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Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

blog.backtype.com

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

#21

Old readwriteweb article "Secrets of BackType's Data Engineers - How do three guys with only seed funding process 100 million msgs a day?" http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/secrets-of-backtype... HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097926 I am not a Clojure fan, but I found BackType engineer Nathan Marz's fusion of Datalog, Clojure and Hadoop to create Cascalog very impressive, and was looking f…

Given Twitter's history with Open Source, I'm guessing we'll still see Storm.

Re: Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

#23
I don't get it. Are startups now just a new resume? How are BackType users supposed to react to this? How are users supposed to trust other API startups if they can just get the rug pulled out from them like this?

I'm happy for the team, but is there not any way they could have transitioned the project to other developers and still joined twitter fulltime?

Re: Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

#24
post #2

[ YC08 ] BackType has raised a total of $1.32m according to http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype No speculation as to the size of the acquisition, but I guess anything between $10-100m is possible, which would give YC a return of about 3% (6% adjusted down to 70% twice) of that, or somewhere between $300k and $3m? "YCombinator: turning $15k into $300k in 3 years" Not bad. Edit: This is based on the idea that Ba…

Two thoughts:

Quantcast/Compete is almost no relationship to reality when you are talking about b2b startups or startups with sub-10M/month uniques. They are wrong in magnitude and growth trends as often as they are right, in my experience.

Also, if an investor DID block a sale, that fact would come up any time they were competing to fund future YC companies, so it probably wouldn't be worth it for an investor to do that... Yet another value that YC provides.

Re: Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

#25

I don't get it. Are startups now just a new resume? How are BackType users supposed to react to this? How are users supposed to trust other API startups if they can just get the rug pulled out from them like this? I'm happy for the team, but is there not any way they could have transitioned the project to other developers and still joined twitter fulltime?

Start-ups are businesses. They make money for their investors and founders. Handing off the code sounds like hippie poppycock to me. I suppose they can do it if they want to, but they don't have to.

Re: Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

#26
post #11

A) Congratulations to the BackType team! I wonder if they're the first Clojure-heavy startup to be acquired. It will be interesting to see what happens to their technology stack after a couple of years. B) Does this impact the open-sourcing of Storm?

Velocitude got acquired too by Akamai.

Re: Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

#27
post #2

[ YC08 ] BackType has raised a total of $1.32m according to http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype No speculation as to the size of the acquisition, but I guess anything between $10-100m is possible, which would give YC a return of about 3% (6% adjusted down to 70% twice) of that, or somewhere between $300k and $3m? "YCombinator: turning $15k into $300k in 3 years" Not bad. Edit: This is based on the idea that Ba…

I've been told by people close to the company that it was in the $50-100 million range. Given how aggressive the Backtype guys are, this doesn't shock me at all.

$100 mil split three ways is quite a prize.

Re: Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

#28
post #27
post #2

[ YC08 ] BackType has raised a total of $1.32m according to http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype No speculation as to the size of the acquisition, but I guess anything between $10-100m is possible, which would give YC a return of about 3% (6% adjusted down to 70% twice) of that, or somewhere between $300k and $3m? "YCombinator: turning $15k into $300k in 3 years" Not bad. Edit: This is based on the idea that Ba…

I've been told by people close to the company that it was in the $50-100 million range. Given how aggressive the Backtype guys are, this doesn't shock me at all. $100 mil split three ways is quite a prize.

Interesting. Will we see a number if it was $50-100M in stock/cash - at what point do companies need to file with the SEC (or does Twitter not need to file since its still private?) I'm assuming it was at least partially stock, as Backtype investor Paige Craig's tweet suggests (http://twitter.com/#!/paigecraig/status/88304617397563392).

Re: Twitter acquires BackType (YC S08)

#29

Old readwriteweb article "Secrets of BackType's Data Engineers - How do three guys with only seed funding process 100 million msgs a day?" http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/secrets-of-backtype... HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097926 I am not a Clojure fan, but I found BackType engineer Nathan Marz's fusion of Datalog, Clojure and Hadoop to create Cascalog very impressive, and was looking f…

I enjoyed reading about Nathan's work as well. He was the only team member I knew of.
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