Props to Randall on all the hard work building Vidpresso over the years - and congrats on the exit!
...Or most scheming. Obviously his strategy worked out for him. Truly nice people don't care about making money so they wouldn't apply to Y Combinator to begin with.
I get it. You get tired of a product, it doesn't do as well as you hope, but you still want to get acquihired and make sure your hardworking engineers don't end up on the street. Nonetheless, its frustrating when evaluating a startup's product and use 'longevity' as a factor.
Hopefully they all just made a whole bunch of money.
A personal note to the team, as Facebook is very much a manage-your-own-journey company: I would strongly recommend you look into professional application, as in, Workplace.
A. that means a free trip to London for you, which is always cool. You get to meet more people with whom to joke: “It’s in the middle of a swamp! — I know — Why?! – I don’t know.”
B. there are tons of applications, roughly empowering internal equivalent to Coursera. Any solution that I know about (and it’s alas a lot: worked for 20+ companies) is bad, expensive, dysfunctional and impractical.
Getting people to use video to document their workflow, think about edge-cases, etc. is the most impactful thing I can imagine because it introduces billions into structured logic in their tasks, allows them to step from code-as-Excel-spreadsheet into code-as-a-system.
Workplace is already teaching a lot of businesses to be open, transparent, interest-driven, to record interaction for later use without closely-defined audience, etc. That happens a lot through Workplace videos — in spite of that tool being very feature-poor. Adding editing, slide-control and later something closer to choose-your-own-adventure, tests, etc. that would be incredible.
I hope you can demonstrate that there is a lot of great things to be done with interactive videos.
1. Build a lasting private business (Mailchimp) 2. Go public (Facebook) 3. Get acquired (Instagram)
Obviously, I'm ball-parking here, but 99% of startups with "successful" outcomes happen via acquisition. For the vast majority of most startups, acquisition is the only viable outcome other than failure.
Edit: thought about St. Jude’s hospital but it depends on donations.
Not a very good heuristic, people always find ways to profit from so-called 'non-profits'.
When I worked at Mashable and Facebook was paying us to make a certain amount of Facebook Live content a month (a practice Facebook started in mid-w2016 and stopped in mid-2017, which was painful for the media companies that had hired out teams to produce that content), we used Vidpresso to make the broadcasts look more professional, with updated lower-thirds, easy multi-camera switches, pre-recorded playback via Tricaster, etc. I don’t remember if we used Vidpresso at Gawker/Gizmodo Media Group or not, but the software was definitely powerful for live broadcasts.
IIRC, Vidpresso was one of the first solutions to get certified to use the various Facebook Live APIs and it really changed what types of video we were able to produce.
I’ve known Randall a long time and am thrilled for him and his team that they could make this exit. This is the sort of thing Facebook should be offering its larger media customers.
I know that we're in the middle of an awakening of sorts about personal data, but that doesn't negate the value that services like Facebook can offer. I may be naive, but I think this is a step in the right direction.
congrats to you and the team
As long as the SV giants have that global scale and keep demonstrating that they value engineers, I don’t think they’ll have trouble hiring.
