

Jaiku's Jyri Engeström on the Consequences of Being Acquired by Google - ssclafani
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2883-exit-interview-jaikus-jyri-engestrm/

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iamelgringo
So I have a slightly different tale. I had the pleasure of hosting a Hackers &
Founders & Factual hackathon this weekend with Gil Elbaz, the CEO of Factual.
His previous startup, Applied Semantics got purchased by GOOG some years ago,
the technology Applied Semantics had was tightly integrated into a little
product called AdSense, Gil recieved a Founders Award, and Gil now sits on the
board of the X Prize foundation as a Trustee.

He spent 3 years at Google, left and started Factual, a new company which
recieved $30 M in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. They are trying to
change the world via creating an open source model around data.

While I appreciate hearing a different perspective at times, I tire of 37
Signals tales of startup funding/acquisition glooom and doom. Sometimes having
your company acquired by Google and ending up with a couple million in the
bank is a plus.

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ChuckMcM
Its a cautionary tale. One to take to heart as well. It was an interesting
exercise to watch from inside the 'plex as Jaiku moved from startup ->
acquisition -> dead pool. I think to be fair it seemed that internally at
Google there was a lot of angst as well but given the comparison with Twitter,
then and now.

"We are the Google. Turn over your founder's stock and surrender your
engineers. We will add your features and technological distinctiveness to our
own. Your culture will adapted to service us. Resistance is futile."

:-)

~~~
jp
A tiny microblogging platform causes angst in a billion dollar company ? Jaiku
sounds like a dinner snack or christmas eve impulse buy. Another Orkut, but
big in Finland.

