Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing • Hacker News Board

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#101

Post by rebelidealist » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 8:01 AM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #82

SwellJoe wrote: post #42

I have very limited knowledge of this situation, but, I'm gonna pile on anyway: With that kind of money raised, the founders didn't get "nothing". They got a salary, probably a decent one, for however long they were running the thing. Which is more than many startup founders get out of businesses that fail. If they don't have personal debt, or didn't lose relationships or friendships, they came out ahead of many star…

VCs aren't assholes, generally, but their standard terms are a bad deal for founders, generally. I've thought about this a lot over the past 25 years. In the past I've seen VCs do really bad things (like force decisions that set the company back 18 months bad.) The problem is, when you get a "good" VC that doesn't force bad decisions on you ,the cost of the money, mostly in deal terms, is too damn high. And when you…

Many people don't realize that 37Signals / Basecamp is a multi-billion dollar business. https://medium.com/@hungrycharles/basecamp-the-small-bootstr...

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#102

Post by rcfox » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 9:17 AM UTC

cheepin wrote: post #94

bduerst wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least you don't have to log in with a social network to see the answers.

Here you go. Not super efficient, but a little bookmarklet to get rid of the most annoying things about Quora javascript:(function(){function a(c){var e=document.getElementsByTagName('*'),i;for(i in e){if((' '+e[i].className+' ').indexOf(' '+c+' ')>-1){e[i].style.display="none";}}}a("modal_signup_background");a("modal_signup_dialog");a("modal_signup_facepile");})();

Off topic, but this code blob broke the formatting of the HN comment page, causing text to extend horizontally off the screen. It'd be great if you (or a mod) could add some (4, I think?) spaces in front of your code to make it appear in a code/pre tag.

    Like this.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#103

Post by seivan » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 10:24 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #42

I have very limited knowledge of this situation, but, I'm gonna pile on anyway: With that kind of money raised, the founders didn't get "nothing". They got a salary, probably a decent one, for however long they were running the thing. Which is more than many startup founders get out of businesses that fail. If they don't have personal debt, or didn't lose relationships or friendships, they came out ahead of many star…

Sounds like the premise of the latest episode of Silicon Valley (season 2) The raised more than they they needed, sold for less. Founders got nothing. Literally the same :)

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#104

Post by blumkvist » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 10:27 AM UTC

reustle wrote: post #37

staunch wrote: post #19

The company tanked after having elected to raise $20M over 5 rounds, for what should have been a very profitable lifestyle business. The lesson is not to raise VC money for a business where it does not make sense.

He also has a relevant tweet deeper in the thread > Taking VC is like getting the world’s worst boss: Shitload of opinions, undue level of influence, never actually shows up for work. https://twitter.com/monstro/status/587413328055635968

Whose fault is it that he was greedy and opted to go for "Zuckerberg status", and then picked the wrong people for the journey?

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#105

Post by kragen » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 10:29 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #81

staunch wrote: post #19

The company tanked after having elected to raise $20M over 5 rounds, for what should have been a very profitable lifestyle business. The lesson is not to raise VC money for a business where it does not make sense.

The VC industry is ripe for disruption it would seem? I wonder how quickly the landscape would change if billionaires from various other fields started investing arms to fund tech. Considering the trend in club football where billionaires who have nothing to do with football started investing in football clubs all over Europe. The way they went about running the whole business changed the face of club football foreve…

Instead of having VCs who don’t respect hackers and work hard to rip them off on behalf of their LPs, you’d have VCs who don’t respect hackers and also don’t understand technology, which sounds like a great way for their LPs to lose all their money.

I wanted to say “this is how pets.com got funded” but actually it turns out pets.com was started by the CEO who led Berkeley Systems, the flying toaster people, into an acquisition where she got laid off; and she was funded by Hummer Winblad and Amazon. And so while Julie Wainwright may not have exactly been Brin and Page getting funded by Andy Bechtolsheim, she certainly had experience managing technology companies, and her VCs certainly knew what they were getting into. And other ridiculous stories from the same time, like FireDrop/Zaplet (business plan: send DHTML by email) had similarly impeccable pedigrees (funded: US$90M by Kleiner, Joe Kraus, Bill Joy, Esther Dyson, et al.)

