
Facebook buys Vidpresso's (YC W14) team and tech to make video interactive - sandmansandine
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-vidpresso/
======
swampthing
Before he started Vidpresso, Randall was helping out my YC batch with feedback
on their demo day pitches. It wasn't his job - he was just being helpful. The
nicest guy you'd ever meet.

Props to Randall on all the hard work building Vidpresso over the years - and
congrats on the exit!

~~~
randall
Dude thanks so much. Clerky has saved my bacon so much!

~~~
timr
Loops now, dude.

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tdumitrescu
> By 2016, it was telling hiring prospects that it was profitable, but also
> that, “We will not be selling the company unless some insane whatsapp like
> thing happened. We’re building a forever biz, not a flip.” So either
> Vidpresso lowered its bar for an exit or Facebook made coming aboard worth
> its while.

~~~
sgslo
Unfortunately there seems to be high incentive and little downside to claim
'we will not sell easy'. You get the upside adoption by any customer concerned
with longevity, and when you decide to fold for pennies you write a blog post
about your incredible journey.

I get it. You get tired of a product, it doesn't do as well as you hope, but
you still want to get acquihired and make sure your hardworking engineers
don't end up on the street. Nonetheless, its frustrating when evaluating a
startup's product and use 'longevity' as a factor.

~~~
randall
The product isn't going anywhere for our customers. That's a big reason we did
the deal.

~~~
RangerScience
What does it mean by "bough the talent and the tech, but not the company"?

~~~
austenallred
I think that's a poorly-worded way to say "the product will be built into
facebook itself"

~~~
repsilat
Hmm, I think it's a legal thing to get the right money to the right people (by
affecting taxes or liquidation preferences or...)

If Facebook buys the company's IP but not the company itself, and the company
pays out that cash in dividends and winds down operations, people could get
paid quite different amounts than if Facebook had purchased all of their
outstanding stock outright.

~~~
nedwin
Buying the company can sometimes be buying certain liabilities they don't want
to deal with.

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bertil
Not sure what your plans are but I think there are tremendous upside into
bundling their solution natively into the juggernaut that is Facebook
Video/Watch. As much as the company has been decried for its influence lately,
it means that innovations for acquisitions get to be put in front of a billion
people or two (including getting support from engineers who dedicated years to
getting code to run on quirky mobile OS).

A personal note to the team, as Facebook is very much a manage-your-own-
journey company: I would strongly recommend you look into professional
application, as in, Workplace.

A. that means a free trip to London for you, which is always cool. You get to
meet more people with whom to joke: “It’s in the middle of a swamp! — I know —
Why?! – I don’t know.”

B. there are tons of applications, roughly empowering internal equivalent to
Coursera. Any solution that I know about (and it’s alas a lot: worked for 20+
companies) is bad, expensive, dysfunctional and impractical.

Getting people to use video to document their workflow, think about edge-
cases, etc. is the most impactful thing I can imagine because it introduces
billions into structured logic in their tasks, allows them to step from code-
as-Excel-spreadsheet into code-as-a-system.

Workplace is already teaching a lot of businesses to be open, transparent,
interest-driven, to record interaction for later use without closely-defined
audience, etc. That happens a lot through Workplace videos — in spite of that
tool being very feature-poor. Adding editing, slide-control and later
something closer to choose-your-own-adventure, tests, etc. that would be
incredible.

I hope you can demonstrate that there is a lot of great things to be done with
interactive videos.

~~~
ritwikgupta
The latter part of your comment sounds like "The Circle." Does every
interaction need to be recorded and logged?

~~~
bertil
I’m not talking about interactions but processes: things that other part of
the organisation relies upon. Think things like bus-factor.

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throwabay
Yet another example that if people want to put their money where their mouth
is w.r.t not being bought out, only trust a not for profit organization.

~~~
ajsharp
I'm confused by the idea that this is bad in some way. The point of business
is to make money. For startups in particular, the entire commercial goal can
roughly be broken down into one of three things:

1\. Build a lasting private business (Mailchimp) 2\. Go public (Facebook) 3\.
Get acquired (Instagram)

Obviously, I'm ball-parking here, but 99% of startups with "successful"
outcomes happen via acquisition. For the vast majority of most startups,
acquisition is the only viable outcome other than failure.

~~~
jjeaff
Point is, don't go around promising that you are in it for the long haul when
you can't/won't made good on it.

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benatkin
It's strange that the investors would agree to having the team and tech
aquihired. What's in it for them?

~~~
sebleon
Optics of having a portfolio company "acquired by fb", non-zero returns (more
relevant for angel, for VCs it's pretty much the same as nothing), frees up
mental energy to focus on other companies.

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orliesaurus
Was this something like OBS is for Twitch/YouTube streamers? Where you can set
different scenes and overlays that are pretty interactive when connected
properly to whichever platform's API!?

~~~
filmgirlcw
Yeah, though a bit more complex than that. It basically allowed companies to
create professional broadcast-like workflows with a Tricaster and complex
setups using Facebook Live and other protocols.

