I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything:
Just the _highlights_ from http://vark.com/team
* Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization
* Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years
* Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google's Firefox and Safe Browsing teams
* Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra.
* Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research
* Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project
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Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few weeks/months. [http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf]
"Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine' and submitted it to WWW 2010. We found out last week that it has been accepted, so we wanted to share a preview with you today!
Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', in which =>Sergey Brin and Larry Page<= originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference."
It turns out, everything is friend based. Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. Have a project you don't want to do inside of Google? Just quit, make it anyway, then they'll re-hire you with a $5M per head bonus.
I'd find it delightful if I were in such a position, but I'm not. Not only am I not, but the more technical side of me doesn't want to play social games to become ingratiated to the decision makers. Deep down, I still believe the world is merit based -- and that's one reason why I'm still a nobody doing nothing going nowhere.
I'd be better off not reading HN most days.
I can confirm this. Contrariwise, knowing poor people can help you get poor. Such is life.
Create something remarkable and people with money will find you.
Way off base IMO. If it was true, there would be very few ex-googler companies failing. And there would be A LOT more acquisitions by Google.
I have used Vark. And I think this was a SOLID technology acquisition and well worth $50M.
If I was a Vark founder, I'd feel insulted by your post.
What you may not realize is that everyone is knowable if you put enough effort into it. If you have no drive and no talent, rich people won't be able to help you. There aren't that many driven and talented people out there, so if you're one of them, and you make an effort to meet rich people, they'll help you too.
But overall your negativity throws me off a bit. One definitely notices when a company with many ex-Googlers is bought by Google. But if you think that's how the world is, nothing really stops you from joining Google: what were these guys doing before joining Google in the first place?
Networking definitely helps in a lot of situations (to find a job, to make a deal, to get in touch with the right people), but you can do something to arrive at a place where you can easily network with the right people.
Additionally, what other business case could their be to purchase such a small, new company. Couldn't Google just have integrated these features into their shiny new Buzz service _last week_ and have overshadowed Vark very quickly?
$50 million sounds like a lot initially but considering the size of the founding team and that they raised 6 million from VCs I don't think any of them would want to retire just yet.
For example, looking through my old questions, I think it automatically tagged "what's a good place to get a cheap SSL certificate? I don't think I need wildcard subdomains" as "SSL".
In a perfect world, you ask Google a question just like you'd ask a person a question, and they answer it with the info you want, so they might be interested in the technology and people that make this intelligent tagging work as a step in that direction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=10m10s
I was like "this sounds like Aardvark".
They might have some as-yet-undisclosed IP which one of the big search companies would be able to defend - rather own it than fight it.
Also, integrating the already-refined code and ideas into Buzz, Wave, Orkut, other future social initiatives.
Plus they get the cool early-adopter-of-new-search-technology userbase.
This might be wrong more often than it's wrong, but if it does work the payoff could be enormous. Who knows in this case. But I suggest you think of it as an investment at $50 million pre-money. That's a little pricey, but might still be worth it.
An example of a question (and an awesome answer) I submitted: http://vark.com/t/cad4a0
This is also why they should acquire Yelp -- it's not about the tech (in fact, Yelp is built on Google maps). It's about the interface.
Talent doesn't make sense at that price, more like a few million. The tech can't be that out of the ordinary for Google given they just launched Buzz and Wave. So what was it that deserved that price? Bidding war?
Sometimes I guess acquisitions are just random, and likely more about the people involved than anything else.
(Type 'tag' to fix that label, 'more' for options, or 'cancel'.) Sent at 2:51 PM on Thursday aardvark: (Update: No response yet from people who know about Aardvark -- but I'm still looking. Type 'tag:' followed by a different category to try other people.) Sent at 3:01 PM on Thursday aardvark: (An answer just arrived... From Derek P./28/M/Brookville,PA, Re: Aardvark) That's what I'm trying to find out. I tend to hate services like this, that are for people too dumb to Google. ... WAIT A MINUTE?! (To reply, type 'Derek:' followed by a message, or type 'flag' if this answer is inappropriate. Type 'more' for options.)
