Live data from Hacker News

Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes to an End After Being Acquired for $250M

techcrunch.com

1–10 of 41 posts

Re: Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes to an End After Being Acquired for $250M

#5

This is OT but how come submissions which have less than 12 points appear on the first page? Has anyone figured out the HN algo? There are many other posts with far greater points yet this appears. Maybe techcrunch has higher ratings?

Notably, the user that posted the article has 47,000+ karma. I imagine that's a factor

Re: Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes to an End After Being Acquired for $250M

#6

$271MM in investment and a $250MM purchase price. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gilt-groupe#/entity Does that mean that the investors got all the money and anyone holding common stock was basically screwed?

Yes. The preferred will get the payout. If there were any holders of debt (which is senior to preferred -- his is why the yield on preferred shares of mega corps are higher Than the company's bonds), they will get paid before the preferred.

Execs will renegotiate their compensation contracts with the acquirer and likely have fairly lucrative contracts (often happens to sweeten the deal).

Re: Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes to an End After Being Acquired for $250M

#7
post #2

"unicorns" are only interesting for Goldman Sachs and the like for the possibility of a inflated IPO. btw, did Facebook deliver any dividends?

FB has never issued dividends to common stock holders.

http://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/dividend-history

Re: Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes to an End After Being Acquired for $250M

#8

This is OT but how come submissions which have less than 12 points appear on the first page? Has anyone figured out the HN algo? There are many other posts with far greater points yet this appears. Maybe techcrunch has higher ratings?

It has a time decaying value function. If the points accumulate rapidly upon submission, you can reach front page with as few as 5 up votes. This often happens for github repo submissions.

Re: Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes to an End After Being Acquired for $250M

#9

This is OT but how come submissions which have less than 12 points appear on the first page? Has anyone figured out the HN algo? There are many other posts with far greater points yet this appears. Maybe techcrunch has higher ratings?

I can't remember where dang explained this, but there is a human factor in the algorithm. Some posts are artificially bumped to low on the front page for a small period of time to see if they gain traction. The selection of those posts is up to the moderators. This might be one such post.

EDIT: As I recall, the human-curated selections get put in a pool which the computer randomly promotes for a time to see if it gains traction.

Re: Gilt’s Unicorn Tale Comes to an End After Being Acquired for $250M

#10

$271MM in investment and a $250MM purchase price. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gilt-groupe#/entity Does that mean that the investors got all the money and anyone holding common stock was basically screwed?

Yes. The preferred will get the payout. If there were any holders of debt (which is senior to preferred -- his is why the yield on preferred shares of mega corps are higher Than the company's bonds), they will get paid before the preferred. Execs will renegotiate their compensation contracts with the acquirer and likely have fairly lucrative contracts (often happens to sweeten the deal).

There may be a carveout in place, providing a modest return that would otherwise be consumed entirely by investors eating first.

http://blog.drosenassoc.com/?p=70

Post reply on HN