So, how much worse would it get, really? Hundreds of billions of dollars a year of investment capital desperately chasing any Ivy League graduate who knows how to tie a tie and promises to hire an army of monkey programmers just as soon as they get funded?

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#106

Post by notahacker » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 10:33 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #81

staunch wrote: post #19

The company tanked after having elected to raise $20M over 5 rounds, for what should have been a very profitable lifestyle business. The lesson is not to raise VC money for a business where it does not make sense.

The VC industry is ripe for disruption it would seem? I wonder how quickly the landscape would change if billionaires from various other fields started investing arms to fund tech. Considering the trend in club football where billionaires who have nothing to do with football started investing in football clubs all over Europe. The way they went about running the whole business changed the face of club football foreve…

If the evidence from football is anything to go by, billionaires adopting startups to run as their personal fiefdom would have even the most activist and unethical VCs seem like a founder's dream by comparison.

The emergence of liquid secondary markets for companies not big enough to IPO would be the founders' dream; suddenly the long term sustainability of the business would matter as much as numbers of potential acquirers and potential for aggressive growth.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#107

Post by blumkvist » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 10:34 AM UTC

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.

I think we can safely assume that the grass is green.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#108

Post by blumkvist » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 10:38 AM UTC

tomglindmeier wrote: post #22

prostoalex wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any significant round outside of seed would come with liquidation preference. CrunchBase says a total of $20.9 was raised, so if the final sale price was less then $20,900,001.00, there's likely no money left for common stock.

Interesting. I didn't know that. I understand that if expectations are not met there have to be consequences. But leaving the founders of a company with nothing while others earning money feels completely wrong.

What happened to this douche sounds completely right to me.

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#109

Post by SandB0x » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 11:17 AM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #82

SwellJoe wrote: post #42

I have very limited knowledge of this situation, but, I'm gonna pile on anyway: With that kind of money raised, the founders didn't get "nothing". They got a salary, probably a decent one, for however long they were running the thing. Which is more than many startup founders get out of businesses that fail. If they don't have personal debt, or didn't lose relationships or friendships, they came out ahead of many star…

VCs aren't assholes, generally, but their standard terms are a bad deal for founders, generally. I've thought about this a lot over the past 25 years. In the past I've seen VCs do really bad things (like force decisions that set the company back 18 months bad.) The problem is, when you get a "good" VC that doesn't force bad decisions on you ,the cost of the money, mostly in deal terms, is too damn high. And when you…

> Don't even get me started on founders vesting their shares. You build a company, you have sweat equity, but the VC wants to reset the vesting? Why ? You can't vote unvested shares. They will give you a song and dance about "what if a founder leaves?" Well, we covered that in our articles of incorporation because we're not idiots, but they will ignore that and insist that "all founders must vest all their shares". (this is more common on early VC deals.) That's straight up taking paid for (with equity) and earn shares and turning them into a class of potential shares. Nope Nope Nope. Give founders part of the option pool as an incentive, fine. But reseting is just setting you up to be sucker punched when they want to replace a founder (because they don't like how things are going and need a scapegoat, no matter that it's the worst thing for the business at that point. But Tada! All your shares you already earned are now vesting again! Look at that! Even thought the other founders don't want you out, you don't have enough votes!

I'm really interested in what you're saying but I can't understand what you mean in this paragraph. I'm not sure what part is your position and what part is meant as sarcasm. Can anyone spell it out for me? Thanks :)

Re: Sprinklr Acquires GetSatisfaction, Founders Get Nothing

#110

Post by Kliment » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 11:19 AM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #63

tomglindmeier wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I didn't know that. I understand that if expectations are not met there have to be consequences. But leaving the founders of a company with nothing while others earning money feels completely wrong.

>But leaving the founders of a company with nothing while others earning money feels completely wrong. Why? They founded a company which tanked. They made poor decisions along the way which led to said taking. They did it on someone else's dime. No one made money here, so why shouldn't the investors get some of the investment back?

Isn't the whole point of venture capital that you take on a large risk in return for a large potential payout. VC is called "risk capital" in a number of languages for a reason.