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Comment by mmelin | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? Acquired for "tens of millions of dollars", half a million dollars in funding? I'm not usually the one to ask things like this but could someone please explain what they're buying here?

400k users signed up during beta, okay, but for a service like this I don't see how that translates to these kinds of numbers.

If they have data that tells them they can convert a meaningful percentage of users to a premium plan, sure, but somehow I doubt that's AOL's plan.

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"Vanity acquisitions do serve one purpose: wealth redistribution. Take money from public companies (bye 401k!) and give it to a lottery few" -dhh

http://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/15547006609006592

I agree. In all fairness it is in people's nature to buy from their friends even if it doesn't always make sense.

I doubt most of those 400k users ever intend on using it. Being an "early adopter" is such a hip and happening thing to be people sign up to new services just to secure a cool sign up date and name now. I have an account with about.me only because I got my first name... I have no intention of ever using it unless it becomes big and worth while.

How many people also got different variations of their name?

I reserved my regular handle but never returned to set up my page.

The full quote is "The size of the acquisition isn’t being disclosed but our guess is it’s in the tens of millions of dollars."

The only thing separating this from crazy and smart is the price, so I think it's important to keep in mind that we don't know the price.

Techcrunch always guesses that price. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it.

What problem does About.me solve? Seriously, I want to know. Wasn't Google Profiles supposed to be for this use case? I'm not sure why the tech public needs a bunch of fragmented personal identity domains.

Keep in mind, a founding team like that is probably worth 10s of millions to a company like AOL (assuming they retain them for several years).

Why exactly? Because of their ability to copy another existing site? http://flavors.me

Or, because of their ability to copy another existing site, and having the business savvy and relationships to sell it for a huge sum.

Having a successful startup is a lot more than the tech behind it or the product itself, right? I mean, you should know, considering Digg never returned money to its investors. (joke!)

To expand on your joke, the ability to generate buzz on the twittersphere.

http://tweetreach.com/reach?q=aboutme

The last 50 tweets alone (at the time I submitted the form) reached 275,244 people! (Well, could have, if everyone read every tweet in their friends_timeline).

Or, because of their ability to ... sell it for a huge sum.

Wait, so the founding team is worth a lot because of their ability to sell themselves? Sounds like rather circular reasoning.

sell themselves and "sell" their product (to 400k users) in exchange for time and attention.

as the GP suggests, startups are about a lot more than tech - selling, it turns out, is also valuable.

Or like self-fulfilling prophecy.. Thanks HN, first a post on multilingual Quines, then this line.. My head spins now.. :)

Actually mentioning digg just reinforces my point - there's relationships and then there's cronyism. Because digg did get money to some investors - presumably the same ones who got invited to the right parties.

And invariably we'll have to listen to various people from this company blovating about how smart, and creative, and witty they are.

Yeah, let's be pretty clear: even if you built about.me, you weren't going to have an exit as good as this one because you weren't already a known quantity to AOL (as Tony Conrad was).

I will also say that flavors.me launched before them, but the about.me domain is obviously much better than flavors.

So this is essentially a signing bonus for Tony Conrad to come back to AOL for a few more years? Man, I need to start working on my personal branding.

Some part of this signing amount is for domain name. about.me is valuable domain to have IMO.

That would be "acquiring back a founding team that'd already cashed out to AOL once".

I wonder how many times you get to do that.

(And I guess this sale is why all my "in the loop" friends al started metioning their about.me page a few weeks back. Yeah, it worked, I became one of the acquired users @ about.me/Iain_Chalmers )

True. But when you see how much fun they have at the end of the video, you may also want, one day, to belong to that "I've been acquired/I IPOed" group.

First of all, the 400k is a number, not a metric. Techcrunch only mentions it to create a polite segue to their skepticism.

Bear in mind that the number of users is particularly useless, because about.me is an vanity URL-based service. People stampede to reserve a /<firstname> domain. This is also the case for Twitter, Tumblr, and the Facebook vanity URL, or whatever they call it.

Before I read the article, I was thinking talent acquisition... now... I don't know what to make of it.

Sensationalism perhaps?

Talent acquisition? Tony's a seasoned entrepreneur and he built a pretty good team, that's worth the price.

EDIT: Also, if 20mm AOL users now have an about.me profile that can become a huge part of AOL's push into social, that would be worth it too.

So I guess a successful team at Google should group quit, create a social me to product then wait to be acquired for a few years bonus salary for all by either Google or another of the big players.

That's a bit like what etherpad did, right? :)

how much of the acquisition was driven from a talent acquisition standpoint? with his track record, i'm assuming tony conrad had recruited a stellar cast of characters to bring about.me to life.

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