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Comment by vm | Hacker News Reader

Great exit for a team that hadn't raised much $ + great acquisition for Square given the easy upsell path to all its SMB customers.

For perspective, competitor Wix is a $4B market cap company at a ~$500M revenue run-rate. Shopify, which is quite different, has a $12B market cap at ~$1B run-rate. This is a massive market.

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Great exit for the founders, horrible exit for the employees.

In 2014 Weebly was worth $455m [1]. 4 years later in 2018 it is worth $365m. Imagine how much more an employee could have made working for 4 years at a public BigCo with RSUs you can sell every year. This is just another startup lottery failure. Employees got screwed.

[1] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/22/weebly-valued-at-455...

Weebly was founded in 2007. Their series A was in 2007 and their series B was in 2011. Isn't it likely the bulk of employee options were granted before 2014, before their big Series C? I wouldn't be surprised if their Series B valuation was south of $100M, maybe way south of it. Perhaps it took awhile for those options to go liquid, but I doubt those employees were banking on those options, anyway. They were such early employees that they just wanted to build a great company, and the rational ones knew the options were lottery tickets.

Saying employees got screwed without knowing deal details is a bit preposterous. Weebly pays engineers pretty well compared with bigco salary, has a cash yearly bonus, sabbatical program, etc. The only difference is stock comp.

What bigco are you going to work for in SF that gives those rsu grants? Salesforce, LinkedIn, and...? I wouldn't be willing to waste my life riding up and down the peninsula for that rsu grant.

and Dropbox, and Google (they have an SF office), and FB (opening SF office). Yes that's why you would just move to SF then. If you are in the Peninsula already then go work for FB, Google, LinkedIn, et al.*

*If maximizing for total comp

My question was for people already living in SF who don't want to ride down the peninsula. The choices are limited for bigco rsu grants.

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.

625K subscribers @ $10 per month = $80m run rate.

$365m exit = 4.5x revenue compared to 12x for Shopify and 8x for Wix. Quite a discount.

Late stage investors from 2014 who put in money at $455m valuation just getting their cash back. 0 return for 4 years of capital being tied up (vs. 80%+ for even an SP500 Index fund)

Back in 2004 I built a similar platform for a guy that was in love with MLM stuff. Too bad he was focusing on the wrong stuff and I was completely unexperienced in regards to entrepreneurship. We could be in a much better situation today. Sigh

I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself, I think a lot of people were in this position. A GUI for creating websites was not really a groundbreaking idea; weebly hit the market with the perfect product at the perfect time, just as frontend tech became powerful enough to enable a solid GUI.

I myself had dinewebs.com with the same idea for the restaurant vertical, but as a 14 year old I couldn’t even finish the project!

Thank you!

I agree... that was when DHTML and VBScript were a thing. Not even JQuery was created. "AJAX" was just JS loading content in hidden frames... good times though.

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