Massive web corporations flush with stock market cash acquired startups for billions of dollars, like rich brats that wanted a cool new toy, but then quickly got tired of it and threw it away. And in the end, we lost a lot of great ideas, companies, and user content that would have otherwise prospered.
Why did Bezos buy it then? Pretty sure there was at least an idea to have it add value. Getting sick and tired of billionaires destroying the internet.
Destroying communities and history isn't a great look. I'd like corps to be held to some sort of clause where they have to do something with their acquisitions or give it back to the people that are actively using it. Imagine someone bought Craigslist or Wikipedia and just shut it down.
It's so much effort to get a community like DPreview back, it's probably not going to happen. Some are trying and it's just not it.
Where a legacy Internet behemoth mistakenly clicks "Buy It Now" on a startup for eleventy billion dollars during some drug-and-drink fueled bender and then wakes up the next day and offloads it to some rando on Twitter for whatever they have lying around in their PayPal balance.
Exactly what I came to post. Where is the part where he wasted money on the domain? If he had bought startup-deals.com for $500k that would be a waste. What he has now is a prime piece of very valuable real estate that is currently occupied by a company that is going out of business. I'm sure lots of startups that get shut down wish they had an asset like this left over at the end instead of just a whole bunch of code and some email addresses.
He didn't started a company anyway. Selling old clothes and old toys in ebay doesn't make us a company, does it ?! What if we sold $200k worth in old toys ?! Paypal would take our money anyway...
Reminds me of a time I saw Craig of Craig's List on a forum in the mid 2000s. People asked him why he didn't put ads on the Craigs List. With negligible effort his company could profit hugely.
He politely pointed out that most of the companies that tried to maximize profit that way went bankrupt in the recession. Meanwhile his company was chugging along, free to do what it wanted, delivering a product its customers loved to a global audience with minimal staff, costs, or conflicts of interest.
People don't give you money for nothing.
Note to the original blogger, statements like "Capitalism won, try it," when referring to one of the most successful projects on the net, don't make them look bad. They make you look like you missed something. But that's just my perspective.
That STILL didn't stop them from being bought out...
I wonder how the poo-pooing of anything that isn't a $10m+ funding or $1bn+ market cap business on sites like HN encourages people to think "well, hey, perhaps I should go join a business like that if mine can't be."
Worlds shittiest founder and less than the founders of Friendster and Geocieties. And, way less than AOL, which was bargained for $360B illion to Time Warner. It's worth noting that purchasing users that intersect with Instagram (with 50M MAUs) with cheap stock is not a business strategy.
Hipmunk was a head scratcher from day one and it's purchase made no sense except in light of who their founder was. Buying hipmunk was a play to get close to Reddit.
To those that have, everything will be given, to those with nothing, everything will be taken away.
Congrats to Steve for his second big money grab. Next he should start and sell an Amazon clone!
If genuine this amounts to purchasing stolen goods, buyer beware. Not that at $10M I think there'll be any takers.
As always there is likely another side to this story and if you're a US buyer of this batch of stuff you're probably going to be dealing with that aspect of the sale.
The way I read this is: founder got screwed, founder uses ebay to put the pressure on his former employer to see if he can get compensation by threatening to expose the crown jewels of the company which he developed.
On another level, this story is just like any other minority shareholder dispute and founders should definitely take a warning from this.
It is relatively easy to screw a minority shareholder, even a founder, if everybody else colludes. This can happen and it does happen, hell, it happened to me. If you're technically savvy but not business savvy you might as well settle for a fat salary in many cases, unless there is ample paperwork to document your position and sufficient trust between you and your partners.
I wouldn't touch this auction with a 10' pole, but there might be someone out there that takes the bait and thinks that this is peanuts for the goods from a counter-intelligence perspective.
To create a competing product based on this data would be a very stupid move and at that price I think you could do a lot better by doing it again with today's tech.
Essentially he is saying: my 10% of the company is worth 10 million dollars (or more) and that alone might be an indication of the kind of thing that lies at the heart of the conflict.
I hope the poster finds a way to fund his lawsuit in a less controversial way, if only because he's selling some of the evidence that he'll need in order to win it and because he's opening himself up to a substantial counter-claim and actively helps the opposition with an own goal.
If the poster of the ebay auction reads this: retract this auction, get a lawyer, if possible on a contingency basis but at least for a few hours (which you should be able to afford out of pocket) to research the legality of your position. If a lawyer will sign off on this action in writing then go for it. But I doubt that will happen. Hint: a minor shareholder does not have the right to pre-emptively strike at the company based on the outcome of a lawsuit that still has to be fought. It is very well possible that when the dust settles that you'll own the assets of the company but until then this stuff is company property and you as a shareholder are acting against the interests of that company and probably against the terms of your employment contract. That's a (very) bad spot to be in and it may very well annul any and all rights that you still have or cause the tide to turn against you from having the moral high-ground to becoming the defendant.
I like how she skipped the part where one of the requirements was: found a company during the dotcom explosion and sell out before it crashes.
Zip2 would've been a complete bust in 2003, and he wouldn't have had the funds to move on to his subsequent ventures. The guy obviously has a lot of great ides, but lots of people have great ideas. Without the financial backing... good luck.
You can buy hardware, trademarks, and DNS, and stuff.
YOU CANNOT BUY COMMUNITY.
YOU CANNOT BUY GOODWILL.
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