
Voicegem (YC S12) joins Palantir - ardakara
http://blog.voicegem.com/post/43241478510/voicegem-joins-palantir
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dannyr
"One of those tools was a voice based email service that quickly grew beyond
our friends at the local senior houses"

If the service is doing well, why is it being shut down?

~~~
aaronbrethorst

        30 seconds/recording: presumed average recording length
    
        1,000,000 seconds: a bit higher than the total number of seconds of audio recorded
    
        8 months: Amount of time service was around
    
        1,000,000 seconds / 30 seconds/recording = 33,333 recordings
    
        33,333 recordings / 8 months = 4,166 recordings/month = 138 recordings/day.
    

Assuming that the average user tried it out once and then didn't use it again,
VoiceGem was getting about 140 new users a day. If the average user used it
more than once, they were getting even fewer new users. Startups are hard.

Edit: for some reason, Josh Constine at TechCrunch decided to reference my
arithmetic. I just want to make sure it's clear that I'm happy for Arda and
Alexander for finding an exit, and that startups are hard. I'm not trying to
be snarky.

~~~
andrewcooke
all you are going to deduce from this is whatever you put into your model. if
they were getting exponential growth then most of the calls would have been
recent. and they imply that they had viral growth because use was spreading...

on the other hand, presumably they didn't decide to fuck over a bunch of
grannies for fun (even if they did go to palantir). so it was an acquihire. so
maybe some part of the description was more positive than the unvarnished
truth?

~~~
choffstein
It never really says it is an acqui-anything. Maybe they are just winding down
and getting jobs?

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Samuel_Michon
Congrats!

You may want to place a hyperlink to Palantir in your blogpost. I'm assuming
it's these guys (?): <http://www.palantir.com/>

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rdl
Congratulations! Palantir has a lot of interesting technical challenges and
great engineers, ops people, etc. -- I think you'll love it there.

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neel_murthy
Known Arda and Alex for years. They are really smart guys and Palantir is
lucky to have them! Sad to see you two go though, but enjoy NYC!

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argumentum
Wow, congrats fellow "no idea" batchmates!

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vj44
Looking forward to meet you guys in nyc!

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ukd1
Congratulations to you both, enjoy NYC!

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kategleason
love this team, congrats!

