Could someone experienced breakdown what a transaction like this looks like for everyone involved? I'm super curious. I've never been acquired, so I really have no insight into the process other than what I've read.<p>Here's the facts as I see them: Crunchbase says Hunch started in September of 2007 and had 23 employees on LinkedIn when they exited. (TechCrunch calls it a 20-person team, so I'm presuming that's all the employees.) They've gotten $19.2m in funding, let's just say $20m. TechCrunch claims the sale was "around" $80m.<p>So what does the breakdown look like? Who gets what? What are the likely investor terms?<p>My totally naive guess would be that the investors got at least a 1x liquidation preference, maybe more. I mean, did Hunch have any revenue? So there was at most $40m to go around to the people at the company. Of course, most of that probably went to the founders. Would maybe 20% of that have gone to the 20-ish employees? So naively pretending that each of the 20-ish employees got 1% for four years, did they each end up with an extra $100k/year? What's the likely distribution of shares among employees?<p>What are the transaction costs (lawyers, taxes, etc.) for this sort of acquisition? How long will the employees have to be at eBay to get their earn-out, and will that earn-out be in addition to their common stock in Hunch? Will they end up being paid less to work for eBay during their earn-out than if they were on the open market?<p>Of course, their are many other reasons to do a deal like this (passion for improving eBay's recommendations, for example), but let's ignore that for now.
"It’s been a long journey for Hunch."<p>They were founded in 2008 and sold for $80m 3 years later. That is considered a "long journey" these days? Statements like this give me that "we're in a bubble" feeling.
Wow, this is like a knight in a white horse for Hunch.. I seriously doubt they were making any profit... This sounds like a talent acquisition. I mean this is ridiculous... but it goes to show you.. you gotta show up for the game (the startup game, I mean) to win it... $80 m for a site that doesn't even get 1 million uniques (per Compete) a month is a STEAL. I mean.. seriously, everyone who has a CS background should just start something on the side if a deal like this is possible.
I never used Hunch much, and I'm not sure if an 80 million exit with 20 million in VC funding is so great for the founders, but I suppose it gives eBay a footing in NYC - that's the part of the article I found most interesting.
Chris Dixon talked a lot about "going big", growing big companies, etc. He talked a lot about a new "data tier" for the web and how Hunch would be an intelligent filter for all the data. I wonder what changed?
Something about Hunch's trajectory is utterly predictable and ever-so-slightly depressing. I suppose building to sell is a perfectly valid business model -- if you succeed -- but it makes me feel a little dirty. And if nobody buys you, you're well and truly f#%@$ed.<p>Although who am I to argue with $80 million.
"I have a hunch nobody ever meaningfully used Hunch."<p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/rafat/status/138633186300264448" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/rafat/status/138633186300264448</a>
Hunch is like my divorced neighbor who couldn't work it out, so now they're giving up and short selling the house and bringing down the values for everyone.
"It’s been a long journey for Hunch. The company was founded in 2008."<p>Knowing how long it can take for a small company with a good idea and product to launch, I wouldn't really call that a long journey.<p>Still, congratulations to them. I hope eBay is able to make something good out of what they have created so far.
I never felt the need to use Hunch on its own. Now that it can be more of a tool to supplement other objectives, it sure might be the right tool after-all.
Anyone have any suggestions about how Hunch would scale to eBay levels?<p>Seems Hunch has gone the 'Mega Machine' route (1 T RAM, 48 Core [1]), from 700k users (80m Total TTHY / 113THAYs [1]), make 250k API users<p>How do you scale that out to eBay numbers?<p>[1]<a href="http://blog.hunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/110509-HUNCH-TASTEGRAPH_800px_v2_small.png" rel="nofollow">http://blog.hunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/110509-HUNC...</a>
Here's an interview with Chris Dixon on the Ebay purchase.<p>eBay is an interesting challenge because so many of the listings don't have metadata like product IDs.<p>The work Hunch has been doing on the open web is a good fit for this kind of unstructured data.<p><a href="http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/21/chris-dixon-ebay-hunch/" rel="nofollow">http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/21/chris-dixon-ebay-hunch/</a>
Whatever Hunch is really good at, we haven't seen it yet. I assume Ebay has, and that it has everything to do with crunching customer browsing & purchase behavior to offer them products they're most likely to purchase.
There is a great play around the collection of data outside of just social space. Hunch has done a great job aggregating this data via a social means and displaying the data to the masses in an appealing way to drive more people towards their "recommendation" engine. I work for a site called Ranker and we're focused on a similar data play with much greater focus on SEO.<p>* <a href="http://www.ranker.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ranker.com/</a>