Wow, I thought Meebo was on track for much more than a $100 million buyout. It has raised $70 million and apparently has a very large, active user base after all. I wonder what happened?
Strategic exit I'm guessing. I think they have been struggling to find a core product for a while now. The meebo bar was essentially a pivot after popularity of meebo messenger started to decline.
That seems likely. I doubt there was any employee participation on this exit. Google has a pretty good track record of giving 'RSU's[1] to the key employees in an acquisition which can make it worthwhile.
[1] RSU - Restricted Stock Unit. Unlike a stock 'option' where there is a price per share which is set at the current market price and then is only valuable if the stock goes 'up', an RSU a convertible instrument that has a nominal face value of 1.0 share of Google Stock. However it has attached to it a scaling factor which is generally tied to performance. The scaling factor can go to 0 if performance is poor or as high as 3 if performance is stellar generally. This would be similar to an 'earnout' although its more about how the employee does at the company rather than how the acquired assets perform.
Meebo was about to lose most of their remaining (they'd already lost a few) key employees to better companies anyway. A Google buyout with incentives to keep the employees around was really the only way this was going to end well.
1 - there's very little money in chat, meebo's original product;
2 - meebo has been trying to make money via their behavioral targeting dataset: they see browsing activity of users via sites that embed their javascript and also through the plugins they get people to install in their browsers. It's a similar dataset to clearspring, which also does bt stuff. In 2011, Meebo bought mindset media which does psychometrics (eg [1]), and I'd bet the play is to marry psychometric targeting with meebo's bt dataset.
2a - the above may be meebo's value to google: experience building, selling, and a client list for psychometric targeting. This is another targeting layer that would be sold in Google+ alongside dems targeting.
3 - for the sake of the employees, I hope meebo's VCs didn't have preferred participation; that will cut up the $30mm even further. Though I bet Google will take care of the employees.
