31–40 of 84 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An acquihire is the implied alternative. I'm not sure why companies would ever acquihire when they could do this with the appropriate signing bonus.
Because there are assets other than just the people. Code, network relationships, reputation, service contracts, company partnerships, IP, etc. There can also be non-competes, NDAs, security clearances, stock vesting and a multitude of other agreements to factor in.
Taken without any external context, this release is nonsensical, probably because they don't bother to say why they're shutting down or what the new opportunity is. "Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for ebooks." By... shutting down? I would have appreciated a bit of plain-speaking here.
I understand that Apple generally doesn't announce its acquisitions:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/05/21/tight-lipped-apple...
It's worth noting that Oyster raised a total of $17M as of last year: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/oysterbooks-com Runway has its limits.
Wow. What'd they burn it on?
If you have a company with a product and the product is being discontinued is it really so hard to just say that in English? The word "sunset" isn't even a verb.
Between 2012 October and 2015 September they ran out of 17M USD. That's a burn rate of 5.67M USD per year.
For 26 employees, if we stupidly assumed no other costs, that nearly 218k USD salary per year.
Obviously that's not right. Let's assume they paid an average of 100k USD per year to each employee. That's 2.6M USD burnt for salaries. Which means that infrastructure, ad spend, and administrative costs and taxes (?) came to just over 3M USD per year.
And that's assuming they received ZERO money while they were running. Which is of course a load of tosh.
I'm unaware of the US market's costs in running a business but those numbers seem abnormal. Am I missing something here or does this seem plausible?
Kindle unlimited. Also, I don't think there's as big of a market as they thought for people who wanted to pay one fee for all you can read.
I tried Oyster and ended up canceling after discovering that the books I wanted weren't available. The case is the same with Kindle unlimited. The problem is that publishers make sure that the high demand books just aren't available via an "all you can read" plan so these end up with the scraps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because there are assets other than just the people. Code, network relationships, reputation, service contracts, company partnerships, IP, etc. There can also be non-competes, NDAs, security clearances, stock vesting and a multitude of other agreements to factor in.
Non competes are unenforceable in California.