Sam and Chris are both brilliant guys and great BRANDS. Not Steve Jobs great-- but great nonetheless. Guys like this attract A-players and attract PR. Could Sam and his group have $43M in impact for the buyer? Surely.
Listen, success is just a big multiplication formula. If your "leadership brand" number is high enough, you just about can't lose. But that holds true for any other number in the formula (product awesomeness, timing, marketing, business model, etc).
What about the minor things like, you know, making money? They took 17 million in funding and failed. But that's OK because they're buddies with the VC's and can try, try again.
Is it okay/smart for Facebook to buy/hire a team of 4 engineers for $8M or is that because they are buddies with VCs? I assume Loopt had an engineering team of 20+. Is it that out of bounds to think that that (plus patents and perhaps some tech) could have an eventual financial impact of more than $43M?
Their job was to grow Loopt and make money. They failed to do that. So either they're not as brilliant as you say or that stuff isn't as important as you make it out to be. Result matter. Whether you're a great brand shouldn't.
Judge people on their success/failure. Not on what other people think of them.
Loopt was a flawed, quickly obsoleted idea. That was pretty obvious from the outset.
That isn't really true. The main reason most VCs are friends with people is because they think they can make money out of them in the future. But it shows how far into falsehood you've leaned in your attempt to be nasty when you end up unintentionally implying something so nice it isn't true.
That VC money is investor money. These aren't angels being nice with their own money, these are VC's playing fast and loose with their investors money and it's not ethical behaviour.
what do you mean by impact? how can this even be measured?
"If your "leadership brand" number is high enough, you just about can't lose. "
again, what does leadership brand mean? And what does it have to do with building a business that earns money/makes profit (revenue - expenses). Just because something/someone has market or exchange value, doesn't mean they have use value. If the goal is to sucker some large corporation out of a small chunk of cash (small for the large corp) be upfront about it. But saying there's some higher form of value that 'brands' bring that has nothing to do with building profitable businesses is disingenuous. Steve Jobs built companies that earned money (from business operations, not financial market operations). HUGE difference.
Where the heck did I say that? I said building profitable businesses is a formula and leadership/brands are a multiplier in that (very complex) formula.
I'm saying that A-Players with great brands have value. It's pretty hard to unravel that value. What's the financial impact of bringing Jobs back to Apple? What was the financial impact of Google buying Android? What would the financial impact be if I was running Square instead of Jack Dorsey? There's no way to know. But you can't disregard the impact of great people because you can't precisely measure it is wrong.
People have value (in general), calling some people A-players is trying to ascribe value to some, and as you say, that's hard to unravel. I agree ranking and valuing people is hard/impossible, why should we try . . . why are you trying? Why not let people show their own value by doing great things. I don't disregard the value, i just admit that we don't know it, the only thing we do know is if a business made money or not. It doesn't mean the person that started a shitty business is also shitty, but it also doesn't mean they're a success if all the sudden someone bestowed a crown of exit on them.
NeXT alone was never going to do what Apple has done. Apple had a sustainable hardware business (after being fixed up a little with sexy designs) that gave them enough manufacturing leverage to do iPod, and iPod gave them enough operations leverage and economy-of-scale to do what they're doing now.
More of it than is around now. Location based apps are just getting started.
I think there is sort of a last mile problem for data, in the same way that there is a last mile problem for hardware. As much people come to see the world this way I think we will end up with more and more possibilities for local social than we can currently even imagine. I think this acquisition will be a good opportunity, as Loopt will effectively be able to use these financial tools as bait to get more people into their system.
