
Yahoo acquires Rockmelt - Lightning
http://blog.rockmelt.com/post/57166686461/big-company-news
======
smackfu
"For many of you, Rockmelt has become a daily habit and for that we’re
eternally grateful… "

"The Rockmelt apps and web product will be shutdown on August 31, 2013."

~~~
applecore
What you left out:

"We’ve kept all your valuables safe. In each of our products, you’ll find a
tile to click on that initiates the export service. Your kept items will be
exported as bookmarks and the feeds you follow as an OPML file."

------
salimmadjd
Hello Marissa!

This is Vinod and Marc Andreessen, we put a lot of money in this company,
hoping Facebook would buy it for a $billion . At this point we want to get our
money back. What do you say you do us a favor and buy this company? We owe you
on this one.

~~~
josh2600
This is so ridiculously cynical.

If this were the first in this long line of crap-quisitions, I'd disagree with
you, but I see Yahoo as the Island of Lost Startups.

Tying multiple disparate teams into a cohesive product will be really hard. I
don't see what good will come of this, except getting Yahoo positioned to have
early access to a16z and Khosla startups.

~~~
rdouble
It's cynical but there is a lot of cognitive dissonance surrounding software
startups. The players involved in a deal like this seem to go through a lot of
twisted internal logic to convince themselves that what they are doing isn't
just an investor shell game. Whereas a corporate raider type simply wouldn't
care about having extra-financial justifications for the deal.

I'm not saying that is what happened here, but I have been involved in a
startup acquisition which was an investor shell game, and even guys who lost
in the acquisition had to come up with a warped internal history about what
happened in order to not feel bad about it, or something...

~~~
foobarqux
Can you explain specifically what you mean by investor shell game? Who
benefits and how?

(I don't necessarily disagree with you I just like to understand high stakes
trickery).

~~~
rdouble
To be honest, I wish I wouldn't have use that phrase because it adds
negativity that is probably unnecessary.

In my case, what happened is the failed startup I worked for was "acquired" by
another company that was funded by the same investors. The acquiring company
wasn't acquiring anything: the software was open source, none of the founders
worked there anymore, no key engineers were left, etc. The deal was done to
avoid a loss on the VC balance sheet so that the fund wouldn't lose face with
its institutional investors. The people who benefit: investors, and also
mediocre late hire employees who stuck around through the transition. They
ended up with a higher salary and better title than they would have if they
had been hired directly by the acquiring company.

When I read about an acquisition where it doesn't seem like anyone is going to
make money, nobody uses the product, the founding team isn't there anymore and
key engineers have left, it just reminds me of this situation I already lived
through.

------
orky56
Copied my comment from other Rockmelt-related acquisition post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6148221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6148221)

For those keeping score, this gives another win for Khosla Ventures, SV Angel,
a16z, and First Round. Here's the tally for those who invested in companies
that have been acquired by Y! since Mayer took over:

CrunchFund - 3 (Stamped, GoPollGo, Tumblr)

True Ventures - 3 (OnTheAir, Snip.It, Lexity)

Khosla Venture - 3 (Snip.It, Xobni, Rockmelt)

SV Angel - 3 (Snip,It, Xobni, Rockmelt)

Google Ventures - 2 (Astrid & Stamped)

Spark Capital - 2 (Tumblr & Lexity)

Jack Herrick - 2 (Qwiki & Astrid)

Greylock - 2 (Tumblr & Qwiki)

First Round Capital - 2 (Xobni & Rockmelt)

Also to note, Lexity & Jybe were founded by former Y! employees.

~~~
volaski
Good job on your research, but if you think these are "win"s, you don't know
how VC works.

~~~
orky56
Obviously a larger return (10x-100x) is more of a win but to discount a modest
exit that an investor and founder(s) agree on as not a win is a bit harsh.
Each one of these startups has a different story and had their own definition
of what was considered success and a good investor's reputation is also based
on ensuring that startups can achieve that.

------
eksith
One of these days, I'm going to come across a blog post about an acquisition
that doesn't begin with "We’re excited to tell you..." and ends in a disaster
for the majority of employees.

One of these days...

That said, recycling old Yahoo addresses, buying Tumblr, Snip.it, Summly...
anyone see a pattern?

I can see Yahoo is trying to muscle in on Pintrest's turf with this and maybe
even venture into Google Plus land : "Discover & share with Facebook, Twitter,
and beyond."

The "beyond" is where Yahoo can provide infrastructure to build/extend their
own social network.

~~~
yuhong
I think Yahoo has much improved after Marissa became CEO.

~~~
eshvk
Is that all you have to say? You have made the same damn comment in three
different locations on this thread!

------
general_failure
"Rockmelt was designed to make sense of the Internet".

What sort of horse crap is this?

~~~
rhizome
The self-aggrandizing kind.

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RyanZAG
Yahoo seems to be trying to dig themselves out of a hole by standing in the
hole and throwing sand out.

Is Yahoo trying to set up some kind of 'corporate rehabilitation' clinic where
they will take these scruffy startup employees and turn them into drones
slaving away on methods to get users to click on ads 5% more?

