, someone would be unhappy about it :)
corresation 13y ago
This is a growing anti-web trend -- the tendency of web properties to only self-link. I assume someone somewhere has actual metrics justifying this, but it's the antithesis of what the web is about, but it's exactly why the only links in this article are to other Bloomberg Business Week articles.
- lauradhamilton 13y ago
  I think the idea is to pass your SEO juice to your other pages rather than external pages.

d0ugie 13y ago

Has Google done anything with Waze other than buy it, or with Google Maps, incorporating some Waze treats? Haven't seen any noteworthy changes to either Waze or Google Maps that one might have (optimistically) expected as becoming both feasible and worthwhile from the deal.

Scaevolus 13y ago
Yes, Google Maps now includes realtime traffic updates based on the Waze app.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
snarf 13y ago
I'd be really surprised if they do a whole lot with it. My impressions was that the main reason they bought Waze was to keep Facebook from acquiring it.
- eliben 13y ago
  Your comment looks really silly in light of the two directly above it.
jedberg 13y ago
If you hover over accidents in Google Maps, sometimes it says "reported by Waze". I assume there is lots of data mixing happening on the backend that we can't see.
mjcohen 13y ago
When is Google Maps going to restore "Save as Contact"? I keep my old Galaxy Nexus around so I can use Maps 6. The new Maps is a definite downgrade.

oznathan 13y ago

They did a successful pilot in Israel this past year. A lot of people use them and saved significant amounts of money. They use the Waze founder for PR but he is not the real story, the service is.

humannature 13y ago

is it safe to give my retirement login credentials to feex?

mathattack 13y ago

Awesome idea. The fees on 401Ks are awful. My company has fees on index funds 4 times the competition. When I asked why, I was told, "Because that's the only way we can make money." Umm...... Fidelity does fine with 1/4 the fees, so does Vanguard.

technotony 13y ago
This could be a scale effect. Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run, so if your company only has 1/4 the assets under management then their comment might be true.
- zhte415 13y ago
  > Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run It is, but not an overly expensive one. I worked for a couple of years in an asset management operation where we managed a variety of funds, all with different risk-return mixes. The smallest fund was a few hundred thousand pounds, the largest around three billion. Total assets under management were about five billion pounds, the most complex of which was a pension fund. Front office consisted myself (the most junior member of the front office) plus 4 others, including the chief investment manager. Middle office consisted one person who was also the back office manager, and back office, including the department secretary, was four people. Total department budget was less than a million per year - including office rent, taxes, information services (Bloomberg, Datastream, etc) yet we substantially outperformed (usually within one standard deviation, occasionally outside) performance and risk budgets, as they were defined to us by trustees. And we worked eight hour days, a rarity in the City at any institution. In hindsight, what we did was quite simple - invest in what we thought was wise, and not worry too much. Much mainstream investment management seems to be embodiment-in-large of the Peter Principal: create work in order to seem busy / important. The upside of the Peter Principal is to collect large bonuses by virtue of seeming important, of which none of us did, as it was simply a job - look after the organisation's funds and the pensioners' pensions. This organisation was somewhat unique in both mandate and people attracted to it. tl;dr Fund management costs, for a collection of a pretty good performing funds, was 0.02%. This excludes broker fees and management fees of indirectly invested funds. Byline: I am of course aware that having a single middle office manager is far from ideal, and that the middle office manager managing the back office is bad from an operational control perspective. This was changed after I left.

up_and_up 13y ago

> the 49-year-old Given the prevalence 'youth worship' articles on here lately it is good to point his age out to people. Get out there and make an impact regardless of your age or situation.

josefresco 13y ago
Like you I immediately thought of the recent ageism articles on HN and specifically PG's comment about the "cut off" age for consideration for tech-investors being 32.
- harel 13y ago
  What a silly thing to have a 'cut off' age for techies. Like a good Single Malt or Wine, we get better and better with time. Age delivers on certain pragmatism not found in the youth of today :)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- andrewfong 13y ago
  I think it's only 32 if you're relatively unknown or unproven. If you're Biz Stone, raising outside financing (in addition to your own cash) shouldn't be a huge barrier. Likewise, I doubt Uri will have a hard time with that 32-year cutoff now that he's had a $1.1 billion exit.
- kirubakaran 13y ago
  Link to the said comment please. I'm unable to find it.
  - corford 13y ago
    In the middle of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-silicon-valleys-start-up-machine.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...