Props to Randall on all the hard work building Vidpresso over the years - and congrats on the exit!
...Or most scheming. Obviously his strategy worked out for him. Truly nice people don't care about making money so they wouldn't apply to Y Combinator to begin with.
I get it. You get tired of a product, it doesn't do as well as you hope, but you still want to get acquihired and make sure your hardworking engineers don't end up on the street. Nonetheless, its frustrating when evaluating a startup's product and use 'longevity' as a factor.
Hopefully they all just made a whole bunch of money.
A personal note to the team, as Facebook is very much a manage-your-own-journey company: I would strongly recommend you look into professional application, as in, Workplace.
A. that means a free trip to London for you, which is always cool. You get to meet more people with whom to joke: “It’s in the middle of a swamp! — I know — Why?! – I don’t know.”
B. there are tons of applications, roughly empowering internal equivalent to Coursera. Any solution that I know about (and it’s alas a lot: worked for 20+ companies) is bad, expensive, dysfunctional and impractical.
Getting people to use video to document their workflow, think about edge-cases, etc. is the most impactful thing I can imagine because it introduces billions into structured logic in their tasks, allows them to step from code-as-Excel-spreadsheet into code-as-a-system.
Workplace is already teaching a lot of businesses to be open, transparent, interest-driven, to record interaction for later use without closely-defined audience, etc. That happens a lot through Workplace videos — in spite of that tool being very feature-poor. Adding editing, slide-control and later something closer to choose-your-own-adventure, tests, etc. that would be incredible.
I hope you can demonstrate that there is a lot of great things to be done with interactive videos.
1. Build a lasting private business (Mailchimp) 2. Go public (Facebook) 3. Get acquired (Instagram)
Obviously, I'm ball-parking here, but 99% of startups with "successful" outcomes happen via acquisition. For the vast majority of most startups, acquisition is the only viable outcome other than failure.
Edit: thought about St. Jude’s hospital but it depends on donations.
Not a very good heuristic, people always find ways to profit from so-called 'non-profits'.
When I worked at Mashable and Facebook was paying us to make a certain amount of Facebook Live content a month (a practice Facebook started in mid-w2016 and stopped in mid-2017, which was painful for the media companies that had hired out teams to produce that content), we used Vidpresso to make the broadcasts look more professional, with updated lower-thirds, easy multi-camera switches, pre-recorded playback via Tricaster, etc. I don’t remember if we used Vidpresso at Gawker/Gizmodo Media Group or not, but the software was definitely powerful for live broadcasts.
IIRC, Vidpresso was one of the first solutions to get certified to use the various Facebook Live APIs and it really changed what types of video we were able to produce.
I’ve known Randall a long time and am thrilled for him and his team that they could make this exit. This is the sort of thing Facebook should be offering its larger media customers.
I know that we're in the middle of an awakening of sorts about personal data, but that doesn't negate the value that services like Facebook can offer. I may be naive, but I think this is a step in the right direction.
congrats to you and the team
As long as the SV giants have that global scale and keep demonstrating that they value engineers, I don’t think they’ll have trouble hiring.
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-45-the-not-so-ben...
You would be surprised how this works.
People who are accepted into Y Combinator know how to keep their eye on the ball; if they move a muscle, it is only to catch the ball. So yeah, I think he was just pretending to be nice.
I applied / was accepted into Y Combinator, therefore I "know how to keep my eye on the ball" and was the "most scheming." I also care a lot about money because "Truly nice people don't care about making money so they wouldn't apply to Y Combinator to begin with."
Did you ever think the goal of my application to y combinator, and subsequent acquisition by fb, were actually not driven by money, but by the vision of making video more like HTML... a vision from which i've been proceeding on since 2008? Money is great and good and everything, but seriously, I don't care about money. My real goal is to make my vision happen... money is a complete afterthought.
I realize this is casting pearls before swine, but seriously, you should realize sometimes people can be genuinely nice, and have genuinely good outcomes, without being scheming. In fact, PG wrote a whole essay about an email I once sent him, after I worried about not being scheming enough.
http://paulgraham.com/safe.html
Just saying. Maybe people are nice... and not all yc applicants care about money.
Facebook is a vehicle for said spam, disguised as a social network. Yes, it has to offer some value, otherwise no one would stare at the ads.
Putting Facebook and advertising in charge of providing facts and information is a stupefyingly bad idea. It's already shown that it can't provide either.
And if they really want to do it, then they should be regulated.
Facebook doesn't provide the information, they provide a platform and tools for anybody to be a publisher. Anything they can do to improve the platform is a good idea.
All this is to say: Facebook has done a great thing by bringing Randall and co. on board and should continue to bring new ideas and talent in, through whatever means they can.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/facebook-shutters-its-pars...
If Facebook buys the company's IP but not the company itself, and the company pays out that cash in dividends and winds down operations, people could get paid quite different amounts than if Facebook had purchased all of their outstanding stock outright.
Boom solved.
So that would be a 'no' to jjeaf's question then.
[cricket] ...
[pavlov questions the meaning of his/her work] ...
[cricket]
Video is traditionally ad supported — after all, nobody ever paid for broadcast TV. But preroll/midroll ads that interrupt content don’t work well in live online video. Interactivity offers potential new avenues to sell people stuff that they might actually want. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s worth exploring.
Yes I was brash and a bit sardonic, but I was not trying to put anyone down. I should have phrased that more encouragingly and less mockingly. Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, you're not killing baby seals or helping give people cancer. You're just working for the company that surveils a large part of humanity, tries to get them addicted to tapping stuff, deceives them into buying stuff, "accidentally" gets involved into election manipulation, etc. They're also working hard at getting their hands on medical and banking information.
All around great guys, those Facebook employees.
My message was too inflammatory and I have to rethink my approach to not run afoul of the rules. This has to be said though: a large reason people think it's ok to work for companies like Facebook is because there's almost no social pressure against it, including here.