How much twitter paid for posterous

Most consumers now expect poor service and I'd wager that has, to some degree, had an influence on purchasing decisions. I totally understand where you're coming from, but I suspect that what's happening here is that team acquisitions provide vivid examples and, in particular, long agonizing will-they won't-they suspenses about killing off the service that create an easy narrative for something that is always happening all the time anyways.

It just is risky to do business with startups. If a company is simply shutting down, there's some sympathy for the team and it's known that the service will stop.

With a talent acquisition, nobody really knows what's going to happen to the service maybe even the founders don't know and that extra level of uncertainty is off-putting. It definitely makes for a more wrenching story, but it's hard for me to see how failing outright is somehow better than selling the team and keeping the service alive for more months.

Perhaps it's because acquired companies tend to be more useful and more popular than companies that fail. So the cumulative disruption is greater for the acquihires than for the failures. Or in other words, I would sacrifice many many startups to get EtherPad back again. Hard to believe that a team that knows it will be able to be acquihired won't be phoning it in and slacking off.

Same as people do when they have taken finals and know that grades don't matter anymore. If you know failure is at the end and not some big prize and do over you will naturally try harder. Not trying to suggest either is better. Just thinking through why people including me might react to them differently. You don't "do business with startups". You do business with other businesses, and expect them to be serious about their propositions.

You can't will away the extra risks carried by immature businesses. This isn't a moral issue. Some companies mature and stabilize around viable businesses; most don't. In semiconductor startups, you sometimes need to secure "second source" agreements with a bigger business that could be your eventual acquirer that assures they'll takeover manufacture your existing silicon if they go down.

In our case we had a second-source partner until our acquisition that had "rebadged" parts available. It was annoying, but it's sometimes the only way for a startup to sell to big multi-million dollar customers.

What do you think would happen most of the time if these acquihires didn't happen? The companies would just go out of business and the services would be shut down anyway. One alternative would be for these startups to scrimp and struggle for a long time on Ramen Profitability, maintaining their services while they sought to expand, find a business model, open up new veins while continuing the old, perhaps providing a graceful upgrade into the new portfolio.

I'm with the GP poster -while I probably would do the same thing in an acquihire situation, it does start to somewhat poison the well over time for newer startups. While I love Path to bits - I have zero clue what their business model will be, and wonder what will happen to all my carefully journaled "moments" if Path gets acquhired sometime in the future. I don't think you really need to worry about Path being acquihired.

Given the people involved, and the fact that they already turned down a reported million acquihire offer from Google, I don't really expect Path to go that route. Loopt once had a m valuation, and then sold for 43m, one of these days Why couldn't Path or anyone go down the same route? Because an acquihire doesn't have a positive effect on Dave Morin's life.

He's back at a big company again, and he's already filthy rich so what's a few more millions? And frees up his time to start up another idea that he thinks has a lot more chance of success.

Assuming he'll forever be in that position. Path actually did what you said, supposedly. Dave Morin reportedly paid the staff through some rough times, since then they came out of it better with a new product release.

Their team is very experienced and doubt they'd do that kind of move. Also as someone else said they've turned down very large offers. How about rsync. Or just FTP it to any of a thousand cheap webhosts?

Don't write off sbierwagen's comment as flippant. For this kind of thing, this will be more and more the future. I think. At first you'd only get people who are aware of the user-as-a-product issue with Google and other free providers, but as those providers are more widely recognized as problematic, the market will increase.

Are you thinking of a paid service? Because if you're describing a free service, it doesn't sound like much of a business proposition. And if you're describing a paid service, then I don't see how the storage provider angle is relevant.

Wait, why do you say that? Is there an assumption that startups don't have a workable business model? Sure some startups have workable business models. Even posterous had a workable business model if they had been able to beat tumblr. The problem for the companies getting acqui-hired isn't generally a lack of business model.

It's a failure to succeed in executing on that model so acqui-hire is all they have left. Yeah, just like Facebook; I don't know if you have heard of it. It's not successful companies like Facebook that get acqui-hired.

It's the unsuccessful ones like Posterous. I don't think it's just a long term effect. I've already experienced this attitude from potential customers: "So what happens when you guys get aquired and shut this product down" "We don't plan to, it makes money and we're growing" "If you keep growing one of the big players will get worried or interested or both and make you an offer you'd have to be stupid not to take" It makes sense, the aqui-hire doesn't just get you a proven team with known talent, it removes a potential competitor that might disrupt the status quo.

There's a reason it's happening so often and it's because it's great business. But as a trend it's certainly going to make it harder to get customers for startups that aren't based on creating a fad-ish service for consumers but are providing services people consider important.

If this is ever a customer objection that actually prevents a deal, the prospect probably just does not want your service that badly and is reaching for an excuse to not sign. I certainly think that's a possibility but I think you're overstating how much they are rationalizing in your analysis.

There is certainly an extra lack of confidence in startups because of the "find a big exit! As if it wasn't hard enough as a startup to attract customers, this perception is certainly not helping. No it doesn't errode confidence, most customers are not part of the startup ecosystem.

