Airbnb Acqui-Hires Brian Pokorny And The Batch/DailyBooth Team

Airbnb Acqui-Hires Brian Pokorny And The Batch/DailyBooth Team(techcrunch.com)

51 points by Braasch 13 years ago | 7 comments

samarudge 13 years ago |

This isn't a particularly constructive comment, it's just something I've wanted to say for a while but not really had a chance.

I'm not a regular user of Batch, but Dailybooth is one of my favorite/most visited websites. I can't help but feel they don't really want it anymore, like they're just supporting it because they have to. I don't think there have been any updates to the code for about a year, 20% of the live-feed is spam and it goes through periods of being completely unavailable, the home feeds/notifications not updating and seems to have random 5xx server errors constantly. It still seems to have a reasonably active community but it's been mostly abandoned. I'm not sure if it's because they couldn't monetize it effectively, they don't have time/resources to maintain it constantly, or something else, with this (presumably talent) acquisition I wouldn't be surprised if it's been shut down within a few months.

Braasch 13 years ago | |

Batch has received some updates, but there's been a lack of new features & updates over the past 6 months, and I've stopped using it because very few people are using it.

I can't help but agree with you and think they'll be shutting down relatively soon; both have been maintained less and less, and I highly doubt Airbnb wants to let the team continue working on either of them.

jmathai 13 years ago |

I'm curious about these acquisitions. If DailyBooth raised $7M then how is an acqui-hire approached?

Is there contention with the investors or at this point is the business a lost cause anyway? Or do the two companies share investors and it works out as "shuffling" talent?

colinsidoti 13 years ago | |

There have been a number of articles about this. For some reason what pops to mind is: VC's dont really like it, Conway thinks it's good for entrepreneurs. (Who knows though, maybes there's a pretty good chance Conway is invested in both the acquirer and the acquired.)

From what I've heard, despite not liking it, VCs haven't done anything to protect themselves in the event of an acqui-hire. A lot of times the cash in an acqui-hire doesn't go to the company, but rather to the salaries of those being hired. So while a VC may have negotiated preference on the cash that results from on acquisition, they never see the cash from acqui-hire situations.

That said, I suspect it's hard for an entrepreneur to take a deal that screws their investors in good conscience, and they would make an effort to get their investors at least paid back (which still kinda screws them, but might keep things more amicable).

Edit: Regards to sharing investors, in this case they seem to share Sequoia, Conway (SV Angel), and YC, but there are a ton of others including Ignition (which led DailyBooth's A round) that aren't also invested in AirBNB.

brianbreslin 13 years ago | |

Is this an exchange of stock primarily? i.e. airbnb gives the original investors $20M in stock or something, and cashes the founders a bit of $? I'm curious how this would work as well.

jimboyoungblood 13 years ago | | |

typically the original investors get their cash back (no more, no less). there's no reason an acquiring company would want their stock in the hands of random investors they have no prior relationship with.

robryan 13 years ago |

I originally tried Batch but felt the overhead it added to sharing photos over just doing it on Facebook/Path etc just wasn't worth it. Similar to why I don't really use Instagram, although I'd be more likely to use Instagram.