Got a Tech Startup? Google is NO Angel
Is Google’s newest role really “Venture Capitalist”?
Paul Graham (in)famously touts a Google buyout as a best of breed rapid fire exit for barely hatched hacker dreams, and Google agrees.
Chris Sacca, Google biz dev guru:
“Y combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer.”
And, that gives a (not so savory) flavor for how cheaply Google values what Y Combinator cooks up, Zenter case in Googley point, as I analyze in Zenter: Google Product Development on Spec.
A favored ”entrepreneurial” strategy espoused by Y Combinator is for young hackers to build a lightweight, cool app in a matter of months with the target end game of “selling” the resulting code to the likes of Google (or Yahoo, but NOT Microsoft, as Graham has declared Microsoft “dead”).
In Zenter team Wayne Crosby and Robby Walker, Y Combinator found such “two kids” more than willing to devote several months of their lives to what amounted to churning out a development project, on spec, for Google.
While Crosby and Walker apparently believe they epitomize the realization of the American dream because conventional wisdom is that their “six month old start-up got bought by Google,” Mountain View views things differently: The Googleplex simply acquired “rocket scientist” engineers, on the cheap.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt on how he likes to “obtain” engineering talent:
We would buy businesses in lieu of (recruiting) engineers.
“Business,” however is a relative term. Zenter did not represent a viable business when Google acquired its software and IP assets, along with the Y Combinator funded hackers behind it.
Y Combinator prepares its prospective hacker teams for a rapid-fire sell-out strategy, probing:
Which companies would be most likely to buy you? If one wanted to buy you three months in, what’s the lowest offer you’d take?
Three months in? That would be the entire life cycle for many a Y Combinator backed “startup.” Low ball deal, to boot? Is that any way for a financial backer to inspire an entrepreneur?
Did Crosby and Walker make the right Google decision? Yes, because their entreprenurial vision did not seem to extend beyond an orchestrated Google engineering audiiton.
For other Google buyout “success stories,” however, the Google dream soon became a Googley nightmare: The Dodgeball hacker team for big example.
Google has no love for the Dodgeball it acquired and the Dodgeball developers are now applying their hacking skills elesewhere.
Moral of the Google VC story? Google is NO angel!
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