Second Posterous has few customers compared to users, but well paying ones like Coca-Cola, I'm sure they will be taken care of. If you have a product worth buying your customers will not question how long you've been around. Some will but there are enough that won't. If you're really worried about it, buy an off the shelf company with updated filings, it's not very difficult to find a company 3 or 4 years old.

If you've got the cash you could even buy a publicly listed shell. Even NYSE shells come up now and then but those are very pricey. But honestly, unless you're selling items in the thousands of dollars per month range no one is going to pull your corporate charter. Out of all the issues bootstrapped startups face, I really don't think "other startups may be acqui-hired and poison our well.

The vast majority of startups that fail do so because they poison their own well. It's endemic to the web. Just look at GeoCities. Or, maybe you entrusted all your medical records to Google Health? The web is built for innovation, not longevity. I agree with you but this is really a business issue not a startup issue. Apple killed newton, clones, xserve and other products. I'm sure you can think of more. Sun killed cobalt servers.

GM killed Oldsmobile, Pontiac etc. Survival of the fittest. All the warm fuzzy folksy stuff that you don't see in traditional business - you know things like a dog at the office or free food means very little in the end.

They will do what they need to do to survive. The difference is a most hardware is owned on premises and Sun can't simply walk in your server closet and yank it out, and b these companies usually provide support for hardware for a few years after the product is shelved. With web startups, you get at best an email with 90 days notice. You're right with hardware there are end of life notices that extend for several years. And even third parties that support the equipment. Of course the software or OS might be a different story.

But more importantly there is an ongoing concern that has a reputation not the same with an entire company folding and the product killed is just a part of many products that are offered. And of course they are charging for something whereas in the case of web startups what they are giving you is free.

So there is no "consideration" and as a result I would think they are not subject to any class action lawsuits. How can you sue for something you didn't pay for? It also has to have some effect on lowering the costs to launching a new startup by limiting the downside risk, particularly to technical talent.

Surely some people have though "Sure, I have a good job now, but if it doesn't work out we'll just get acqui-hired by the big guys in 18 months, so why not? As for the effect this has on other start-ups, I think there are two interconnected issues here, one on the buyer side and one on the seller side. You could say that angel investment is that model - the problem is that VCs want to invest in many companies, and it's sometimes hard to reject their offer.

Once you do take their money, it's hard justifying slow growth and good though less-than-stellar success, and in that case, both the company and its users are "doomed". And why do VCs want to invest in so many companies? I think they have to invest because they have so much money, they can't accurately identify the stellar companies well, obviously , and acquisitions give them a good enough ROI to continue doing what they're doing. Early adopters are always jumping to the next thing anyway.

What are the chances you will still want to use a given web service 5 years down the line? All in all I think this concern is more than outweighed by the fact that startups offer tighter and more inspired new products than established players. What are you gonna do, just not use any products? Early adopters yeah. But consumers used Kodak for years or so before changing. Average people hate data migrations.

It also has the profoundly sad impact of occupying entrepreneurs and investors who could be inventing job creation machines. Totally agree. I liked posterous. I've also wondered out loud whether a similar thing will happen to workflowy as well, which I also love. Nothing against the guys, they're just optimizing, but it sucks to be on the receiving end. Is web 4. Nothing on the web should be construed as permanent.

It's a risk everyone has to analyse when choosing third-party vendors GOOG now charges for Maps, for example, and look how many people are revamping their apps to not use them. I agree. You can't really criticize someone for selling, maybe they had to do it. But it really does make you pause the next time you decide to commit to a new company.

Today I got reminders in my email about how SimpleGeo and IndexTank will "sunset" their services within the next month after their acquisitions last year. I knew it was coming, but after having to spend all this time removing them from my app, I'll be a little more wary going forward of using third parties in the things that I do.

I think you're right, but aren't these acqusitions transparent to most of these customers? Posterous stays the same brand for a huge portion of its userbase. I'm assuming possibly incorrectly that Posterous shuts down their blog system within a year. Software—however niche, crappy, or "beta"—gets used for a lot longer than developers realize. Launched in , Posterous -- like its archrival Tumblr -- pioneered the "microblogging" space. Its specialty is content that's longer than a tweet but shorter than a traditional blog post.

The services are especially good for sharing photos, videos, quotes and other multimedia snippets. Posterous' staff of 21 previously worked out of a San Francisco headquarters just two miles from Twitter's home base. They joined Twitter's staff this week. Is Twitter looking to venture beyond its famous character limit, into the broader microblogging world?

The early signs are no. Twitter is keeping Posterous up and running, at least for the time being, but its staff is being redeployed on other projects.

He is joining Twitter as a product manager, reporting to Twitter product chief Satya Patel, and will be working "to make Twitter an even more awesome product," he wrote. And while there's little known about what will change as the result of the acquisition Posterous says "Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption" , it does ratchet down some of the logic for why Twitter would want to buy one of those competing blogging platforms. Also unknown is how much the Posterous investors will get from the deal.

No terms were disclosed. But a quick glance at the Quantcast traffic chart show that Posterous has not taken off the same way Twitter and Tumblr has -- and even recent social media darling Pinterest has shown some signs of catching up, at least in Quantcast's estimates.

The numbers for Tumblr and Twitter are both indirectly measured estimates. As for what Twitter plans to use Posterous for, it's a total mystery.