I don't get it. Are startups now just a new resume? How are BackType users supposed to react to this? How are users supposed to trust other API startups if they can just get the rug pulled out from them like this?<p>I'm happy for the team, but is there not any way they could have transitioned the project to other developers and still joined twitter fulltime?
[ YC08 ]<p>BackType has raised a total of $1.32m according to <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype</a><p>No speculation as to the size of the acquisition, but I guess anything between $10-100m is possible, which would give YC a return of about 3% (6% adjusted down to 70% twice) of that, or somewhere between $300k and $3m?<p>"YCombinator: turning $15k into $300k in 3 years"<p>Not bad.<p>Edit: This is based on the idea that BackType is successful, and had other options (which may not be the case, since their QuantCase/Compete graph is going down)... if they were about to go bust, the price could be considerably lower... but if they were doing well, I imagine investors would have blocked a sale lower than $10m.
Old readwriteweb article<p>"Secrets of BackType's Data Engineers - How do three guys with only seed funding process 100 million msgs a day?"<p><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/secrets-of-backtypes-data-engineers.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/secrets-of-backtype...</a> HN discussion <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097926" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097926</a><p>I am not a Clojure fan, but I found BackType engineer Nathan Marz's fusion of Datalog, Clojure and Hadoop to create Cascalog very impressive, and was looking forward to Storm.
A) Congratulations to the BackType team! I wonder if they're the first Clojure-heavy startup to be acquired. It will be interesting to see what happens to their technology stack after a couple of years.<p>B) Does this impact the open-sourcing of Storm?
I wish that when a headline announced "Big company acquires little startup you've never heard of" that it would be accompanied by some explanation of what the little startup actually does, and why it is interesting.