Yahoo acquires Xobni

http://allthingsd.com/20130703/yahoo-acquires-xobni-for-upwards-of-30-million-like-atd-said-part-2/

by posharma • 13 years ago

80 40 13 years ago

rabble• 13 years ago

That's pretty funny, Xobni's CEO is Jeff Bonforte who used to be a yahoo running IM and eventually part of the business where delicious was. Now he's been brought back in.

btucker• 13 years ago

All these acquisitions by Yahoo is making it feel like 2005.

aresant• 13 years ago

I haven't encountered Xobni since I quit Outlook a few years back, but at the time I remember it being a very innovative and interesting layer that I actually got value from.

Pairing the Xobni brains w/the Yahoo Mail product could create a compelling reason to give something other than GMAIL a look.

rocky1138• 13 years ago

If Y! Mail wants to pull a ton of users from Gmail they should offer NSA-free, snooping-free email similar to how DDG does search.

statictype• 13 years ago

Somehow, I doubt very much they would pull a ton of users from Gmail with that claim.

packetslave• 13 years ago

How do you propose that Yahoo (a US-based company, subject to US laws, just like Google) do this?

jforman• 13 years ago

Your searches don't need to persist. Your mail kinda does. And since US law compels US companies to comply with warrants, this isn't possible to do.

psbp• 13 years ago

Are we pretending that Yahoo wasn't part of PRISM as well?

DanBlake• 13 years ago

Seems like they would have been better off just taking the rumored 20m from microsoft in 2008 (before they raised FIVE additional rounds of funding to the tune of nearly 40m).

2pasc2• 13 years ago

That's for sure. But hindsight is 20/20, and when you are growing like a weed, like they were at the time, it's easy to be caught in the "I want more" mindset, especially when you are a younger founder.

Andnowfor3• 13 years ago

The big assumption here of course is they had the choice.

wslh• 13 years ago

I followed Xobni since their inception since my company did similar things for other companies that have a shorter life or were acquired for other services like MX Logic.

Following their last investing rounds I realized that they were looking for investment when the previous investment was exhausted. I calculated approximately their expenses and the number of employees from LinkedIn.

TallGuyShort• 13 years ago

I would ask who they're going to acquire tomorrow, but that would be ridiculous and silly. Tomorrow's a federal holiday in the States.

jfb• 13 years ago

Oh, I don't know -- desperate money never sleeps.

kunle• 13 years ago

Still have Xobni installed, it's been very useful. Hope it gets better - congrats to these guys.

jdale27• 13 years ago

According to Techcrunch, the price was "somewhere in the $60 million-plus range" (http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/03/source-xobni-was-acquired-f...). That makes it look a little better, considering they raised nearly $42 million over the years.

mathrawka2• 13 years ago

I imagine they raised that $42m at a higher valuation... giving investors preferred stock, meaning normal stock for employees was worth nothing.

Zelphyr3• 13 years ago

Proof of why, as jwz says, stock options are a stupid tax and a lottery.

Andnowfor3• 13 years ago

Don't forget the founders, which likely had common. If current management has no desire to do right by early employees, common can be set to $0.

baydinalex• 13 years ago

Way back when we were just starting to think about Baydin, Xobni was one of the models for how we could build a company based on an email plugin.

Their tech was so cool -- we'd never seen anything like it. Then Bill Gates demoed Xobni on stage, they had so many downloads, and rumors about acquisitions swirled in the press. It sounded so glamorous and so exciting. And, honestly, so fast and easy.

We didn't know that Xobni had been at it for two years already when they were featured in that keynote. And we certainly weren't thinking at all about a story of 7 years of grind, improvements, and putting one foot in front of the other every day. Helicopter rides, keynotes, WSJ profiles, and closing fundraising deals get the headlines, but behind the scenes, it's releases, updates, support, and hard work.

Now that we're a few years into our own story of grind, improvements, and putting one foot in front of the other every day, we have a ton of respect for what Xobni put together over the past 7 years. Obviously, this isn't the outcome that everyone was hoping for, but it's easy to look at the numbers and forget 2008-2009, when Xobni was at the top of the world.

Thanks, Adam, Matt, and the rest of you who were early in Xobni for building something magical and inspiring us to build something of our own. And congratulations on the end of a long journey.

ajju2• 13 years ago

It has become rare to see such genuine meaningul positive comments on HN but it's gratifying to see it still happens. Bravo BaydinAlex!

mh-• 13 years ago

for those who don't recognize the Baydin[0] brand (I didn't), they're the folks behind Boomerang[1] - which is pretty awesome.

[0] http://www.baydin.com/

[1] http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ http://www.baydin.com/boomerang/index.html

presty• 13 years ago

Funny no one mentions that the founders left the company long ago.

ajju2• 13 years ago

Well done Xobni

yashg• 13 years ago

Yahoo it seems is acquiring a startup a day. Are they going to buy entire Internet?

bifrost• 13 years ago

I hope so.

someone_inside• 13 years ago

A word of advice: stay clear of Jeff Bonforte. Cronyism defines his career and nothing more.

bonforte• 13 years ago

So true: stay away from Jeff Bonforte. Wait...I'm Jeff Bonforte. Dammit, this is going to be harder than I thought.

Yahoo acquires Xobni

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