Re:The Google black hole: What happens to startups when they...
by josefresco on Thursday August 14, 2008 @04:07PM
(#276434)
I'm sure Google promised these founders all sorts of things once their application was assimilated into the borg that is Google. And with lots of money on the table I'm sure the founders grinned and asked where to sign.
Closing your doors to new signups is practically like suicide. As a founder I would never agree to that if I was taking a smaller buyout in exchange for continuing to work on my application as an employee of Goog.
Now if they backed up the money dump truck and sent me on my way I wouldn't care so much (although I'd probably have thousands of users who'd hate me but probably also wouldn't blame me)
I missed where exactly the article said this. I imagine if you're looking at a Google acquisition and you care about your service, nobody is stopping you from asking "how will this integrate into Google's MapReduce/BigTable? Where will I be in the Google corp. structure? Will I get engineers working with me on my product, or will I be farmed off to other products?" Weigh the answers to this as part of yoru consideration about whether this acquisition is good or not.
I think the founders are more to blame for not understanding what an acquisition by Google involved, not whoever@Google they were dealing with for not spoon-feeding them.