Marissa Mayer will close her old AI startup, sell assets to her new AI startup

https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/29/marissa-mayer-will-close-her-old-startup-sell-assets-to-her-new-startup/

by bookofjoe • 10 months ago

102 106 10 months ago

techcrunch.com

philipwhiuk• 10 months ago

What's the benefit of this paperwork re-arrangement?

nextworddev2• 10 months ago

restructuring

pkphilip• 10 months ago

You are buying the assets from the previous company but not its liabilities. So the previous company can file for bankruptcy without affecting the new company.

Also, since the new company is buying the assets, it improves the books in the old company and the extra funds will be used to pay off some of the debtors without the debtors being able to access the assets in the new company.

dtnewman• 10 months ago

Seems like a non-story? Person starts a company and for legal or other technical reasons needs to restructure it. This happens all the time.

tiahura• 10 months ago

and, as per the article, largely self-funded.

newfocogi• 10 months ago

"Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer is closing the doors on her consumer software startup Sunshine, and is selling the company’s assets to her new AI startup, Dazzle" and "all of Sunshine’s employees will move to the new company".

Under what conditions is it better to buy the assets and hire the employees instead of just change the name and product offering of the company? Is it just to get the investors off the cap table?

prasadjoglekar• 10 months ago

Clean cap table is quite valuable.

bix67• 10 months ago

Valuable to new investors. Old investors get hosed. I really struggle with these sorts of situations. She’s presumably doing something similar with the new company so all the old investors who didn’t participate (presuming a pay to play) get hosed. Is that really fair?

mbesto• 10 months ago

Clean cap table and she probably provided a decent amount of the funding for the first startup. It's also more than likely a tax thing here. I don't think people ought to get too obsessed with the contractual details on this one.

ajross• 10 months ago

It's "valuable" to the company and to new investors. It's quite the opposite to old investors. In the world of public companies, a "liquidate a shell company" trick like this is presumptively fraud. If you want to liquidate the company you have to buy back the stock at market price, not whatever your purchaser is offering.

It's legitimate only if the existing investors are getting enough liquidity back from the sale to make it worth the transaction. The article says that "almost" all the investors are on board, so... maybe.

taeric2• 10 months ago

Ostensibly, it is in what you left out of your question? If you can buy the assets, specifically, you can not buy the liabilities.

Obviously, getting some people off of obligation lists is one of them. There could be others?

xp842• 10 months ago

Indeed; and when you don't want the brand it's even more ideal. We saw a few months ago an example of the "new company" buying the brand and the assets but not the liabilities, including some suckers who bought "lifetime" subscriptions[1] from the old owners that they allegedly didn't even disclose, and which legally speaking weren't the liability of this random unrelated company which just bought the assets and the brand of the defunct company who made the promises.

In this case though with a new name and product that won't be an issue.

[1] someone else will remember the name of that company - it escapes me

eig• 10 months ago

Is it not illegal in the US to break up a company to isolate liabilities?

brudgers• 10 months ago

Liabilities don’t transfer, Corporate structure doesn’t transfer, and as you point out investors don’t either.

Soft liabilities may be significant. For example here we are talking about the move. The headline “Sunshine launches Dazzle” is about a failing company and we wouldn’t be talking about it on the HN front page.

And if you are adequately capitalized (you probably are not), starting a new company is an easy business decision. And if you are a serial entrepreneur, starting new companies is what you do.

caycep• 10 months ago

the old "burn down the restaurant to avoid taxes, build new restaurant under another name" play common here in the San Gabriel valley area...

freejazz• 10 months ago

Because you can get rid of liabilities...

SMAAART• 10 months ago

When new capital is needed, the old investors (investors in the old company) are given the equivalent of cents on the dollar on the new company, while the new investors do the usual.

Old investors are welcome to put new money into the new venture, of course.

ugh123• 10 months ago

This person has a history of failures venturing on their own.

pydry• 10 months ago

A history of failures period. She surfed google's wave of success before proving conclusively at yahoo that it couldnt have had anything to do with her.

carlosdiaz3rd• 10 months ago

This is a description of the entire SaaS startup ecosystem; surfed on ZIRP but so so many AWS configurators are 100% convinced their deep memorization of syntax structures and git pull <all the deps> were real value creation

moffkalast• 10 months ago

I thought Americans figured that was the best thing ever or something.

