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Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

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Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#71

Post by lobster_johnson »

tptacek wrote: post #66
lobster_johnson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the pricing page, Get Satisfaction's only public pricing is the $1,200/mo subscription. ZenDesk starts at $25m/agent for the community solution. Granted, they are slightly different products; I was just grabbing the nearest competitor I could think of. (They're in the same space, though, and competing directly for the community/knowledge base part of their products.)

I think we can safely assume GetSatisfaction didn't have 9-figure revenue.

To be sure, but that wasn't really my point. $1,200/mo for such a simple product seems excessive.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#72

Post by TheOsiris »

sharkweek wrote: post #47

This is pretty common. When startups don't sell for above their valuations, the investors are going to get their money back first (and in varying cases more, depending on liquidation preferences). Pulled GetSatisfaction's tables from PitchBook, take a look at their B round: http://i.imgur.com/zUzDrFp.png Post valuation at over $50M - no data yet on the amount of the acquisition, but if it was equal to that or less (o…

does PitchBook show whether the founders cashed out some stock or not? I doubt they raised series B without cashing out some money

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#74

Post by PhantomGremlin »

sharkweek wrote: post #47

This is pretty common. When startups don't sell for above their valuations, the investors are going to get their money back first (and in varying cases more, depending on liquidation preferences). Pulled GetSatisfaction's tables from PitchBook, take a look at their B round: http://i.imgur.com/zUzDrFp.png Post valuation at over $50M - no data yet on the amount of the acquisition, but if it was equal to that or less (o…

Thanks for posting those tables.

The thing I was surprised by is that the preferred stock had a 6% dividend. Is that common nowadays?

Back around 30 years ago when I was at startups, the preferred didn't get any dividends. It existed to allow the VCs to stay ahead of founders/employees in case of IPO, liquidation, etc. Not to collect a dividend along the way.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#75

Post by bri3d »

TheOsiris wrote: post #72
sharkweek wrote: post #47

This is pretty common. When startups don't sell for above their valuations, the investors are going to get their money back first (and in varying cases more, depending on liquidation preferences). Pulled GetSatisfaction's tables from PitchBook, take a look at their B round: http://i.imgur.com/zUzDrFp.png Post valuation at over $50M - no data yet on the amount of the acquisition, but if it was equal to that or less (o…

does PitchBook show whether the founders cashed out some stock or not? I doubt they raised series B without cashing out some money

Founder liquidity in a B round for a company that wasn't extremely competitive for capital seems pretty uncommon, IMO, especially back when Get Satisfaction would have been raising (I remember "Series FF" and other founder-preference vehicles being novel in the ~2006 era). Why do you think they'd have cashed out at a series B?

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#77

Post by Animats »

That's happened to other companies. Havok, the physics engine people, went through that. The founders and early investors way overexpanded the business (they had locations in three countries), blew through the initial funding, and tanked. Another group bought the business cheaply, replaced the management, and eventually sold out to Intel.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#78

Post by gyardley »

This sort of thing happens to founders from time to time. I'm more interested in Lane's claim that OATV and First Round didn't see any money:

https://twitter.com/monstro/status/585808886508040192

This is interesting, because according to the screenshot from PitchBook elsewhere in the thread, OATV and First Round both participated in the Series B, which was the last equity round.

If that's accurate, in order for OATV and First Round to get nothing, whoever did that debt financing in 2014 would have had to have gotten 100% of the proceeds, with none left to trickle down to the Series B.

We don't have the details, of course, but taking on debt and then selling for less than the amount needed to cover the debt a year later certainly sounds like a party foul. If your company's in such a precarious position, normally you can't even get debt financing.

Based on the equity rounds, the founder has nothing to kvetch about - they raised and the company didn't get to where it needed to be. But if I were investigating this, I'd dig into the terms of and decision to take that final debt round. Could be nothing, but there's a lot that could've happened there that'd make a founder tetchy.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#79

Post by calbear81 »

codinghorror wrote: post #62
moe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then google seemed to delist them in a panda And rightfully so. They were a pest, just like the spam-site by that Calamaris guy from Netscape around the same time. Lesson learned: If you depend on search traffic then don't be obnoxious. Otherwise nobody will speak up for you when Google snaps your neck. Hey Google, why is Quora (expert-sexchange 2.0) still polluting my search results anyway?

Could be worse, could be a Yahoo Answers result.

Yahoo! Answers results are often quite entertaining. I treat it as a comedy site.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#80

Post by macspoofing »

onewaystreet wrote: post #43

This isn't a "founders got screwed" story, it's the story of most failed startups. Usually the founders don't burn their bridges though.

I'm sure the bridges were burned a long time ago. When people start losing money, it ain't pretty.
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