

Airbnb Acqui-Hires Brian Pokorny And The Batch/DailyBooth Team - Braasch
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/airbnb-brian-pokorny-batch-dailybooth/

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samarudge
This isn't a particularly constructive comment, it's just something I've
wanted to say for a while but not really had a chance.

I'm not a regular user of Batch, but Dailybooth is one of my favorite/most
visited websites. I can't help but feel they don't really want it anymore,
like they're just supporting it because they have to. I don't think there have
been any updates to the code for about a year, 20% of the live-feed is spam
and it goes through periods of being completely unavailable, the home
feeds/notifications not updating and seems to have random 5xx server errors
constantly. It still seems to have a reasonably active community but it's been
mostly abandoned. I'm not sure if it's because they couldn't monetize it
effectively, they don't have time/resources to maintain it constantly, or
something else, with this (presumably talent) acquisition I wouldn't be
surprised if it's been shut down within a few months.

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Braasch
Batch has received some updates, but there's been a lack of new features &
updates over the past 6 months, and I've stopped using it because very few
people are using it.

I can't help but agree with you and think they'll be shutting down relatively
soon; both have been maintained less and less, and I highly doubt Airbnb wants
to let the team continue working on either of them.

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jmathai
I'm curious about these acquisitions. If DailyBooth raised $7M then how is an
acqui-hire approached?

Is there contention with the investors or at this point is the business a lost
cause anyway? Or do the two companies share investors and it works out as
"shuffling" talent?

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brianbreslin
Is this an exchange of stock primarily? i.e. airbnb gives the original
investors $20M in stock or something, and cashes the founders a bit of $? I'm
curious how this would work as well.

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jimboyoungblood
typically the original investors get their cash back (no more, no less).
there's no reason an acquiring company would want their stock in the hands of
random investors they have no prior relationship with.

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robryan
I originally tried Batch but felt the overhead it added to sharing photos over
just doing it on Facebook/Path etc just wasn't worth it. Similar to why I
don't really use Instagram, although I'd be more likely to use Instagram.