When I worked at Mashable and Facebook was paying us to make a certain amount
of Facebook Live content a month (a practice Facebook started in mid-w2016 and
stopped in mid-2017, which was painful for the media companies that had hired
out teams to produce that content), we used Vidpresso to make the broadcasts
look more professional, with updated lower-thirds, easy multi-camera switches,
pre-recorded playback via Tricaster, etc. I don’t remember if we used
Vidpresso at Gawker/Gizmodo Media Group or not, but the software was
definitely powerful for live broadcasts.

IIRC, Vidpresso was one of the first solutions to get certified to use the
various Facebook Live APIs and it really changed what types of video we were
able to produce.

I’ve known Randall a long time and am thrilled for him and his team that they
could make this exit. This is the sort of thing Facebook should be offering
its larger media customers.

~~~
orliesaurus
That sounds amazing - truly a tool to make life easier to many. Love it

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jakecarpenter
Congrats! Facebook could not have gotten anybody better to make live video
awesome. I'm excited to see what the future holds for the fb/vidpresso combo.

~~~
blub
The future holds advertising and collecting usage data, what else can it hold?

~~~
jakecarpenter
That is a little too reductionist. It can hold a lot of things. Millions of
people get all of their facts and information from live video. A lot of it is
delivered by cable tv right now, but in the same way that TV news overtook
newspapers, Facebook will overtake cable. People have watched moon landings,
walls falling, and the birth and death of democracies, all live--and there
were always advertisers paying the bills.

I know that we're in the middle of an awakening of sorts about personal data,
but that doesn't negate the value that services like Facebook can offer. I may
be naive, but I think this is a step in the right direction.

~~~
blub
Advertisers are just a bunch of people paying money to blast our ears and eyes
with spam about their products. They're not philantropists. They're not
financiers.

Facebook is a vehicle for said spam, disguised as a social network. Yes, it
has to offer _some_ value, otherwise no one would stare at the ads.

Putting Facebook and advertising in charge of providing facts and information
is a stupefyingly bad idea. It's already shown that it can't provide either.

And if they really want to do it, then they should be regulated.

~~~
jakecarpenter
I agree that regulation is a good idea. Throughout history, news and facts
have always been provided to most people by groups with vested interests in
controlling the prevailing narrative. It started in churches, moved to papers
and has taken a lot of forms over the years. Moneyed parties have always used
their resources to sell products, ideas, and agendas via these channels.
Companies like Facebook are different because they allow near-universal
access.

Facebook doesn't provide the information, they provide a platform and tools
for anybody to be a publisher. Anything they can do to improve the platform is
a good idea.

All this is to say: Facebook has done a great thing by bringing Randall and
co. on board and should continue to bring new ideas and talent in, through
whatever means they can.

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nickporter
Congrats dude!

~~~
randall
Thx!!

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btrautsc
Excited for Randall. Good on FB.

congrats to you and the team

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taylorhou
props to the team! we were fellow best-in-class products at NAB YEARS ago.
haha

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anandkulkarni
Congrats, Randall and team!

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aphextron
Probably the only way they can hire decent talent anymore.

~~~
pavlov
I’ve joined Facebook today as part of the Vidpresso team. The opportunity to
build something that can reach a large group of users is attractive: basically
everything I’ve worked on for the past 15 years has been very niche.

As long as the SV giants have that global scale and keep demonstrating that
they value engineers, I don’t think they’ll have trouble hiring.

~~~
jjeaff
Does it matter that the end goal will be to funnel all the innovation,
countless developer hours, and blood sweat and tears into selling ads?

~~~
pavlov
For live video, nobody really knows how to make selling ads even work. It’s
actually an interesting challenge to try to come up with formats where ad
monetization makes sense for the content producer — I’m convinced they’d have
to be compelling formats for audiences first.

~~~
arthurofbabylon
...

[cricket] ...

[pavlov questions the meaning of his/her work] ...

[cricket]

~~~
pavlov
You don’t know anything about me. I’ve spent years working on various products
that were paid by users, not advertisers. Guess what? Selling software
licenses is very hard. You can’t blame me for not trying though.

Video is traditionally ad supported — after all, nobody ever paid for
broadcast TV. But preroll/midroll ads that interrupt content don’t work well
in live online video. Interactivity offers potential new avenues to sell
people stuff that they might actually want. I don’t know if it will work, but
it’s worth exploring.

~~~
blub
Why is it so hard to admit thay you sold out and are working for an evil
company?

Yes, you're not killing baby seals or helping give people cancer. You're just
working for the company that surveils a large part of humanity, tries to get
them addicted to tapping stuff, deceives them into buying stuff,
"accidentally" gets involved into election manipulation, etc. They're also
working hard at getting their hands on medical and banking information.

All around great guys, those Facebook employees.

~~~
dang
Maybe you're right; but attacking someone personally is not an ok way to
express how right you are on HN. Please post civilly and substantively, or not
at all.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
blub
I don't want to be right, I want the people that are abusing others to realise
that they are doing a bad thing.

My message was too inflammatory and I have to rethink my approach to not run
afoul of the rules. This has to be said though: a large reason people think
it's ok to work for companies like Facebook is because there's almost no
social pressure against it, including here.

