I worked at Optimizely from before its series A in 2012 until the end of 2016, so I have a unique perspective on this. For most of the time when I worked at Optimizely, the company was all the rage. It appeared at the top of most "hot startup" lists, the Glassdoor reviews were 5/5, revenue was skyrocketing, and for a period in 2014 it became the fourth most valuable YCombinator company (after Stripe, AirBnB, and Drop…
I initially misread the title as "optimized to be acquired [..]"
Maybe my serendipitous reading explain your observations of what happened to the company.
I remember meeting Dan, the founding CEO of Optimizely, at winter 2010 YC demo day. I had just grabbed my name tag and was walking toward the building when he stopped me outside to give me the pitch. He immediately struck me as a smart, capable guy, but as a former software engineer I couldn't understand why companies wouldn't just build A/B testing themselves. What did Optimizely add? How was it defensible? Dan didn't answer the questions to my satisfaction so I thanked him and moved on. As the years went by and I saw them raise round after round, get great press, put up billboards, and build out a beautiful office that I walked by at least once a week, I felt terrible for missing out on the angel investment. I was a rookie investor (I think that was my first YC) and chalked it up to my inexperience. I even tried to extract "lessons learned" and apply them to similar investment opportunities. It feels bittersweet to see things end this way, with probably no return for the common and a haircut for investors. I had built them up and expected them to succeed but I guess it's good to know I was right. Lessons: It ain't over 'til it's over and vanity traction like press & billboards mean nothing. Don't build a big company on a bad idea, it's a waste of time and money for everyone, especially the founders & employees.
I interviewed for a marketing role at Optimizely back in 2013...I passed all the interviews with the team and then had a final, short interview with the CEO. He asked me a few basic questions and then asked 'if you only had 3 years to live, would you work at Optimizely?'. I responded honestly and said no. Said that I'd love to work here to help and grow the business, learn, and further my own career but if I had only…
Huh, I don't know if I know one person who would honestly answer that question with a yes.
If you don't mind answering, what's the strategy behind a hiring tactic like the one in the link above? It seems cartoonish and not grounded in reality....
Probably the op spent $100k to exercise the options. It's likely this deal will wipe out all common shareholders and only the VCs will get anything. That's a $100k loss. The op will be spending the next decade writing this loss off against capital gains and earned income. I've been there.
Can you write off just the exercise price or the fair market value at time of exercise?
I recently asked a tax advisor a similar question: if I do a cashless exercise sale for $5 when the FMV is $6 and my strike price is $2, can I pay income tax only on the $5 sale price? The answer was no: I would owe income at the $6 price and then immediately accrue capital losses on the $1 spread between sale and FMV.
I guess that's a longwinded way of saying "I doubt it". Tax law around employee options is brutal. :/
Maybe I haven't worked in tech long enough, but am I the only one who has never heard of Episerver?
It's an old-school enterprise CMS. And a crummy one. It's done a pretty remarkable job of staying relevant all things considered. The current market leader in this space is Adobe who own AEM and bought Omniture years ago so they can offer analytics and A/B testing in one bill of sale. Episerver must be working to position themselves the same way.
Lot of big enterprises buy these kind of systems and pay through the nose for them.
This sounds like a bad exit. From what I can tell the original Optimizely space has been slowly becoming a more discrete area of progressive delivery, rather than an industry on its own. Many players have jumped into this space with their own A/B testing and Feature Flags solutions as part of their total offering, many of those offerings being free, open source or cheaper. Also potentially better in the concrete task…
Google Optimize & VWO hurt them. Free, or low price, low friction won at scale with smaller teams running 1-2 experiments or low level personalization. Everyone I know who's going to high volume testing is either on a hosted CMS that has this baked into their offering or JAMStack. No one I know has deployed Optimizely since 15/16.
Thats the issue. They start at $50k. No startup can afford that, so we build our own or use google optimize. I've been at multiple startups that have scaled to millions of users and Optimizely could have been a player if they had a self service budget option. Need to get in early like other saas/cloud providers because the cost of switching becomes to high as the business scales. Imagine if AWS didn't have self service option and you had to go through a sales process with min commits. It would have failed.
I worked for a startup that basically let 90% of its engineering team quit due to low morale over the course of a year without making any effort to (a) stop the exodus, or (b) replace them. When they exited about 6 months later, it became pretty clear that it was intentional.
Sorry for my daftness, but what is the incentive behind intentionally losing a bunch of staff before 'exiting'? Just to reduce your cash burn?
Mostly to get better profitability numbers to show to potential acquirers