
Google Hires Tech Team from Homejoy, Readies Leap into Home Services - coloneltcb
http://recode.net/2015/07/17/google-hires-homejoys-technical-team-to-build-its-own-home-services-marketplace/
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dragonwriter
Note that -- in a not untypical for Re/Code demonstration of a near-complete
absence of journalistic standards -- the assertion that Google's hiring of
(some of) the Homejoy team is about moving into home services is not even
attributed to any source or set of sources. The only sourced facts are:

(1) Google is hiring a portion of Homejoy's staff (sourced to Google)

(2) Homejoy's current platform will be shuttered (sourced to completely
unspecific "sources", but this is pretty explicit in Homejoy's own public
shutdown announcement.)

(3) Google "had set out to enter" the home services space "earlier this year"
(sourced to a Buzzfeed article, which actually claimed that Google was in the
process of readying an offering in the space, that doesn't indicate the timing
of the planned launch, so really doesn't support the past-intention
characterization given in the Re/Code article.)

So, Homejoy is shutting down (which we knew), Google has hired some of
Homejoy's technical staff, and there were reports a few months back that
Google might be readying some product in a space related to (but not identical
to) what Homejoy was doing.

~~~
chralieboy
Note that Kara Swisher (executive editor of Re/Code) was married to Megan
Smith [1]. Megan is now CTO of the United States, but previously was at Google
for over a decade and a VP at Google X.

It's not unreasonable that Kara, and by extension her team, would therefore
have made a number of high-level contacts inside Google.

That said, if they are speaking to sources then they should reference them
(even if anonymously.) Otherwise, as you noted, we can only consider it an
opinion piece masquerading as journalism.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith)

~~~
steve-howard
Kara's ethics statement claims that she has no non-public information related
to Megan's job:

[http://recode.net/ajax/writerinfo/ethics/kara-
swisher/](http://recode.net/ajax/writerinfo/ethics/kara-swisher/)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_Kara 's ethics statement claims that she has no non-public information
related to Megan's job_

I see nothing in that ethics statement that contradicts the GP's assertion
which was:

    
    
       It's not unreasonable that Kara, and by extension
       her team, would therefore have made a number of
       high-level contacts inside Google

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slg
This is an interesting move, it seems like an acqui-hire without all the
upfront money to actually do the acquiring. I wonder what someone who owned
equity in Homejoy would think of this.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Is there anything legally preventing a startup from folding regardless of
their VC's demands and going to work for someone else if an offer is extended?

EDIT: Hand remaining money back to VC, say "We've received better job offers",
turn off the lights and move on.

~~~
erehweb
Maybe issues with intellectual property? VC's lawyers could be ready to pounce
if the former employees do things very close to what they were doing. (IANAL).

~~~
detaro
And even better, "Yes, we sue people that leave to work for Google" is exactly
the message you want to send to founders. /s

(depends on the type of IP though, but you better have a really solid claim)

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nugget
I'm shocked by how quickly Homejoy seems to have folded. It was viewed as a
baby Unicorn around Silicon Valley. Hopefully a more detailed post mortum will
come out in the press in the next couple weeks.

~~~
danieltillett
I’m shocked that Homejoy got any investor money at all. In what rational
universe could Homejoy have been a baby unicorn?

~~~
boomshucka
Come on, it was mobile, and on demand services. So hot right now. I'm just
surprised they didn't get a late stage round at a $1 billion+ valuation by the
sophisticated investing folks at Fidelity etc.

~~~
danieltillett
mmm.

I guess if they could get $1 from investors why not a $100 million. I would
have loved to see what was in their pitch deck as I can’t imagine a worse
industry to try and build a unicorn.

~~~
boomshucka
Slide 1:

Mobile, on demand services. So hot right now.

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rmason
There's a missing piece of the puzzle, on the surface this makes absolutely no
sense.

~~~
ronilan
There has to be a "Flexible Frank" prototype here somewhere. And a door into
summer.

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wahsd
Great idea. Hire a bunch of law and regulation flouting failures? I get the
whole "you will fail far more than not" but it's not like they were doing
something new, they couldn't even manage to take over something as simple as
dispatching of cleaning services, let alone set up a cleaning service that
didn't abuse its "independent contractors" aka employees.

It's kind of annoying, but hell, Google failed at "Home Services" at least
once before, why not hire a couple people who failed at exactly that just a
few days ago. It sounds like a winning only-makes-sense-to-google kind of
strategy.

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chintan
Well played Google! using your Venture arm to recruit for your internal
product.

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prawn
You know when you watch movies like Total Recall, or Blade Runner, or play a
sci-fi game, and there's that pervasive company that seems bigger than any
political super power? That's what I think of when one of the Four Horsemen
(especially Google) looks like expanding territory blatantly outside their
core offering.

In this case, I'm hoping they're just hiring technical people and not looking
at cleaning houses, but it always brings that fictional megacorp to mind and
makes me uncomfortable.

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hkmurakami
Thumbtack is funded by Google Capital. Homejoy was funded by Google Ventures.

I know that the two entities are distinct, so I guess this is Kosher?

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cblock811
If Google is actually going to make a move here, I'm all for it. Homejoy was a
horrible experience. Housekeepers leaving an hour early (their QA team
confirmed this for me) and one stole my medication from the bathroom
countertop... If they go under it's their own fault.

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afarrell
Why would Google hire only the tech team? Home services seems like the sort of
thing that absolutely demands a solid customer service and sales organization.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Why would Google hire only the tech team?

Maybe because they are proven capable to deliver technology team, which Google
has many ways to employ, that was about to be unemployed _en masse_ given that
Homejoy was suspending operations and thus likely wasn't going to have much
for them to do, or anything with which to pay them.

> Home services seems like the sort of thing that absolutely demands a solid
> customer service and sales organization.

If Google, as was reported months ago, is well on its way to offering its own
product in this market than, whether or not Homejoy's tech team was (as is
claimed, without any stated basis or source, in the Re/Code article) hired to
work on it, its likely that the customer service and sales structure for it is
already decided. If the model isn't fundamentally what Homejoy was doing,
there's not necessarily any reason to think that Homejoy's team in that area
would be of any use to Google's product.

OTOH, whether on a home services product or otherwise, Google probably can
find lots of uses for engineering talent.

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theseatoms
> "Type in a search query for a cleaner to come to your house; rather than
> send you to third-party sites, Google would bake the options directly into
> the top of results."

I remember hearing that Google can't aggressively promote their own services
in search results. (Example: When I google "search", the top 4 hits are Yahoo,
search.com, AOL, & DuckDuckGo.)

Is this a proactive measure on their part to keep anti-trust regulation at
bay, or an established prohibited practice? In the latter case, is there any
guidance around where 'the line' is regarding this behavior?

~~~
bishnu
I mean, the Google search bar is still first in all those results ;)

~~~
6666666666
There's something called anti-trust regulations, and it's a very serious
issue.

------
ashurbanipal
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956)

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nodesocket
Golden parachutes, they don't just exist in finance.

------
richkuo
Google 'You dun goofed.'

~~~
richkuo
this was meant for
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905363)

