101–110 of 159 posts
Congrats to the api.ai team. I love when great companies do well. I'm a happy customer (and wish I were also an investor, but I'm not).
What are your plans for transitioning off their service?
The script for this sort of acqui-hire is pretty well known at this point.
Congrats to them. I do find this sentence a bit awkward: "It has been a long and fun journey. Since API.AI’s launch in 2014..." I think the CEO referring to the total time into the company (including the Speaktoit phase), but it comes across badly - leaves me thinking "You think 2 years is a long time???" I don't think that's what the CEO meant to say.
This kind of text reads like something that is going to end up in https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
When I read this kind of stuff, I feel like it never makes sense to sell out if you care about your company unless you wanted to get rich all along. I just feel like the majority of companies that get bought up die a slow and painful death - and sometimes a quicker but equally painful one. It would pain me so, so much to see all the work I put into something like that go down the drain.
That's interesting they just bought apigee which does about the same thing?
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Aren't Google acquihire offers conditional on passing the usual Google employee screening process? I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity. Say your employer is bought by Google - are you axed because you slept poorly and couldn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem on the whiteboard in 15 minutes?
One of my former colleagues failed to pass his interview after his company was acquihired by Google. He had designed and contributed a decent portion of the core of the product. One of his projects for the company had about 50 stars on github. n=1
amazing: they spend n million dollars just to get that talented individual, and then just throw it all away. My question is how is this expense reported/justified and who gets the difference? What about shareholder value?
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And what of the ones that don't get brought on? Do they get anything for their equity typically? For key employees i can see them sticking around, but early hire support staff that may not be needed could still have considerable equity.
Most startups use double trigger acceleration for vesting. The first trigger was the acquisition and the second was the termination (not offered a position). So they would vest their entire equity grant. Of course that implies that the equity is worth anything. Most acquihires are at low multiples so the VCs tend to take the entire price, leaving founders and employees with nothing.
I'm assuming Google doesn't need any of the company's business, and that it is being acquired for its talent. So, my real question: how much, on average, does a founder get as part of one of these acquihires? And does s/he actually, y'know, have to do any work after getting paid?
https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/
* Cloud Vision API - Upload an image, and it will tell you what is in it
* Cloud Speech API - Upload a wav and it will transcribe it
* Natural Language API - Parse sentences, extracts entities, sentiment and syntax
* Cloud Translate API - Translate from one language to another.
Api.ai would make a great bullet point to add to the end of that list!
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Aren't Google acquihire offers conditional on passing the usual Google employee screening process? I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity. Say your employer is bought by Google - are you axed because you slept poorly and couldn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem on the whiteboard in 15 minutes?
One of my former colleagues failed to pass his interview after his company was acquihired by Google. He had designed and contributed a decent portion of the core of the product. One of his projects for the company had about 50 stars on github. n=1
Does this signal a continued push for bots and conversational UX? Where does the belief in the tech come from? Are there any examples of real success with this tech? Bots can't solve discovery in a novel way without big advances in NLP. There doesn't seem to be a bridge from here to there where it makes sense as a user. Is this just irrational exuberance? I'd love to understand why microsoft/google/facebook are all c…
I know of a few large scale projects successfully implementing conversational UX with huge economies of scale. Most of the customers haven't even realised they are talking to bots.
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Hilarious. We've reached a place where a doctorate in CS is an insufficient qualification to delete a fucking file.
IMO the pendulum swings both ways. I'd bet money many a PHD could not delete a file properly.