The Zenter duo invested a few months of their lives in non-stop hacking with the goal of winning over Google
I don't know if it's even worth correcting her, but this isn't true. They were about a day away from closing a funding round when Google got interested.
"The Zenter duo invested a few months of their lives in non-stop hacking with the goal of winning over Google, and they did. Grand prize? Engineering jobs at Google!"
That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. The Zenter guys spent 6 months building their product before they got bought. I have no idea what the purchase price was, but let's take a wild-assed guess and say both founders made $1 million in Google stock. They ended up with jobs at Google, which is probably the best of the big technology companies to work at, plus the chance to see the stuff they'd developed used by millions of people as an eventual component of GDocs. So on the whole, I think they did pretty well for 6 months of work, and fairly limited risk.
The alternative? If they rolled the dice and tried to make an independent company out of it, there's no guarantee they wouldn't just be crushed by GDocs adding presentations 6 months down the line. They hadn't even launched yet, let alone demonstrated they could build a profitable business.
If anything, I think the lesson to be learned is that if you're in Zenter's shoes, that would be a hard offer to turn down.
"... I have no idea what the purchase price was, but let's take a wild-assed guess and say both founders made $1 million in Google stock. They ended up with jobs at Google, which is probably the best of the big technology companies to work at, plus the chance to see the stuff they'd developed used by millions of people as an eventual component of GDocs. So on the whole ..."
I also couldn't understand the point of the article. Certainly getting bought out to make your product work is better than A) dying a slow death B) being beaten to the punch by google C) being bought out by Microsoft and having to work there.
"... I think they did pretty well for 6 months of work, and fairly limited risk. ..."
I don't think so. They sacrificed 3mths work. One also had a newborn. For their spouses this is no holiday. Indeed they are taking risks here. The ones left behind are picking up a lot of slack.
I didn't mean to suggest they didn't take risks -- of course a startup involves some degree of risk. My point was just that selling out to Google involved significantly less risk than trying to continue as an independent startup.
"... How valuable was the Y Combinator backed Zenter to Google? Chris Sacca, Google biz dev guy: Y combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer. .."
Still trying to work this one really means because I'm sure yc is a lot more valuable to google than is made out in this quote.
@sacca RU quotedok "Donna Bogatin:YC
comes down to 2 kids in a room with 2
computers & ramennoodles for a
summer" http://tinyurl.com/37ca5s
I don't know if it's even worth correcting her, but this isn't true. They were about a day away from closing a funding round when Google got interested.