It's official: Google buys Zenter

Was Google's earlier vaporware announcement a strategy to get Zenter at a lower cost? Probably not, as they really need that app one way or another for the suite. Excellent recovery that Zenter got bought instead of ending up on ebay.

Also congratulations to the Y Combinator team - yet another good call added to the record. The PR from this will be big.

sharpshoot• 19 years ago

wow - well done!

Alex3917• 19 years ago

Very nice :-)

trajan• 19 years ago

Really exciting. Congrats.

aston• 19 years ago

This makes the second service I know of (after Youtube) that Google's acquired despite already having internal teams working on a product.

bootload3• 19 years ago

"... Will the founders survive at the Googleplex for long? ..." && "... second service I know of (after Youtube) that Google's acquired despite already having internal teams working on a product ..."

I was wondering about this as well, then I read this post. It must have an impact on the 'engineers' who work there having groups of buyouts with vesting periods and larger payouts. There must be some level of resentment (it's human nature). How does google manage this?

antirez2• 19 years ago

Yeah, also it is not particularly cool after you sold that you need to go at Google to work on this stuff. I mean... ok... after some year the vesting period expires and you are rich and goodbye, but in some way after the acquisition you became a "worker" for Google with much less freedom than before: this sucks.

ashu• 19 years ago

Way to go, guys. Brilliant!

vlad• 19 years ago

Happy Father's Day (one of the founders is a father, right?)

brezina• 19 years ago

phew, now I don't need to pay back Robbie for that dinner I owe him.

Happy 1st Father's Day Wayne!

gduffy• 19 years ago

I can do you one better ... Robbie OWES me a pizza. I like my pizza with pepperoni and shares of GOOG.

palish• 19 years ago

Holy moly. Way to go!

abstractbill2• 19 years ago

TechCrunch coverage here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/19/google-acquires-zenter-to-fill-out-coming-powerpoint-application/

migpwr• 19 years ago

Congrats to all yall as we say in the south!

rokhayakebe• 19 years ago

YC totally got a recipe.Paul G.tell us what it is. It has to be more than "Make something people want".

brlewis• 19 years ago

M.S.G.W.

davidw• 19 years ago

Yeah... something Larry and Sergey want is better than something that joe schmoe wants:-)

Congratulations are in order, in any case!

pg3• 19 years ago

YC's recipe is: make people make something people want.

Seriously, making something people want was exactly what the Zenters did. Everyone could see at Demo Day that they'd made something users would like.

bootload3• 19 years ago

"... The smart money is saying this is a build, not a buy. ..." ~ TC, April 17, 2007 ~ http://tinyurl.com/yo99gh

So if you make things that other want, did zenter purposefully make it's product to fill the gap in google office? If so it's a risky (ballsy) strategy to compete head to head with google if they have announced their intentions. What I want to know is what happened in the following 2 months?

Was zenter X times better than the internal version?

gibsonf12• 19 years ago

GigaOM Coverage: http://gigaom.com/2007/06/19/enter-zenter-google-office-is-now-complete/

brett• 19 years ago

Congrats.

chris• 19 years ago

Congrats dudes!!

startupper• 19 years ago

Congrats YC and Zenters!

plusbryan• 19 years ago

That's really exciting. Congrats to the team. And woot!, you just raised all our valuations a little bit!

Readmore• 19 years ago

Good work guys!

bk• 19 years ago

What technology did Zenter use to build their service? Python? Java? I'm just wondering if Google has a preference for certain technologies.

nostrademons• 19 years ago

Somebody asked Chris Sacca (one of Google's main acquisition guys) this at the first Startup School. His answer was "Build it in whatever language will let you get to market and start getting users fastest. Usually when Google buys a company, we have to rewrite all the code anyway to take advantage of Google's infrastructure and scale to millions of users."

This doesn't answer your question about Zenter, but it should about Google...

SwellJoe• 19 years ago

It's predominantly JavaScript.

I believe the back end is Java.

paulgb• 19 years ago

I think you are right. Whois.sc cached the server response headers before Google switched the server, and it was "Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_jk/1.2.21 SVN/1.4.4". mod_jk is a Tomcat connector, so it would make sense that the site would be written in Java.

jamongkad• 19 years ago

Congrats guys! happy to hear about your success!

brianmckenzie• 19 years ago

Way to go, Zenters!

neilj• 19 years ago

Congratulations to the Zenter team!

mqt• 19 years ago

It's interesting that Zenter agreed to an acquisition before publicly launching. I don't recall seeing this too often.

Would they have survived a presentation-ware duel with Google or would they have suffered a fate similar to Kiko's?

I can't remember when I first heard about Zenter but it seems like I've been anticipating its release for a while. We generally hear that it's good to release early and update often so I'm interested in the story behind all of this.

Would it have been better for them to hold out and build a user base so they could be acquired for more money?

far33d2• 19 years ago

Zenters - a question if you are around - did you ever end up hiring a non-founder employee?

It's official: Google buys Zenter

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