I don't want to speak for the founders, but looking at the factors surrounding this acquisition(little innovation, spam tactics, low price, unrelated acquirer), it is clear that Socialcam was a build-to-flip company. And as a build-to-flip company, it was a fantastically executed one at that.
Some people (pg included[1]) build companys just so they can sell them off one day. Many around here get worked up by that reality, but the cold, hard truth is that not everyone is in this game to change the world forever. Deal with it.
I agree. This is definitely not a long term business model and could only benefit if its built to sell. These people build a business out of tricking people into clicking their misleading title and video thumbnails that are populated from their Facebook Feed(almost like ads) to increase their stats and app users. People don't usually get fooled more than once, so their traffic is starting to decline. Like our president Bush once said "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again"
They have 200million unique visitors to their website according to Google Adplanner, many of which were probably forced to register as users. Also Viddy are behind them, yet valued at 370m. That's how I concluded that Socialcam was sold for cheap.
I think that built-to-flip vs dent-the-universe is a gross oversimplification and a false dichotomy. Maybe they were aiming to change the world, but their funding round wasn't coming together. Or maybe they lost the faith and decided to return money to their investors, rather than go bust. Maybe one of their key team members had a personal or family issue and needed more financial stability in a hurry. Maybe they learned so much about startups that they were wishing for a reset button. Maybe some combination of all of these things and more?
Startups are a repeat game. A base hit might just be the right career move. You can swing for the homerun on your next at-bat.
Having just gone through a small acquisition myself, I can tell you that it's incredibly bittersweet to pad your bank account by means of killing your baby. Unless you've gone through the process, you have no idea the extent and complexity of thought processes and emotions you experience as a founder.
I don't know anything about socialcam. I just heard of them for the first time with this headline. My comment is with respect to the wide range of small acquisitions.
Hahaha! Epic!! Its one of the shittiest apps I've ever used. Oh wait, I never used it at all - It used my account by itself! (Of course I did authorize it by mistake, ONCE!!)
This is somewhat surprising but not THAT much considering Autodesk makes a lot of creative finishing products and are trying to penetrate the consumer/indie space. (for example, Autodesk Smoke 2013 will cost ~25% of what Smoke 2012 did: http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/autodesk-smoke-2013/)
While this doesn't seem to be that much in line with their current product line, they can experiment in the mobile space, acquire a good team and maybe develop some new integration between creative finishing and mobile video.
Autodesk has apps[1] which work pretty well. I think they're trying to expand into the photo-measurement space, competing with companies like E-Template[2], measuring walls, rooms, and objects by analyzing a photo.
If they could morph SocialCam into an app to take photo/video, upload to their servers to do the math, then output to their app (or another part of their ecosystem), they would provide an incredible mobile utility that would both heavily impact the photo-measurement industry, and provide a massive gain to the 3d-printing early adopters. This is the kind of disruption that photo-measurement and 3d printing need.
My understanding is that a bunch of people clicked on Socialcam when it showed up in their news feed and didn't know they were signing up - now it seems the numbers are starting to reflect that not many people actually use it.
I don't know about their traffic but I would not be surprised if it had decined. Growth comes from paying attention to growth. But getting acquired, like raising money, is an immense drain on attention. In both cases it can put a startup in a dangerous pinch.
PG - are you serious? you seriously think that their decline in growth comes from anything other than facebook users seeing through their scam and facebook itself shutting off their spam channels?
You think that there is any chance in hell that they can maintain that kind of growth. Come on
I can't speak from experience about getting acquired, but I definitely see how it could be an attention drain. I was more speaking to the stickiness of the product. Socialcam grew really quickly, but shrunk just as fast because people didn't stay around. That to me seems very hard to monetize.
Would it be inappropriate for pg to give an honest assessment of Socialcam considering his involvement with the company and his history with the founders? I would love to read a sincere evaluation from pg's perspective on Socialcam's method of growth and the real value to it's acquirer.
