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Twice

blog.aubrey.me

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Re: Twice

#21

Post by jusben1369 »

lmm wrote: post #20
rdl wrote: post #9

The genius here was Bill Nguyen turning a failing company and a pittance $11mm offer from one failing company (Nokia) into an $80-160mm buyout from a real company (Apple), essentially though hustle alone. But it's zero-sum genius. I can respect him for being good at playing a specific game, but it's not a game I want to play myself.

I struggle to even respect it. He ripped them off; the world would be better off without his "hustle".

"Ripped them off"? These acquirers didn't have the resources and faculty to make their own decisions? You "rip off" helpless people. These aren't helpless people.

Re: Twice

#22

Post by jusben1369 »

guptaneil wrote: post #16

The point of this post is to talk about Bill's hustling when selling Lala, which is a very interesting story. The author should have left the last word out to make a much more powerful story about Lala rather than changing the focus of the article to Apple's "genius," especially since there was no genius involved on Apple's part. Just good luck for Apple, and horrible luck for the Color team.

I disagree. I thought the last paragraph was great. Life is never a single event. Round 1 to Lala and their engineers. Round 2 to Apple. There'll be Round 3's!

Re: Twice

#23

Post by jtoeman »

aubreyjohnson wrote: post #2

The title of this is a little misleading as I don't really discuss anything about Apple acquiring Color. I just link to the rumor articles.

thanks for adding that - i read through it three times trying to find a link to page 2 or something. :)

Re: Twice

#24

Post by mikeryan »

lmm wrote: post #20
rdl wrote: post #9

The genius here was Bill Nguyen turning a failing company and a pittance $11mm offer from one failing company (Nokia) into an $80-160mm buyout from a real company (Apple), essentially though hustle alone. But it's zero-sum genius. I can respect him for being good at playing a specific game, but it's not a game I want to play myself.

I struggle to even respect it. He ripped them off; the world would be better off without his "hustle".

He ripped nobody off, he sold a company in the exact way you're supposed to sell a company or for that matter the exact way you sell anything with a limited supply. Heck thats how you sell a house.

Step 1. Find interested parties, Step 2. Get Bids. Step 3. Allow other interested parties to counter.

Thats it there's no scam here. Its not even genius its company selling 101. Everyone involved had the opportunity to do their due diligence. Instagram did the exact same thing turning a $500M Twitter offer into a $1B offer from Facebook.

Re: Twice

#25

Post by RandallBrown »

I miss Lala, at least the final streaming iteration. It had iTunes Match for FREE years ago. You would upload your library to Lala, they would decide what they already had and just let you stream that, then anything they didn't have would get uploaded. It was iTunes in the cloud. Their webapp was phenomenal, especially by 2009 standards.

I had big expectations for Lala after Apple bought them. I thought they might actually get a true iTunes in the cloud built.

Re: Twice

#26

Post by notahacker »

lmm wrote: post #20
rdl wrote: post #9

The genius here was Bill Nguyen turning a failing company and a pittance $11mm offer from one failing company (Nokia) into an $80-160mm buyout from a real company (Apple), essentially though hustle alone. But it's zero-sum genius. I can respect him for being good at playing a specific game, but it's not a game I want to play myself.

I struggle to even respect it. He ripped them off; the world would be better off without his "hustle".

Ripped off? Apple won what was effectively a sealed-bid auction: they paid a lot of money to beat Google (and Nokia, which was probably less of a big deal). They paid a lot of money for a real service to beat off real bids from real competitors, and to do so immediately. The fact they didn't realize how low Nokia and Google's initial offers were is down to Nguyen not being stupid enough to tell them.

If anyone got "ripped off" it was the venture capitalists who later threw $41 million at the "Facebook-killer" being developed by one of the few people in the Valley that had barely used Facebook. But again, they were sophisticated specialists who knew how to evaluate risk and do due diligence, so if they were so mesmerised by Bill's confidence in his ability (and his team's track record) they wanted to take a premature punt that size in an already-crowded space it's their own fault.

Re: Twice

#27

Post by ceworthington »

RandallBrown wrote: post #25

I miss Lala, at least the final streaming iteration. It had iTunes Match for FREE years ago. You would upload your library to Lala, they would decide what they already had and just let you stream that, then anything they didn't have would get uploaded. It was iTunes in the cloud. Their webapp was phenomenal, especially by 2009 standards. I had big expectations for Lala after Apple bought them. I thought they might ac…

+1 to this. I am on Rdio now for $10/mo, and I easily would have paid Lala the same monthly fee for their service.

I assume they were in bad shape because they had to pay every time someone streamed a song, and not enough of their users wound up paying them for streaming access. Too many loss leaders.

Re: Twice

#28

Post by gatsby »

Fascinating story.

Fast Company did a piece on Bill Nguyen about 18 months ago: (http://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-boy-bubble) and included an infographic on his track record:

http://infographics.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/bill-nguyen...

For a bunch of companies that have widely been considered failures in terms of product and number of users, he has had some unbelievable exits and financial successes.

Re: Twice

#29

Post by guptaneil »

jusben1369 wrote: post #22
guptaneil wrote: post #16

The point of this post is to talk about Bill's hustling when selling Lala, which is a very interesting story. The author should have left the last word out to make a much more powerful story about Lala rather than changing the focus of the article to Apple's "genius," especially since there was no genius involved on Apple's part. Just good luck for Apple, and horrible luck for the Color team.

I disagree. I thought the last paragraph was great. Life is never a single event. Round 1 to Lala and their engineers. Round 2 to Apple. There'll be Round 3's!

I agree, the last paragraph is great. My issue is with the last word. A better ending might've been something along the lines of "Paying twice cost less than paying once," and left out characterizing this fortuitous win as a "genius" strategy.

Re: Twice

#30

Post by alpb »

No mention of the Color in the article, I guess but that was a great story.
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