
Google Buys Wavii For North Of $30 Million - Lightning
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/google-buys-wavii-for-north-of-30-million/
======
agscala
This one makes a lot more sense than the yahoo acquisition considering Wavii
actually developed their own algorithms

------
drakaal
You could just build your own...
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/04/23/how-to-
make...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/04/23/how-to-
make-30m-without-spending-any-of-your-money-in-your-spare-time/)

~~~
mandeepj
from the article - "Don’t worry if your app is down most of the time. It just
needs to work well enough to demo and take screenshots of." ... ha ha

They laid down the whole plan on the paper to get bought so easily. Ideally
this is what it takes rest is up to us...how we execute it.

------
swohns
Looks like they're headed to the Knowledge Graph team, but I'd like to see
some love for the news division, especially from NLP badasses like Wavii.

~~~
Shooti
Since Knowledge graph is a team, not a division that may actually be the case
since it's possible the author actually meant "Google Knowledge", which is the
catch all internal unit for all of Google's search-related products (of which
News is a part).

------
salimmadjd
If I was google or Apple, I would have gone after Prismatic. I've used both
and Prismatic seem to have much better technology.

~~~
MojoJolo
Yeah. I think Prismatic has the best technology in terms of machine learning
and NLP. With it, maybe Prismatic is worth more than their budget.

------
bshastry
This [1] makes one feel if Google is really interested in acquisitions like
these or just tossing some money around.

[1] [http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/02/google-closes-
aardvark...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/02/google-closes-aardvark-
social-search-as-part-of-labs-shutdown/)

~~~
gwern
'Interested' is a hard to prove word. The best one can really say without
statements from Google VIPs is that acquisitions frequently do not seem to
lead to successful services and so they're probably better seen as either
expensive acquihires or gambling on hits.

(I have an in-progress analysis of Google service/product shutdowns at
<http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns> and one of the solider looking
results so far is that even being generous and marking as 'alive' any
acqusition's products which were merged into something like Maps or Google+,
products which were part of an acquisition are much more likely to be shutdown
than internally-developed products.)

~~~
bshastry
Thanks for the link to your analysis. Should give it a read :)

------
micheleg
NLP is on fire at the moment...

~~~
njohnw
In what context?

~~~
mandeepj
first summly now this

------
brendano
Congrats, folks!

------
ttrreeww
I'm guessing the average employee get's to cash out a little under $100k or do
they get locked in? I wonder what the Google retention bonus is like?

~~~
vabmit
Crunchbase says Wavii only has five employees and only took ~$2MM in funding.
So, I would bet it's more than $100K total. The funding is all listed as a
2010-07 seed round. I expect they raised more than that. But, given their
acquisition price and business model it sounds like things worked on well for
them and at least the founders were well vested. Or, did you mean actual cash
excluding any GOOG options/RSUs?

My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a
standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people
negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4.

~~~
kloncks
4 year lock-in only applies to non-execs? What is it for execs?

With this, an engineer at a startup has a worse deal?

~~~
vabmit
I'm sure it's situation dependent with execs. If you have a very mature
company in a new vertical w/ significant revenue (like a YouTube) and they
want you to continue to run the product that would be a very different
situation than a small acquihire where the execs may just be essentially
engineers or dev team leaders at Google. Of course, the execs likely organized
their start-up governance in a way that gives them negotiating strength in the
deal. I can't imagine a start-up where the engineers would be involved in the
negotiation and decision making beyond their own transition/retention.

