Fridge is Joining Google+ Team

http://keepitfresh.frid.ge/post/7885676041/keep-it-fresh-with-fridge-and-google

by joetyson • 15 years ago

173 59 15 years ago

keepitfresh.frid.ge

randall• 15 years ago

Just got the email. Congrats guys!

ryanb• 15 years ago

Austin and the Fridge team are super sharp. I'd say this was a great move for Google+.

Congrats!

riordan• 15 years ago

Fridge built a really amazing product - Social groupware for people outside of Facebook. I'll be sad to see it go.

I wonder if the team is going to be moved out to Mountain View or stay in NYC?

nakajima• 15 years ago

Looks like they'll be moving to Mountain View: http://allthingsd.com/20110721/frid-ge-acquired-by-google-to...

cemregr2• 15 years ago

I like Austin, but a group I was part of used Fridge and it made my pull my hair.

Thanks to Fridge, I now know how my grandmother feels like using a computer. The UI was really overwhelming and I could never find what I was after or why things were sorted a certain way.

peterzakin• 15 years ago

Congrats, guys!

rdl4• 15 years ago

Wow, congratulations! I'm really impressed by how successful Google+ has been so far, and I'm sure you guys will help make it even better.

It will be interesting if you can post in a year or so about what it was like going to work for Google as a talent acquisition in a related space to your own startup (i.e. what was better and what was different). I'm sure the food will be an improvement, but it will be interesting to hear how it was learning to use the google internal deployment environment (in general, non-NDA terms).

Also, thank you so much for extending data availability on frid.ge until the end of the summer!

watty• 15 years ago

So do they need more staff or were they buying out the competitor who did "circles" before they did?

happyfaces• 15 years ago

Didn't know what fridge was so I watched the video on their website, funny thing is at some point the speaker goes like: "share whatever you want without worrying of other people or google seeing it!" that made me smile

plannerball• 15 years ago

Fridge? Never heard before

puredanger• 15 years ago

Man, I was really disappointed to click this link and find that it was not a news story about William "Refrigerator" Perry from the Chicago Bears joining the Google+ team.

zackattack2• 15 years ago

Hahaha

pge• 15 years ago

you're not alone:) I thought Google+ had found a new front man...

nadam• 15 years ago

Funny how the startup scene changes. Years ago, Paul Graham wrote essays like 'You weren't meant to have a boss'. Nowadays talent aquisitions are seen as huge successes while (money aside) we are celebrating that some former founders found jobs at big companies. (I am also more pragmatic in this question than years ago, so I am not criticizing anyone.)

badclient2• 15 years ago

Nowdays talent acquisitions are seen as huge successes

Citation needed.

AlecSchueler• 15 years ago

See: the congratulations that are invariably offered in threads like these.

timxpp• 15 years ago

True. If they would go and work for IBM, would it still sound so good? How come getting a job at Google is seen as a small Nobel price?

rdl4• 15 years ago

I'd draw a distinction between talent acquisitions to go join the general pool of people at a big company, and talent acquisitions to work on the big new focus of a "sleeping giant", in something similar to what you were doing before.

nostrademons5• 15 years ago

Wasn't Etherpad the latter, and then they found out that big new focus had been canceled and quit? Same with Dodgeball, Aardvark, Jaiku, Jotspot, and any number of other acquisitions.

You shouldn't assume anything about what your job duties will be in a big company, even if it's written into your contract. Big companies have an internal logic that often makes no sense to the outside world, and usually depends upon what the decision makers are paying attention to at the moment. Priorities change.

pg2• 15 years ago

(money aside)

That's the mistake in your reasoning. The money makes a talent acquisition significantly different from getting a job.

nostrademons5• 15 years ago

I'm curious what the average founder's take is in a talent acquisition. http://ycombinator.com/nums.html indicates that 80% of YC's acquisitions have been for <$10M - so does that work out to about $1-2M per founder, after investors and employees get their cut?

Not chump change by any means, but skilled engineers in Silicon Valley can easily make $250K/year in total compensation. If a startup takes about 3 years of ramen wages to come to fruition and then the founders are locked up for another year while they vest, the plain old employee will have made about $1M in the time that the startup founder made maybe $2.5M. Startup founder is still ahead, but they took on all the risk of their startup failing and them getting nothing, and the difference is only about a factor of 2 instead of an order of magnitude.

prpon• 15 years ago

I wonder how many of these talent acquisitions happen because of being related to YC? There are many startups out there with strong talent. Not many of them get acquired for talent reasons.

How do talent acquisitions happen? Do they usually start with exploring partnership opportunities?

revorad• 15 years ago

Years ago, PG also wrote "Hiring is obsolete" - http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

hristov• 15 years ago

I never really understood talent acquisitions. They are still puzzling to me. If you only need the talent why pay for the company? A huge chunk of the money you are paying for a company goes to the investors.

Why not just offer the people that you like multi-million dollar signing bonuses and have them join you. But what if they want to stay in the company and believe in their product, you say. Well if that were the case why would they agree for their company to be acquired in a deal that shuts down their service?

I don't know, I must be missing something.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

Perhaps your puzzlement comes from a lack of exposure to all the variables? Not being critical here, I don't know anything about your background.

For some people, they have a demonstrated level of competence which allows them to work on what ever they are passionate about. If that is combined with a modest disregard for money such that they work somewhere because they are passionate, and for any salary as long as it meets some base level. If you want to hire them it is effectively impossible.

You have recruiters call them, they brush them off. You invite them to conferences and schmooze them with all the great things going on at BigCorp and they thank you politely for the invite and don't call back. You shower them with flattery, gifts, whatever and they persistently ignore you.

