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Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

blog.vespa.ai

101–110 of 144 posts

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#101
post #82

> Yahoo will own a stake in the new company and will be one of Vespa’s biggest customers for a long time to come. what's usually going on in scenarios like this is either: the subsidiary is in growth mode and needs access to public capital markets to raise large amounts for building infrastructure (and sharing the expenses with others) to compete, or what has been built is going into profitability mode and the profit…

Cisco has its famous 'Spin-in' strategy.

A "spin-in" is a form of R&D in which a company is the sole investor in a startup. It sends a team of employees off to build an experimental product and then buys that startup for a predetermined and very healthy price.

Cisco has spent on average $763 million to acquire each spin-in that these three men have founded, even though Cisco was also the sole investor in each.

https://www.businessinsider.in/why-cisco-has-showered-these-...

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#102
post #99
post #82

> Yahoo will own a stake in the new company and will be one of Vespa’s biggest customers for a long time to come. what's usually going on in scenarios like this is either: the subsidiary is in growth mode and needs access to public capital markets to raise large amounts for building infrastructure (and sharing the expenses with others) to compete, or what has been built is going into profitability mode and the profit…

Or I suspect a third where the Vespa management team would leave and start their own company that would appreciate at a higher rate than yahoo due to greater growth potential. So yahoo spins them out and has their equity grow faster than yahoo stock, or they lose the product to a new competitor.

There's truth in what you say. I was interpreting (without studying closely) the scale of what's happening to be beyond the scale where ICs have significant leverage, so not the startup venture scale but more like B-C round. It's already clear this stuff's going to be big, and the biggest players have the most advantages, it's time to scale, quit, or pray for a proprietary technological breakthrough. But you're right about giving small equity stake holders a more pure play though equity is an expensive way to pay people.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo search delivers superior search results for tech related queries despite supposedly using Bing

superior search results as in better than Google? superior in any specific way or just generally more relevant results?

Kagi has shown me that “better than google” is not even particularly difficult, if such a small team can do it.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#104
post #52
post #27

Can anybody speak to how Vespa compares to some other Vector Database solutions? Seems like there's so many options today

Disclaimer, I work on Vespa. If you look for just pure vector similarity search, there are many alternatives. But Vespa's tensor support, multi-vector indexing and the ability to express models like colBERT ( 1) or cross-encoders makes it stand out if you need to move beyond pure vector search support. Plus, for RAG use cases, it's a full blown text search engine as well, allowing hybrid ranking combinations. Also wi…

You might want to add a \ before the asterisk.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most growth currently is international. Remember, gmail doesn't work in China :)

Interesting point but makes me wonder whether it's meaningful. There are plenty of local Chinese email providers, why would anyone choose Yahoo specifically?

Speaking as someone that lived in a non-Western country: specifically because it is a recognizably western and non-Chinese brand.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#106
post #101
post #82

> Yahoo will own a stake in the new company and will be one of Vespa’s biggest customers for a long time to come. what's usually going on in scenarios like this is either: the subsidiary is in growth mode and needs access to public capital markets to raise large amounts for building infrastructure (and sharing the expenses with others) to compete, or what has been built is going into profitability mode and the profit…

Cisco has its famous 'Spin-in' strategy. A "spin-in" is a form of R&D in which a company is the sole investor in a startup. It sends a team of employees off to build an experimental product and then buys that startup for a predetermined and very healthy price. Cisco has spent on average $763 million to acquire each spin-in that these three men have founded, even though Cisco was also the sole investor in each. https:…

So they take smart people and free them from corporate bullshit by giving them a bunch of money and telling them to do what they do best? I suppose it requires a lot of trust in those individuals, or the takeaway might just be that subjecting your high-performing employees to bureaucracy and bean-counting is not a great strategy.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#108
post #101
post #82

> Yahoo will own a stake in the new company and will be one of Vespa’s biggest customers for a long time to come. what's usually going on in scenarios like this is either: the subsidiary is in growth mode and needs access to public capital markets to raise large amounts for building infrastructure (and sharing the expenses with others) to compete, or what has been built is going into profitability mode and the profit…

Cisco has its famous 'Spin-in' strategy. A "spin-in" is a form of R&D in which a company is the sole investor in a startup. It sends a team of employees off to build an experimental product and then buys that startup for a predetermined and very healthy price. Cisco has spent on average $763 million to acquire each spin-in that these three men have founded, even though Cisco was also the sole investor in each. https:…

A company so brilliant it is still below its stock price in the year 2000.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#109
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been meaning to dive into SCaNN and DiskANN as well, but haven't gotten around to it yet. quick TLDR on both vs HNSW?

any ideas what do cloud providers like pinecone user underneath ?

I'm from Pinecone. We use proprietary indexes. We could've used HNSW but decided the high memory consumption (ie, costly at scale) and slow index updates (ie, data gets stale) won't cut it for production use cases.

Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company

#110
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cisco has its famous 'Spin-in' strategy. A "spin-in" is a form of R&D in which a company is the sole investor in a startup. It sends a team of employees off to build an experimental product and then buys that startup for a predetermined and very healthy price. Cisco has spent on average $763 million to acquire each spin-in that these three men have founded, even though Cisco was also the sole investor in each. https:…

A company so brilliant it is still below its stock price in the year 2000.

In March 1999, a share of CSCO was worth about $26. At its peak a year later, March 2000, it was worth about $82 (3x increase.) [0]

I don't know about you, but that seems likely to be an excessively inflated figure to me (a la the dot-com bubble.)

Comparing any company's value to its valuation during the dot-com bubble seems silly to me.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/CSCO

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