

How GoDaddy Acquired and Dismantled a Successful Startup - steve-benjamins
http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/what-happened-to-virb-after-godaddy-acquired-it

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ryangittins
Not that this isn't abhorrent behavior, and not that GoDaddy isn't a terrible
company anyway, but this isn't exactly uncommon. It happens every day, with
the prototypical example of this sort of thing is General Motors:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy)

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andrewguenther
Sure, GoDaddy is evil, but how is this different than any startup that
Google/Facebook/Twitter etc. acquires and kills?

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nugget
Not directly related but one of the happiest days of my life was the day I
transferred my last domain away from GoDaddy.

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justboxing
Who did you transfer out to? When SOPA was the rage, I looked into
transferring my domains out from Godaddy, but was unable to find a better
domain registrar.

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soperj
Really? Nearly everyone I've dealt with has been better. Name.com is my go to
right now.

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nucleardog
Name.com's nameservers had a huge outage that lasted about an hour a few
months back now.

That's not the bad part.

The nameservers didn't just go down, they were misconfigured and were serving
the incorrect records for all of our ~140 domains. They were resolving to some
totally unrelated address we'd never seen before. And not with a 0 TTL.

Before emailing to ask about an issue they already knew about, I looked for
their service status dashboard... They don't have one. I checked their Twitter
and other social media... No mention of the issue.

To date they haven't released _any_ information on what happened that I'm
aware of. When I contacted them directly and asked them what had happened and
asked if there was to be a post-mortem released, their response was simply
that it was a "configuration error" and they couldn't give me any details
about what had happened or what they're doing to mitigate it, but I had their
word that it would never happen again.

As a registrar they've been decent (lots of issues trying to get some
registrant info updated on our .CA domains...).

I would absolutely recommend someone more transparent for nameserver hosting
however.

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gesman
Did you|anyone expect anything else from GoDaddy?

I do occasional WEB consulting and I warn clients that I have to charge extra
if they are hosting any of their resources at Godaddy.

Every time i need to interact with their resources to do anything productive -
it is a minefield of upsells at every step and wasted time trying to find
simple things.

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teevio
I had the opportunity to interact with some of the new execs at GoDaddy and
the culture was definitely shifting. But Virb's numbers just couldn't compare
to GoDaddy's own site builder. Virb was a drop in the bucket compared to the
user base they already had.

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KaiserPro
Surely this should be _why_ GoDaddy acquired and killed....

The mechanics are simple, and obvious. GoDaddy buys an upstart with money,
kills it be starving it of resources.

Whats more interesting is why it would do such a thing. To acquire a company
and kill it takes a lot of time and effort. It must have been either a great
threat, or have assets worth spending money on.

This isn't an uncommon practice. However its less common in the world of
startups, mainly because no one runs at a profit, they can't afford to spend
valuable run time capital killing a competitor.

Autodesk and Avid are the masters of the buy and kill.

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steve-benjamins
Did you read the article?

GoDaddy never set out to acquire Virb. It just happened to. This is more of a
story about the messiness of acquisitions than any kind of dark, malicious
intentions by GoDaddy.

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KaiserPro
Yes,

but sorry, no one spunks out millions of dollars to get a happy accident.
There are months of wranglings, negotiations, covenants drawn up, targets
created.

Granted Virb might have been collateral, but thats the point of my question.
Why, was it lack of interest, did it cost to much to develop?

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megatroll
After my favourite invoicing solution roninapp.com got bought out by GoDaddy,
I was forced to use their inferior Bookkeeping product!!! Never again!!!

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teevio
What is infuriating is that Virb still lives under the MediaTemple umbrella.
I'm sure MediaTemple loves having a good as dead product in their product
lineup.

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bsimpson
I had no idea Media Temple was now owned by GoDaddy. Makes me glad I never
used them.

Random sidenote: wasn't Virb originally a side project from PureVolume?

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teevio
Yup! I used to work for PureVolume, then Virb, and then Media Temple via
acquisitions. Crazy world.

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fixxer
So, any idea of how much Virb was sold for to Media Temple?

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steve-benjamins
I don't think that's publicly known. This was an article written around the
time of the acquisition but it doesn't state any prices:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/virbcom-the-myspace-killer-
th...](http://www.businessinsider.com/virbcom-the-myspace-killer-that-wasnt-
has-a-new-plan-2010-7)

