Congrats Boys!!!
Cover is joining Twitter
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#22An acquihire for a startup which had received $1.7M investment is probably not a great success.
Don't the original investors usually get their investment back from these things? So Twitter pays the investors $1.7M and pays the founders $200K per year as a dev team. How does that usually work?
I think the parent was inferring that recouping $1.7M isn't viewed as a success for a VC.
In general I think acquihires are moderate successes for the founders. Not just financially but external validation of their collective skills as a team.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#23An acquihire for a startup which had received $1.7M investment is probably not a great success.
Don't the original investors usually get their investment back from these things? So Twitter pays the investors $1.7M and pays the founders $200K per year as a dev team. How does that usually work?
I highly doubt it was that little. I've seen quite a few acquihire term sheets and the payoffs are a lot better than you would think for the founders.
I bet the investors get their money back, the founders of Cover get $2m - $4m each in stock alone (vesting over 4 years of course), and the employees get $500k / year in total comp.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#24An acquihire for a startup which had received $1.7M investment is probably not a great success.
Don't the original investors usually get their investment back from these things? So Twitter pays the investors $1.7M and pays the founders $200K per year as a dev team. How does that usually work?
Someone has explained it here a couple of years ago that VCs generally view them as failures as they have investment pools with lifetimes of 7-10 years and each pool is expected to yield something like a 10x profit at the end of the period. There's not much difference between losing their original investment and getting it back as they will have similar effects on the performance figures of the pool at the end of the cycle.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#25This is really disappointing news if this acquisition goes the way it's sounding. Cover was a great app and one of the reasons to use Android over iOS (along with Link Bubble, etc.).
At the least, if it gets pulled or falls into abandon, that's opportunity for someone else to fill the spot. There are obvious ways to improve Cover (like picking a time interval for it to default to Work mode--it is pretty bad at detecting Work mode in general IME). It would also be nice if you could customize the number of apps that show up in the app switcher (mainly useful on large devices like a Note 3).
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#26If you're looking for a similar replacement, I like Aviate. Yahoo bought them, but they're still developing the app.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#27"For now, Cover will remain available in the Play Store while we focus our attention on our work at Twitter. If that changes down the road, we’ll provide another update here." tl;dr: Cover will die a slow, unmaintained death while the former Cover employees work on completely unrelated Twitter projects. Oh well.
Better or worse than just killing off the product?
worse than having the team continue to work on a good product that people love.
I think it's the point of the author of the comment here.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't the original investors usually get their investment back from these things? So Twitter pays the investors $1.7M and pays the founders $200K per year as a dev team. How does that usually work?
I think the parent was inferring that recouping $1.7M isn't viewed as a success for a VC. In general I think acquihires are moderate successes for the founders. Not just financially but external validation of their collective skills as a team.
Yeah, that's pretty much the value of a talent acquisition the founders: enough cash and credibility to make things go a lot faster the next time around.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#29Such a shame. After owning an iPhone for since the first launch, I recently bought a Nexus 5. Cover was one of the first apps I downloaded that showed me the power of Android. Effectively doing what you want with the OS. I wasn't oblivious to it, but here was a nice approach to make my life just that tad bit easier. I showed a lot of friends and they were all impressed. Felt like maybe something that should be baked in Android. Unfortunately, after 2-3 weeks of usage, I gave up after it wouldn't reliably switch home to car or car to work and found I needed to intervene a lot more than I would have liked to. However, I was hopeful this would be smoothed out...guess not now.
Re: Cover is joining Twitter
#30I see a lot of undeserved negativity here for what I'm sure is an exciting time for the Cover guys. Let's not piss on their parade. I say congratulations, I hope you guys made a bit of cash, had a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy working on interesting projects at Twitter!