I can understand acquiring a startup when you plan to use their product and
will keep the founders working on it, but something like this just rings of a
failure to understand human behavior. The guys getting a fat payout and
corporate safety net while working on some random project they didn't even
agree to work on are no longer the same guys who made the startup.

~~~
outside1234
its worse than that. these guys are just going to start in on their next
startup, but with benefits, all while pretending to turn the bigco wheel.

~~~
badclient
its worse when these guys that burned through $40M+ are going to be backed by
their investors again at the expense of more worthy startup founders with less
experience fundraising.

------
pearjuice
We might want to consider that Yahoo is corrupted from the inside and is using
its large range of financial assets to spread its wealth via various sidesteps
and investment networks. Unless they will release some massive product or
actually intergrate all services into their core, what else is it for that
they are spending such amounts of financial assets on these companies. To
please the eye for a rehash of the Yahoo brand? One could argue that it would
be more wise to _move_ the core to the Tumblr brand instead of reviving Yahoo.

------
batgaijin
Literally the only thing Yahoo should buy is Twitter. That's fucking it.

Yahoo done fucked up good. They can't make a walled garden, but they could own
the public ecosystem. And they could push it beyond Google+ if they did it
right.

People use Google for finding things and email. People use Facebook for
friends. People use Yahoo out of habit.

~~~
AznHisoka
I still use Yahoo for games. They're one of the few places where I can play a
quick game of Spades or Poker for fun.

~~~
icebraining
Pipes is nice too, though it has no business model whatsoever.

~~~
jfornear
[http://jfornear.co/why-marissa-mayer-should-acquire-ifttt-
an...](http://jfornear.co/why-marissa-mayer-should-acquire-ifttt-and-go-all-
in-on-yahoo-pipes/)

~~~
icebraining
The problem is that IFTTT doesn't have a clear business model either. Like
with Pipes, you go in, setup a few recipes and then log out, possibly for
months. There's nowhere to show ads on, and it doesn't seem compelling enough
to get individuals to pay for it.

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randallu
Rockmelt had apparently received $40M in funding which it seems likely they
were not going to be able to return any time soon. Many of Y!'s recent
acquisitions seem "distressed" (not all though).

~~~
scrame
Yahoo has a long history [1] of crap acquisitions.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo_acquisitions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo_acquisitions)

~~~
rdouble
Yahoo basically _IS_ a long history of crap acquisitions.

------
stephanos2k
"We like to do things right and we put a premium on getting stuff done. When
it's crunch time, we work crazy hours, pull all nighters, have lunch and
dinner in the office, grab a few hours sleep and are back at it." (from the
careers page)

Honest? Insane? Cool? Unhealthy?

~~~
hga
As long as they aren't in crunch time 365.25 days of the year, or of course
all that often, it's OK.

In fact, by specifically calling out such a thing as "crunch time", you can
ask them "how much of the month/year do you spend in crunch time?", the answer
to which should be very telling.

------
jmduke
That's "Rockmelt", not "RockMeIt."

------
coldcode
They tried to hire me but I thought it a pointless product and turned them
down.

------
nashequilibrium
I am trying to find out what problem does Rockmelt solve. Does anyone know
seriously? I found this in an article of theirs: "This feature, called Save
Search, will essentially let you make your query results persistent. “We have
a patent on this,” says Howes." So is it that they allow you to persist your
queries?

~~~
smacktoward
The _original_ problem Rockmelt was supposed to solve was having to go to a
bunch of different sites to manage all your online social activity. The idea
being they'd take Chromium and integrate popular services directly into the
browser chrome.

It turned out that nobody actually wanted a browser with social services
integrated into the chrome, though. Which should have surprised nobody, since
that exact same idea was behind Flock
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_%28web_browser%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_%28web_browser%29)),
another social-integrated browser startup (this one building its product on
Gecko) which predated Rockmelt by five years and which nobody wanted either.

Apparently Rockmelt managed to find some VCs who either hadn't heard of Flock,
or who thought using Chromium instead of Gecko would lead Rockmelt to succeed
where Flock failed.

Ooops.

(Like Flock, when the "social browser" idea failed, Rockmelt began a series of
pivots to try and find something else that wouldn't fail as badly. Also like
Flock, they never quite found it.)

~~~
hga
You're possibly over harsh here, "social" today doesn't mean the same thing,
and itsn't in the same position it was, 5 years ago.

Hmmm, before I'd invest in this I'd like to see research on how many people
are seriously engaged in more than 1 and more than 2 social networks. And I'd
seriously wonder if that changed for the better in 5 years.

------
mathattack
Are there any angry users of the old services? People who might say, "I joined
your mission as a new venture, and now you're all quitting at once to join a
new firm"?

------
brianbreslin
So can someone explain what Rockmelt is? I haven't used it since the private
beta in 2010, and thought they abandoned their facebook integrated browser.

------
loceng
I think know what they're doing. I think they have a good chance of
succeeding.

------
pawrvx
Bail out the VC who sit's on public company boards.

------
znowi
Yet another startup is lost to the land of irrelevance.

------
taopao
Rabble rabble Reader rabble rabble!

Oh wait, 'tis Yahoo.

 _crickets_