Keyframe• 10 months ago

How she gets any investment going anymore is a great mystery.

oltmang• 10 months ago

People still give Adam Neumann money

watwut• 10 months ago

Some people get investment money again and again and again and again and all their failures are somehow positive things.

tootie• 10 months ago

How did Sunshine operate for so long? I remember when it was announced and nobody understood what it was for. It never gained adoption. Presumably never had much, if any, revenue. Was it pure vanity?

baal80spam• 10 months ago

But of course she will.

computerphage• 10 months ago

"due to privacy concerns about privacy"

This strikes me as a particularly funny typo

cosmicgadget2• 10 months ago

Probably wrote "due to concerns about privacy" then realized it should be "due to privacy concerns" and forgot to remove the original bit.

Many such cases.

antod• 10 months ago

I often do that frequently. I should do it, but forget to not fully proof read after a quick edit. I also regularly leave out n't a lot when changing where a negation happens (see above).

crossroadsguy2• 10 months ago

Definitely not using Apple's epic proofread feature.

neilv• 10 months ago

"In hindsight, the ad slogan 'Sunshine on your privacy' was a little too obvious, even for modern consumers. Let's Dazzle them with the next shiny thing instead."

geodel• 10 months ago

As long there is new logo designed by founder/CEO I am in.

mortoc• 10 months ago

"That product saw little adoption due to privacy concerns about privacy, and pretty much languished."

- A professional writer

ipsum2• 10 months ago

Typos and grammatical errors are common in journalism nowadays, even with formerly respected organizations like APNews.

lesuorac• 10 months ago

I think they're pointing out that the sentence is symmetric.

"That product saw little adoption" - "and pretty much languished."

"privacy concerns" - "about privacy"

blackoil• 10 months ago

I think it boils down to you get what you pay for. If information is free, it will become same as noise.

boothby• 10 months ago

It's crossed my mind that a couple of a certain class of typos in a document has become a signal of authenticity. It's only a matter of time* before we see prompting or even manual editing adapt to falsify that signal.

* before this comment gets a single upvote, somebody will have vibe-coded this

oldandboring• 10 months ago

The article also misspelled her last name.

elicash• 10 months ago

Getting rid of editors happened at the same time as shorter deadlines. I'm sympathetic.

stathibus• 10 months ago

Makes sense, lack of editors is why all my essays in high school weren’t any good either

busymom02• 10 months ago

Ironically, an AI would write a better sentence than this professional writer.

krona• 10 months ago

Poor style gives a sense of character and authenticity.

LeifCarrotson• 10 months ago

The AI would, hands down, write a better sentence if you compared the output quality of an author writing 10,000 words per day with an AI writing 10,000 words per day. Or make the AI write 100,000 words per day, it could write sentences better than that 24/7 without breaking a sweat, while the human would literally be incapable of achieving this goal.

But if you gave both a month to write the best 400 word article they could possibly generate on a particular subject, the human author would dominate. Give them time to make a few drafts, to research and think and talk to people, to edit and reorganize and restart and rehearse, and they'll produce something that's worth being read and re-read and considered thoughtfully by thousands of people.

The problem is that the journalism industry has become optimized to generate content to be skimmed by a few people and read by thousands of bots.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 10 months ago

Why can't "AI" be used to fix such errors

Unless this grammatical error is extremely common, LLMs should make this an easy one to detect (relatively low probability of next token)

Why not use "AI" to fix human error (like this one, presumably) instead of expecting people to fix "AI" output

azinman22• 10 months ago

First a contacts app that bombed, and now an ai assistant? I fear she’s stuck in the past and now is in a beyond crowded space. Have any of her attempts post google worked?

nextworddev2• 10 months ago

You just need to be lucky once

NickC25• 10 months ago

Have any of her attempts post google worked?

Yes. She made a tremendous amount of money for herself while failing miserably at Yahoo!.

Oh, you mean attempts at getting workable, groundbreaking new products out into the market with success? No.

toast02• 10 months ago

Yes. She made a tremendous amount of money for herself while failing miserably at Yahoo!.