But if they get passionate about an idea and start a company around it and work day and night to breathe life in it, and more importantly take outside money, then BigCorp gets a chance. If BigCorp can convince the investor(s) to sell them the company they can move this thing you are passionate about into their company and have this star entrepreneur follow it.

Then there is a somewhat less sensational side, you've started a company and you've convinced people to invest, people who are now your friends, and it hasn't turned out quite the way you hoped it might. Perhaps the timing is off, or there was some gotcha you thought would be insignificant but turned out to be much more difficult, or maybe someone turned up a patent or something that makes your idea impossible to implement. Maybe its as simple as customers are willing to pay you what you need to make in order for you idea to be a viable business. You've got talent, you demonstrated an ability to execute, but your investors aren't going to come in on another round of funding because they, like you, no the concept as planned is dead.

You are friends with these folks (your investors) and you don't want to screw that up, so if BigCorp comes along and buys the company which pays off the investors, you get to keep your friendships intact, BigCorp gets to put some golden shackles on you for some period of time, and you get to try again after the shackles come off.

The short of it is that its rarely successful for a large corporation to 'poach' employees by luring them away with promises of better pay and more regular working hours.

Robin_Message• 15 years ago

A shame they are not migrating the content into Google+, in some form, for customers who want it. But then I suppose fridge was a group thing, so getting consent could be tricky.

phodo• 15 years ago

Does anyone know what languages / technologies they used?

kfir• 15 years ago

php not sure about the rest.

SimpleConcepts• 15 years ago

Congrats guys. Google+ saw a trend within small groups and decided to enter that market. However, I would assume small groups aim to limit your time spent with those who aren't as close to you. Now, I have tons of circles, and connecting with even more people than ever. Its organized well, but whats the point? Facebook has Lists right? Buying out Fridge and growing a community from the ground is a much better/sustainable strategy for google. Just an opinion :)

ma2rten• 15 years ago

Quite ironic, I just watched their promo video.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/TRYntzWLJ7Q

It literally says: "You don't have to worry about other people seeing what you posted, not that random person from school, not Google"

18pfsmt• 15 years ago

Maybe this acquisition will bring the interests of someone like myself, that are non-public personas and wish to keep it that way, to the table where we can participate publicly. We would be able to use a single handle in our Circles marked 'public', so we could be blocked but still not be stalked.

cemregr2• 15 years ago

Another article mentioned frid.ge had 40.000 uniques and 20.000 groups. Does that say something?

gpp• 15 years ago

Any idea how much Google or other companies pay for acquisition like this?

ianb• 15 years ago

Since Fridge itself is shut down, I'm not curious exactly how their model worked. Anyone know of (or care to make) a technical description of how it works?

dennisgorelik• 15 years ago

Yet another startup is chewed by big-co.

cookiecaper2• 15 years ago

It's funny that places like Google even perform talent acquisitions. I guess when you're controlling billions of dollars a few million here or there is a comparative "drop in the bucket" but it really has to be about covetousness or something, because there is a large supply of talented engineers that would be willing to work at Google as normal employees, and certainly many of these would have the same capabilities as the Frid.ge team. Does it really cost anything close $5M-$10M to find a handful of employees with that skillset? I'd say Google is definitely doing it wrong if so -- I can understand a premium for demonstrating competency with something like Frid.ge, but it just seems quite inflated when all Google ends up with in the end is a few employees for a few years (if that). I have to say I'm pretty skeptical that talent acquisitions are a decent deal from the acquirer's side of things.

No offense or displeasure to the Frid.ge team of course, if they're happy with it that's fine. I just don't see it as an economically effective investment from Google's end. Perhaps part of it is the extra headlines that are inevitable when a YC company gets acquired? Just doesn't seem like a good value to me.

roc2• 15 years ago

How much would Google have to spend to hire a complete team to add and expand fridge-like features for Google+? It's got to be in that same ballpark.

Surely it's worth the premium to hire a cohesive, motivated team that's already learned the domain and has a proven ability to execute.

Particularly considering the benefit Google can realize from getting a better solution to market faster.

cookiecaper2• 15 years ago

Why would it be in that same ballpark? Google has a notoriously silly hiring process so its costs are probably higher than the costs of some other companies, but really 5-10MM to hire 3-4 people? I guess if they're willing to spend that on a "talent acquisition" it may not be that far out of line with normal hiring costs but I'd say there's certainly a problem there.

As I stated in my post I understand that demonstrating ability via Frid.ge can certainly be valuable and worth a premium. It just seems to be much higher than one might expect Google to spend on normal hiring processes.

bconway• 15 years ago

Congrats to the Fridge team on being hired by Google!

jasonwilk• 15 years ago

Congrats Austin!

fourk• 15 years ago

The wording on this article makes it sound as though this was NOT an acquisition of the company, but a "job offers for everyone on the team" sort of deal. To be clear, was the company acquired, or did everyone quit and join Google? How do investors generally react to deals of the latter form?

Edit: The Techcrunch article [1] states that the company as a whole was acquired, in this particular case. However, how do these deals work out for investors when the company is not acquired, but the entire team quits and joins Google? Note, this is seemingly what occurred with YC Summer 08 company Scoopler yesterday, as mentioned in the TC article.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/21/g-google-acquires-privacy-c...

ehc• 15 years ago

Quite ironic since Fridge markets itself on not sharing your data with Google:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/TRYntzWLJ7Q?iframe=true&wid...

Fridge is Joining Google+ Team

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