I met these guys at work at a startup. Before meeting them I had an overwhelming desire to punch them in the face when I heard they founded SocialCam. In reality they are really nice and congrats on the sale!
Autodesk of now is a collection of products and companies that vary from CAD software to online photo editing to 3D Studio Max to Maya and a variety of video filter and processing.
Think about that for a second. They make professional grade video finishing software. Socialcam is a casual video sharing community with a variety of video finishing processes available.
Autodesk is actually a pretty cool company in the enterprise space. They're historically a CAD behemoth, but have been releasing a bunch of apps and experimenting with different business models. Their software is typically rough around the edges, but they could have something cool up their sleeves with this.
In the CAD space, Autodesk is anything but "rough around the edges." The only time that was a reasonable argument was when they rewrote AutoCAD to be object oriented in the mid 1990's and issued it as Release 13. Otherwise, relative to their competitors they are able to deliver solid applications and reliable implementations of new features (maybe it's their Lisp background?)
It's a big deal but not totally unknown for Autodesk. A quick look on the Play store shows they also own "Pixlr-o-matic", an image editing app. They've been experimenting with consumer-facing stuff for a while.
Looks like Autodesk may be purchasing talent. Seibel is certainly someone who could fit into Autodesk's executive succession track; Bartram has some pretty solid technical chops in video, and Luccisano has a strong Rails background.
As Autodesk reengages in multi-platform development, all three developers potentially deepen the in-house knowledge-base - I try to keep in mind that Autodesk is a mature company and has always seemed to have had a bit more of an academic culture than a typical software company (e.g. the use of Lisp in their flagship product).
I consider Adobe and Autodesk to be premium digital content creation tool company. It sort of (well, not really, but...) makes sense in that direction.
Autodesk wrote my favorite mobile photo filter app: Pixlr-o-Matic. They've made some really interesting contributions to the mobile imaging space, including Sketch, a drafting tool for phones and tablets. Another competent company in this space is very welcome indeed.
My first reaction was, "only $60 million?". SocialCam had huge traction and was winning the social video space. Why exit now? If they would have kept plugging away, couldn't they have gotten a much bigger exit?
Siebel did say in the article that video wasn't like pics and it was much harder for users to adopt. I wonder if engagement wasn't as high as it appeared or if their retention wasnt good. There must have been something that mad them sell this early. Just my 2cents.
SocialCam will never have any long term users because they spam that crap out of everyone's Facebook wall with 15 second videos with misleading title. Doesn't matter how much traction they have now or before eventually these types of site will die down because they are abusing the system and tricking the users into watching the video. How many times do you think a user will click on a misleading video until they completely stop?
Seems pretty clear there were (are) some pretty big problems under the hood, even though they did a World class job of gaming the metrics TechCrunch, investors etc care about.
The founders will be writing a ton of articles, giving a lot of talks, and advising a lot of companies on how to build successful companies and products.
Just do not expect them to be anything but honest.
At first I was surprised by Authodesk acquisition. However, there seem to be some logic to this and I think it could be result in a big win-win for both of them.
SocialCam or "SocialScam" as I call it, used some spammy stuff to show traction. Right or wrong, fake or real, this traction is probably what Autodesk bought into. Given the amount of visual editing technology and image processing knowhow that exist in the autodesk, this marriage would allow autodesk a platform to build and potentially become the market leader in video editing and sharing on the mobile space.
A picture (with filters) is worth $1 billion. A video (with filters), apparently, is worth $60 million. Congrats to the team. Certainly an interesting move for Autodesk.
Autodesk sounds like a weird acquirer, but I'm happy for them. I had heard that they had been diluted to nothing in justin.tv so I'm glad they got the reward they deserve.
Some people (pg included[1]) build companys just so they can sell them off one day. Many around here get worked up by that reality, but the cold, hard truth is that not everyone is in this game to change the world forever. Deal with it.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3178029
(edit: reference)