I was at Yahoo from 2004-2011, so I've got my opinions, but I think failing miserably at Yahoo is like the default option. It was a great gig to take in 2012 --- if you do well, well then it's clearly your leadership; if you don't do well, it's that Yahoo wasn't salvageable.

collingreen3• 10 months ago

She is clearly an amazing negotiator if nothing else. She made a spectacular amount of money running yahoo even faster into the ground. Imagine being paid 100M just to go away. Inspiring in its own way.

freeopinion• 10 months ago

It depends on what you think she is attempting. If you consider that she is attempting to maintain a certain standard of living, then yes, it is working. There is a strange reality where you can get other people to pay you millions of dollars a year because somebody else previously paid you millions of dollars a year. You might have to keep shuffling who pays you, though.

azinman22• 10 months ago

According to the article it’s largely self paid. I’d also be surprised anyone for a pre-product startup is being paid millions a year to run it… even her.

cosmicgadget2• 10 months ago

Originally founded in 2018, Sunshine first launched with a subscription app for contact management, dubbed “Sunshine Contacts.”

I'm sure the new venture will be just as disruptive.

thm• 10 months ago

What Got You Here Won't Get You There.

fishmicrowaver• 10 months ago

Time to load up the Marissa laugh loop on YT while reading this

add-sub-mul-div• 10 months ago

"Slorp is now BONTO!"

jacquesm• 10 months ago

The eternal sunshine of the spotless start-up.

Mayer's track record is good enough that she's able to attract new investors easily enough but I wonder if they actually expect a return or if they see it as a lottery ticket.

rightbyte• 10 months ago

The Adam Neumann-effect. Wasting alot of investor money indicates that you got the know how to do it again.

I mean it is a hard to make people give you other peoples money which is worth investing in.

inerte3• 10 months ago

I think VCs see those things as one :)

crossroadsguy2• 10 months ago

From what I have seen in the Bangalore VC scene, a founder doesn't at all have to have a good track record to attract VC money again and again. They just have to have raised before, and they will raise again, no matter how badly and shadily they sunk the last ship(s). Maybe it's different in the OG valley.

nivertech3• 10 months ago

Both apps have been downloaded just over 1,000 times on the Google Play Store.

The company had raised about $20 million in 2020.

$20K per free app download?

bix67• 10 months ago

Now that’s some CAC!

frankfrank133• 10 months ago

It was a paid subscription!

runlaszlorun• 10 months ago

Yes but they'll make it up in volume...

itemize1232• 10 months ago

that's not too useful ratio isn't it? investment is going to be lumped at the onset

nivertech3• 10 months ago

I'm not criticizing.

I think these 2 apps were experiments.

They probably wanted organic downloads only, in order to identify real user needs / find PM/F.

Otherwise, it's hard to explain why they wouldn't spend money on marketing/advertising.

lisbbb• 10 months ago

Another whiff of 2001. I wonder if they will remove all the copper wiring and toilet paper from the office before they vanish?

lbriner• 10 months ago

A lot of misunderstanding here about "why would you invest in someone who has failed?"

An investor is a gambler. Not just on past success, although I'm sure Marissa has had some successes even if people don't know them.

They gamble on: 1) Has this person got the experience (good or bad) to run a business. A failed business leader is a better gamble than someone with no experience. 2) Does this person have a strong network so they can realistically pull in some really good people? 3) Has this person raised capital before? 4) Do they have a convincing narrative about why they have failed and what they might do differently? 5) Is the potential ROI high? 6) Do I have anything else I could invest in instead with better odds?

If I think as an Investor and not as an Engineer, I am not surprised that she has succeeded and I wish her all the best.

Ekaros• 10 months ago

Could there also be 7) Can I sell or offer something to this new company and prop up my other parts of my portfolio?

nivertech3• 10 months ago

aka "loss leader" or "supporting the ecosystem"

e.g. VCs invest in startups commercializing open-source foundational/infrastructure projects not only for the financial RoI, but also because it helps their portfolio companies succeed faster while maintaining a smaller headcount or spending less on non-core R&D.

frankfrank133• 10 months ago

i use Sunshine contacts, its pretty nice. I used to have a work phone, my personal phone, and tons of linkedin and Gmail contacts, and I use Sunshine to sync them all to icloud. Works well! Was always super put off by the photos app, but I just never used it.

I like Marissa Mayer, but I'm shocked at how little investment these apps got over the years, despite being the *only* apps they offered. What was this startup lab even doing? For five years!!

frankfrank133• 10 months ago

If anyone has a replacement I am all ears

BLanen• 10 months ago

That product saw little adoption due to privacy concerns about privacy, and pretty much languished.

This sentence reeks AI-writing

Marissa Mayer will close her old AI startup, sell assets to her new AI startup

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