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Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#161

Post by andrewem »

patio11 wrote: post #159
gkop wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you write off just the exercise price or the fair market value at time of exercise?

Confirm this with your tax advisor, but FMV at exercise is your basis in later years (generally because the difference in FMV and strike will have caused you a taxable event). c.f. https://www.untracht.com/news-insights/vantagepoint-newslett... Edit: Consider the case where this were not treated as true. You're clearly not going to pay $2 strike, exercise at $5 ($3 of employment income due to the bargain element), se…

I'll note for conceptual understanding (by people who aren't patio11, who I'm sure understands this all far better than me) the general point that a gain or loss on the sale of a capital asset is how much money you got from selling it minus how much you "paid". More technically, how much you "paid" is called the basis, and you can do things that adjust the basis as patio11 noted above.

For general information on this topic see https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/capital-gains-and-losses-10-hel...

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#162

Post by paraschopra »

Dan, Paras from VWO here.

Congratulations for the acquisition. We've enjoyed competing with Optimizely over last the last 10 years, and certainly learned a lot in the process. Hopefully, that will continue even after the acquisition.

The way we look at things, experimentation as a market is certainly in an early phase. The more complex the world becomes, the more necessary experimentation becomes to understand what customers really want.

As an aside, it is true though that for experimentation to work, a company needs to be ready for it. Their culture needs to support being proven wrong and having patience to build momentum of wins over the long term. Any org with a short term horizon will likely see experimentation as a cost without corresponding returns. But companies that really see long term - think Amazon - ground themselves in experimentation.

Of course, not every company can be Amazon but our belief is that more companies will start realizing that there's no alternative to developing a culture of experimentation. This is why we're excited about the market. For us, at VWO, it still seems day 1 :)

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#164

Post by [deleted] »

richardFINEman wrote: post #118
whoisjuan wrote: post #5

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…

Optimize is not an incumbent but a challenger. Google Optimize came out years after Optimizely and is less featured and built by a smaller team. The main benefit to Optimize is that it's cheap.

[deleted]

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#165

Post by KingOfCoders »

richardfeynman wrote: post #19

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…

My impression is Optimizely never crossed the chasm. Huge following with VC funded startups and early stage startups but never crossed into "Google Analytics" territory where every company with a website was using it.

Slowing down users meant higher prices to sustain VC promised growth. Higher prices meant enterprise sales. And it went down from there.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#166

Post by porker »

mike_d wrote: post #155
tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a sort of general question about this narrative, which seems to apply to lots of startups that begin as self-service, developer-focused projects and end in enterprise hell. Is it not the case that these startups begin developer-facing, get market traction, are lavishly funded, and then discover that the self-service offering they've built simply can't satisfy the projections they've made to justify their valua…

Never dump your prosumer/developer/enthusiast base, no matter what any business expert tells you. Keep them going in parallel. CROs and VP of Sales types don't like the idea because they can't control the messaging and manage the sales funnel. But if you have people who genuinely love your product and will champion it internally, ignore these fools. Just keep delivering a quality product with value and if there is a…

This. Not least because some of us have invested effort in singing your praises, selling you to teams, and used our reputation to promote your business, indirectly benefiting because clients are happy.

I've been burned twice doing this; once with Fastly [0] and the second time with AppNeta APM, which they then dumped as it didn't fit with their "enterprise" portfolio.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073520

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#167

Post by porker »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #165
richardfeynman wrote: post #19

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…

My impression is Optimizely never crossed the chasm. Huge following with VC funded startups and early stage startups but never crossed into "Google Analytics" territory where every company with a website was using it. Slowing down users meant higher prices to sustain VC promised growth. Higher prices meant enterprise sales. And it went down from there.

I'd say in the early days they were on the way to getting that mindshare. I had SME clients using them, where VWO was cheaper but they didn't like using VWO.

When Optimizely hiked their prices and lost the smallest plan, all these clients went elsewhere. I'm sure their contribution was noise to Optimizely's turnover, but the awareness of what was possible with A/B testing and the way they'd tell their friends about Optimizely and what they'd just done on their website - you couldn't buy that exposure.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#168

Post by pbowyer »

dsiroker wrote: post #123
worldsoup wrote: post #80

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…

Over the years I A/B tested each of my interview questions in order to better measure what I was looking for. It sounds like you might have been asked an early version of one of the questions I used to ask so sorry you didn't get the "optimized" version. (there was a big difference in responses between only 3 years and 10 years to live) Also, to clarify, I used to end my interviews with TWO questions: (1) if you had…

> The only "wrong" answer to these question was when someone would answer YES to the second question after clearly answering something completely different to the first one. For example, if someone would say travel the world to #1 and yes to #2.

That is a strange assumption.

My answers to #1 and #2 would have been contradictory to you, but with 10 years to live I would see working at Optimizely for 3-5, then doing what I wanted to do for 7-5 years a great tradeoff.

Would I have said that in answer to #1? No. I'd have said "Travel and more time with friends and family", while knowing full-well I had to work, or I would starve.

Would I have said it in answer to #2? Perhaps, but unlikely.

What was the success rate with these two questions?

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#169

Post by horseluvvaslim »

richardfeynman wrote: post #19

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…

Worth noting that Optimizely is the A/B testing tool of choice for donaldjtrump.com.
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