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EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

uncrunched.com

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Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#51

Post by suking »

achompas wrote: post #39
suking wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No freaking kidding - only thing I saw the founder do was interview people on TC. Never heard anyone mention hunch outside of those interviews. What is ebay thinking?

Apple bought the tech behind Siri for $200m in 2010. MS bought Powerset (and their NLP-type search engine) for $100m in 2008. They also bought Farecast (travel pricing forecasting) for $75-115m in 2008. Hunch for $80m is a steal , as far as talent acquisitions go. EDIT: I'm not sure if they were product or talent acquisitions, but does it really matter? All companies listed above obtained state-of-the-art algorithms…

Everything you just listed wasn't for talent - it was for products... try again.

Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#52

Post by hnalien »

achompas wrote: post #36
AznHisoka wrote: post #9

Wow, this is like a knight in a white horse for Hunch.. I seriously doubt they were making any profit... This sounds like a talent acquisition. I mean this is ridiculous... but it goes to show you.. you gotta show up for the game (the startup game, I mean) to win it... $80 m for a site that doesn't even get 1 million uniques (per Compete) a month is a STEAL. I mean.. seriously, everyone who has a CS background should…

This sounds like a talent acquisition. I would agree, and it's a damn good talent acquisition. Hunch's team is made almost exclusively of engineers who (a) went to some of the best CS programs in the world (CMU, MIT, Stanford), and (b) really really really know their shit (just have a 5-minute convo with one of them). Here in NY, Hunch had a reputation for opportunistic hiring. They had lots of funding and an incredi…

Would anyone happen to know how much 'exit bonus' these MIT/Stanford CS Grads get once a company is sold?

40% of them will start their own companies once their non-competes expire.

Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#53

Post by nir »

achompas wrote: post #36
AznHisoka wrote: post #9

Wow, this is like a knight in a white horse for Hunch.. I seriously doubt they were making any profit... This sounds like a talent acquisition. I mean this is ridiculous... but it goes to show you.. you gotta show up for the game (the startup game, I mean) to win it... $80 m for a site that doesn't even get 1 million uniques (per Compete) a month is a STEAL. I mean.. seriously, everyone who has a CS background should…

This sounds like a talent acquisition. I would agree, and it's a damn good talent acquisition. Hunch's team is made almost exclusively of engineers who (a) went to some of the best CS programs in the world (CMU, MIT, Stanford), and (b) really really really know their shit (just have a 5-minute convo with one of them). Here in NY, Hunch had a reputation for opportunistic hiring. They had lots of funding and an incredi…

There's really almost no such thing as talent acquisition , IMHO:

1. No dev is worth $1m. Their skills may generate as much and more, but only in a specific context. Being great at catching a football is worth $50m in context of the NFL, $0 without it.

2. You can't really buy talent. At best, you can keep it, working at 1/2 of its ability, until fully vested and moves on. Alternately, eBay could create an environment as challenging and attractive as Hunch - but (a) by definition, it's almost impossible and (b) if you could pull it off, you could hire the similar talent for much less than $80m.

Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#54

Post by jkaljundi »

movingahead wrote: post #34
jkaljundi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hunch was always more of an API company than a destination site.

Can you name some companies which were using its API? Their developer site doesn't take any names.

What I meant was the goal of the company was to build technology and license that via an API, not become a destination site.

Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#56

Post by achompas »

suking wrote: post #51
achompas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple bought the tech behind Siri for $200m in 2010. MS bought Powerset (and their NLP-type search engine) for $100m in 2008. They also bought Farecast (travel pricing forecasting) for $75-115m in 2008. Hunch for $80m is a steal , as far as talent acquisitions go. EDIT: I'm not sure if they were product or talent acquisitions, but does it really matter? All companies listed above obtained state-of-the-art algorithms…

Everything you just listed wasn't for talent - it was for products... try again.

In all cases, those companies got the algorithms + the team that developed them. Are we really debating the difference? Or were you sitting in MS/Apple/eBay's boardroom?

Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#57

Post by keiferski »

achompas wrote: post #37
arturadib wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone who has a CS background should just start something on the side if a deal like this is possible Chris Dixon is a veteran investor and entrepreneur, with enormous visibility in the tech world. Contacts with potential acquirers are a non-issue for him. A poor CS fellow could have created a version of Hunch that was 100x better and they still would have 1,000x less of an exit opportunity as compared to any st…

Agreed, this is completely absurd. Say what you will about Chris Dixon (zomg he doesn't code, wtf!!!!!111), but the engineering team at Hunch is second-to-none. Grandparent makes it sound like Dixon pulled this off in his spare time. He assembled a team of A-level engineers, then secured millions in funding so they could develop an awesome recommendation engine with almost no clear revenue stream. I challenge anyone…

In what universe is starting a company with no clear revenue stream a good thing?

Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#58

Post by pepdek »

There is a great play around the collection of data outside of just social space. Hunch has done a great job aggregating this data via a social means and displaying the data to the masses in an appealing way to drive more people towards their "recommendation" engine. I work for a site called Ranker and we're focused on a similar data play with much greater focus on SEO.

* http://www.ranker.com/

Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#59

Post by bproper »

Here's an interview with Chris Dixon on the Ebay purchase.

eBay is an interesting challenge because so many of the listings don't have metadata like product IDs.

The work Hunch has been doing on the open web is a good fit for this kind of unstructured data.

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/21/chris-dixon-ebay-hunch/

Re: EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

#60

Post by AznHisoka »

hello_moto wrote: post #49
achompas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this is completely absurd. Say what you will about Chris Dixon (zomg he doesn't code, wtf!!!!!111), but the engineering team at Hunch is second-to-none. Grandparent makes it sound like Dixon pulled this off in his spare time. He assembled a team of A-level engineers, then secured millions in funding so they could develop an awesome recommendation engine with almost no clear revenue stream. I challenge anyone…

I think we need to move away from all the nonsense of "A-level engineers" or superstar developers and so and so and so. Carl Henderson of Flickr fame looked like an A-level engineer back then (especially with his O'reilly book) yet some of the Flickr engineers baffled when they saw the Flickr codebase. Sometime it's all smoke and marketing hype.

agreed. ooh.. a recommendation engine backed by semantic cloud-based peer to peer infrastructure... for all we know, it could just be aggregating data from twitter and seeing whether the word "good" or bad appeared more often to decide whether to aggregate it.
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