Square to buy Weebly for $365M

But, Google would work with the `site:news.ycombinator.com` feature.

They weren't necessarily the hottest company from our batch with investors at the time, and they weren't the odds-on favorite to be among the biggest YC exits. There have been, what, maybe a half dozen bigger exits in all of YC history, thus far, if that many? I haven't really kept up with YC companies that I don't know personally, and I'd guess that in five-to-ten years this may seem like a quaintly small exit by YC standards, but for now, that's a lot of money.

I liked them based on their execution and pragmatism, not on their credentials or merely being smart (everybody in YC was wicked smart...it's the first time I'd been in a room where I was pretty confident that most of the folks in it were smarter than me), and I think investors may have been occasionally looking first at the companies out of Stanford/MIT/CMU/etc. I doubt they had trouble raising money but I never recalled them being widespread favorites among the Valley's cognoscenti either.

All of my comments above were about the cottage industry where Weebly shines. There's a whole bunch of people making a little bit of money online...they aren't big clients for Square, but in aggregate they add up, and some of them will grow and Square will keep them as customers as long as they provide paths for growth.

I think there's just a breakdown in what kinds of business we're talking about in this conversation. Yes, in many segments, $2.4m annual is a small business (it's well under 50 employees, probably well under 25 employees). But, as businesses with their sites on Weebly go, it's pretty big. Weebly has always been a place to go for a first website, particularly for non-technical businesses...it's just not the place you go when you're building a multimillion dollar business.

So, both things can be true: $2.4m annual revenue is a relatively small business, and most businesses on Weebly will never grow to that size.

Of course it's your opinion. You don't actually know their acquisition costs, or the strength of their network effects. You're out here making educated guesses, like the rest of us. Just because you're really confident about your guess doesn't make it automatically correct.

Google doesn't have engineers working full time in the SF office. They highly discourage it. The SF based engineers have a stigma that they're lesser than the MTV counterparts.

FB doesn't have an SF office. Dropbox wasn't liquid until this year. To say people wasted time or got screwed 4 years ago by not going to work for bigco isn't fair.