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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

WTF is "Yes, Inc"?

They're so insignificant, they don't even have an Alexa ranking. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yesitsyes.com

None of their products seem popular either: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/getfrenzy.com and http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/itswyd.com

This has SV nepotism all over it. Thankfully, Twitter doesn't have a monopoly so they can't afford to keep doing this.

If I was a Twitter investor, I would be outraged (assuming that this article is true).

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There's three kinds of hiring in the tech industry. The proles must take an agility course of whiteboard coding interviews that maintain a pretense of objectivity, but actually are loyalty filter tests that only measure how much time are you willing to spend on studying shit books like "Cracking the Code Interview" which have no application in the real world.

Then there's the networked hire who basically lets people know he/she is on the market, and can land a job without having to spend 6 hours at a whiteboard answering trick questions about the space-time complexity of the interviewer's socks.

Finally, the super-networked can get in through an acquihire, so they don't have to feel bad about having spent a couple millions of investor money on their startup sabbatical.

"Coding interviews are the devil" is my favorite HN meme. This post magically appears any time anybody mentions hiring of any kind.

>Frenzy is an app for making lightning-fast plans with friends.

So, another chat app? I assume there is some fancy tech behind the scenes?

Edit: These apps don't even have reviews, do they?

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/wyd-what-you-doing/id1106177...

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/frenzy-plan-less.-party-more...

What's going on with this?

My guess: Twitter spent $3,133,731.41 --- and spent at least a month negotiating which magic numbers to encode in the price --- and then flew to the Marianas Islands on Jack Dorsey's private dirigible to eat whale sushi. I read it somewhere on the Internet that that happens all the time with Twitter, the epicenter of valley nepotism: to get acquihired you have to think of at least 2 magic numbers and be the niece or nephew of an executive vice president at Twitter. That's the scam they're running on the public markets, you see.

How you know it's happening here is you can count the app store reviews for their apps. That's the tell-tale sign.

Too many 3s to be coincidence!

Looks like they have some sort of event coordinating app called Frenzy. Which is basically just phone alerts for when people are trying to start a flashmob-style event. https://getfrenzy.com/

And they have something else that just looks like Snapchat-style image overlays/editing called WYD. https://itswyd.com

The name of this sounds like a blatant rip-off of the "Verb, it's what you do" public health campaign in the US. Changed just barely enough to cover themselves from getting sued. https://www.cdc.gov/youthcampaign/index.htm

It also only has 41 likes on the app Facebook page.

Unless there is some IP or hires that they wanted to snatch up, there doesn't appear to be anything of value that couldn't probably be done cheaper in house at Twitter. This seems incredibly frivolous.

GetFrenzy.com, a service of Yes, Inc. for making flash plans is apparently unrelated to GetFrenzy.co, a service of Shopify for making flash sales.

The CEO is joining Twitter as their VP of Product.

Why haven't they just hired him? It's not like this company's products is worth anything as they are shutting everything down. It's shameless acquihire.

What is a "shameless acquihire"?

...the opposite of a "shameful acquihire"?

Maybe they couldn't get him/them to abandon the app without buying it out.

I believe it's being implied that the shame should be in spending all this money to hire a few people (that, supposedly, they could get cheaper on the market). Maybe that they should feel embarrassed in front of investors? That's what I understood.

"Spending all this money"? How much did they spend?

I think you can answer your own rhetorical question. Point taken.

Do you generally have the impression that these acquihires are bonanzas? They aren't: they're usually only marginally more lucrative than the signing package for a senior hire gets anyways, and sometimes less so. Employers gussy them up for team members by giving aggregate numbers, counting on team members not to divide them by 4 and compare them to competing offers. Investors hate them.

The acquihired team is usually only getting two things from them: the founders save face (publicly, not with future investors, who know what an acquihire is), and the whole team gets placed, rather than having to interview individually.

Even that last bit isn't always true.

I meant they are not even trying to act if their apps were gaining any traction. It's more an ego trip than an actual business operation. We live in a free country however.

I'm sorry, I'm not following. If their apps aren't gaining traction, how do you want them to act? Should they apologize for failing? Refuse the offer to allow their team to be acquired?

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