(co-founder of Optimizely here)
HUGE thank you to YC and the entire HN community for all their support over the years. It was almost ten years ago that we launched here on HN. [1]
Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
31–40 of 203 posts
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#32I 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…
Speaking as a customer, it feels like this is exactly what is happening to Mode Analytics right now.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#33This 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…
I was always very impressed by their office on the end of New Montgomery Street in the heart of Downtown San Francisco. You could see some very swaggy kitchens and open office space through their floor to ceiling windows on the ground floor. I was jealous for some of the employees who worked there. Maybe this is ad hominem, but it seems to me they must've raised a lot of money to prioritize that kind of setting, like…
There were a bunch of startups right there. From the fact that we rented commercial space there (like a minute's walk away), I know that if they leased before 2012 it was going to be a sweet deal. I don't remember any of the numbers now but I recall that if I could get that deal today I'd take it in a heartbeat, even if just CPI adjusted. I think we had just under 10k sq. ft.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#34I hope the founder exited well. I remember working with him at Google when he was the PM for Google Optimizer. Nice guy.
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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#35Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#36There's never been a better time to look at Webtrends Optimize. In the industry for 20+ years, now independently owned. Strongest free tier on the market, best services team, best rated satisfaction. Prices haven't changed in 10 years, with cheaper offerings opening up.
Agencies have been hopping over to us for the last 12 months - everything I've read below rings true with what I'm hearing elsewhere.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#37I 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…
Why Stripe will likely win: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211
Continuing self-service while expanding "up market" into the enterprise. If AWS can be self-service, pretty much any service can be.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#38I used to work two desks over from Dan at the Obama campaign in Chicago in 2007, when he was developing and testing an early proof of concept of what would become Optimizely. He was able to increase fundraising performance significantly by doing (what would now be considered simple) A/B tests. He's sharp and tenacious, identified a market ahead of its time and invented a new product category.
Whether or not this is a "good" exit, it's a great accomplishment for Dan and the team and can't wait to see what they do next!
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#39I 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 wonder how Google Optimize factors into this. Provided its a free service, it seems like Optimizely may have had trouble offering something unique to the self-serve market over something that is completely free. Similar to how it seems Dropbox has less to differentiate itself from Google Drive and other similar services these days.
I think Google is less of a threat than many believe because Google products have to address a Google-sized market which leaves tremendous room for competitors. If you're going to go straight up against Google then, sure, you're going to get clobbered.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#40I 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…
Why Stripe will likely win: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211 Continuing self-service while expanding "up market" into the enterprise. If AWS can be self-service, pretty much any service can be.
This is different, both Stripe and AWS users are developers.
I don't know how you can be so sure that Stripe will win, Adyen is already on the enterprise space, and they are a bigger company than Stripe.
> Continuing self-service while expanding "up market" into the enterprise.
Things are more complex than a sentence, the whole company needs to operate differently https://blog.luap.info/why-most-saas-companies-cant-be-succe...