Waze Co-Founder Skips Google to Try Startup World Again

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-24/waze-co-founder-skips-google-to-try-startup-world-again.html

by gwendolynregina • 12 years ago

102 31 12 years ago

bloomberg.com

Tloewald• 12 years ago

A little more than [the customary] six months, but not much.

philip1209• 12 years ago

Are golden handcuffs not typical at that deal size?

brown• 12 years ago

2-4 years is standard. I bet he left a lot of cash on the table.

jusben1369• 12 years ago

It depends. I think acqui-hires have kind of impacted that impression. For larger startups that are acquired many times it's assume that the founder/entrepreneur will not go over with the acquisition. All parties understand they just won't be interested/do well inside a bigger corp. So the COO/CFO/Head of Sales often is the new "number 1" that stays and ensures a smoother transition.

It's hard for me to undertsand if that's what happened here: "After selling map-software provider Waze to Google for $1.1 billion last June, the 49-year-old Israeli decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer." that would seem to read like he never went over at all.

hueving• 12 years ago

It really depends. If Waze was large enough the founder may have been hands off from the engineering side at that point so he wouldn't have much value to Google at that point. Golden handcuffs are usually attached to the employees that have essential technical knowledge.

jack-r-abbit2• 12 years ago

[Uri Levine] decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer

I think that means he was not acqui-hired. He didn't work for Google after the sale. He just took his money and moved on. Lots of employees of acquired companies don't join their acquirer for one reason or another. I suppose that can work for founders too. I've read of a few founders that were disappointed once they were acqui-hired because they lost control of something they had built... but still have to work on it.

oznathan2• 12 years ago

Uri wasn't full-time at Waze for a while now.. he co-founded Feex almost 2 years ago, and he's also not full time there. He does a lot of angel investments. I don't think that him joining Google was every a possibility.

coreymgilmore• 12 years ago

The guy has drive, can't doubt that.

jack-r-abbit2• 12 years ago

That article has four links to other articles but not a link to the company it is profiling. I hate when they do that.

https://www.feex.com/

privong2• 12 years ago

It is annoying. But on the flip side, if the link was included, someone would have invariably commented that the "article reads like an ad". The authors can't win.

jonathanjaeger• 12 years ago

I disagree. I think it's MUCH worse when, for example, you read an article about a Kickstarter project on Mashable or TechCrunch only to find that clicking on the hyperlink leads to other articles on those sites about Kickstarter and not the actual project link. I think those sites have gotten better at linking directly when commenters complain.

corresation• 12 years ago

This is a growing anti-web trend -- the tendency of web properties to only self-link. I assume someone somewhere has actual metrics justifying this, but it's the antithesis of what the web is about, but it's exactly why the only links in this article are to other Bloomberg Business Week articles.

lauradhamilton• 12 years ago

I think the idea is to pass your SEO juice to your other pages rather than external pages.

d0ugie• 12 years ago

Has Google done anything with Waze other than buy it, or with Google Maps, incorporating some Waze treats? Haven't seen any noteworthy changes to either Waze or Google Maps that one might have (optimistically) expected as becoming both feasible and worthwhile from the deal.

Scaevolus• 12 years ago

Yes, Google Maps now includes realtime traffic updates based on the Waze app.

snarf• 12 years ago

I'd be really surprised if they do a whole lot with it. My impressions was that the main reason they bought Waze was to keep Facebook from acquiring it.

eliben• 12 years ago

Your comment looks really silly in light of the two directly above it.

jedberg• 12 years ago

If you hover over accidents in Google Maps, sometimes it says "reported by Waze". I assume there is lots of data mixing happening on the backend that we can't see.

mjcohen• 12 years ago

When is Google Maps going to restore "Save as Contact"? I keep my old Galaxy Nexus around so I can use Maps 6. The new Maps is a definite downgrade.

oznathan2• 12 years ago

They did a successful pilot in Israel this past year. A lot of people use them and saved significant amounts of money. They use the Waze founder for PR but he is not the real story, the service is.

mathattack2• 12 years ago

Awesome idea. The fees on 401Ks are awful. My company has fees on index funds 4 times the competition. When I asked why, I was told, "Because that's the only way we can make money." Umm...... Fidelity does fine with 1/4 the fees, so does Vanguard.

technotony• 12 years ago

This could be a scale effect. Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run, so if your company only has 1/4 the assets under management then their comment might be true.

zhte415• 12 years ago

Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run

It is, but not an overly expensive one. I worked for a couple of years in an asset management operation where we managed a variety of funds, all with different risk-return mixes. The smallest fund was a few hundred thousand pounds, the largest around three billion. Total assets under management were about five billion pounds, the most complex of which was a pension fund.

Front office consisted myself (the most junior member of the front office) plus 4 others, including the chief investment manager. Middle office consisted one person who was also the back office manager, and back office, including the department secretary, was four people.

Total department budget was less than a million per year - including office rent, taxes, information services (Bloomberg, Datastream, etc) yet we substantially outperformed (usually within one standard deviation, occasionally outside) performance and risk budgets, as they were defined to us by trustees. And we worked eight hour days, a rarity in the City at any institution.

In hindsight, what we did was quite simple - invest in what we thought was wise, and not worry too much. Much mainstream investment management seems to be embodiment-in-large of the Peter Principal: create work in order to seem busy / important. The upside of the Peter Principal is to collect large bonuses by virtue of seeming important, of which none of us did, as it was simply a job - look after the organisation's funds and the pensioners' pensions. This organisation was somewhat unique in both mandate and people attracted to it.

tl;dr Fund management costs, for a collection of a pretty good performing funds, was 0.02%. This excludes broker fees and management fees of indirectly invested funds.

Byline: I am of course aware that having a single middle office manager is far from ideal, and that the middle office manager managing the back office is bad from an operational control perspective. This was changed after I left.

mathattack2• 12 years ago

That's how they described it to me. It was "We can do this, or charge your company a fixed fee per person." I still didn't like it.

up_and_up• 12 years ago

the 49-year-old

Given the prevalence 'youth worship' articles on here lately it is good to point his age out to people.

Get out there and make an impact regardless of your age or situation.

josefresco• 12 years ago

Like you I immediately thought of the recent ageism articles on HN and specifically PG's comment about the "cut off" age for consideration for tech-investors being 32.

harel• 12 years ago

What a silly thing to have a 'cut off' age for techies. Like a good Single Malt or Wine, we get better and better with time. Age delivers on certain pragmatism not found in the youth of today :)

andrewfong• 12 years ago

I think it's only 32 if you're relatively unknown or unproven. If you're Biz Stone, raising outside financing (in addition to your own cash) shouldn't be a huge barrier. Likewise, I doubt Uri will have a hard time with that 32-year cutoff now that he's had a $1.1 billion exit.

kirubakaran• 12 years ago

Link to the said comment please. I'm unable to find it.

Waze Co-Founder Skips Google to Try Startup World Again

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