Jaiku's Jyri Engeström on the Consequences of Being Acquired by Google

So I have a slightly different tale. I had the pleasure of hosting a Hackers & Founders & Factual hackathon this weekend with Gil Elbaz, the CEO of Factual. His previous startup, Applied Semantics got purchased by GOOG some years ago, the technology Applied Semantics had was tightly integrated into a little product called AdSense, Gil recieved a Founders Award, and Gil now sits on the board of the X Prize foundation as a Trustee.

He spent 3 years at Google, left and started Factual, a new company which recieved $30 M in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. They are trying to change the world via creating an open source model around data.

While I appreciate hearing a different perspective at times, I tire of 37 Signals tales of startup funding/acquisition glooom and doom. Sometimes having your company acquired by Google and ending up with a couple million in the bank is a plus.

Its a cautionary tale. One to take to heart as well. It was an interesting exercise to watch from inside the 'plex as Jaiku moved from startup -> acquisition -> dead pool. I think to be fair it seemed that internally at Google there was a lot of angst as well but given the comparison with Twitter, then and now.

"We are the Google. Turn over your founder's stock and surrender your engineers. We will add your features and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapted to service us. Resistance is futile."

:-)