Michael Moritz (Sequoia partner) is still on the board of Green Dot, now a publicly traded company worth north of a billion dollars. Almost the entire board (http://ir.greendot.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=235286&p=irol-gov...
) is Private Equity/VC guys, they do this kind of inside baseball all the time, it's no sweat off their back to do Moritz a favor.
He convinces Green Dot to acquire Loopt for a huge amount of cash (Green Dot was sitting on $225 million in cash). Sequoia makes a cool $15 million.
Related: the always-informative Planet Money did a special on Private Equity and you can see how Bain Capital got its money back on a company that went bankrupt: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/02/23/147257517/how-mitt...
TL;DR the company they bought acquired another company and raised significant debt- they used that debt to pay back Bain Capital.
I do this in reverse quite frequently. I'm on OKCupid and when I want to find out more about someone I'm interested in, I use Google Images reverse image search (http://www.google.com/imghp) - click on the little camera and dump the img url. I would say about 30% of the time it leads me to their same photo on some other site, after which I have their full name and can do more background checking.
That is totally true, but a very large percentage of those 1 million are people who simply have no chance of getting the job. Google is seen as a hot company and place to work for so it attracts a lot of resumes, much more than microsoft ever was...
How about we start to act on this by not posting and/or flagging every post from pandodaily, techcrunch, and uncrunched? I think we'd have a better HN experience all around.
If you tell us what site it is there is a chance that the right acquirer might be on this forum who wants to buy it, invest a little and use it as a lifestyle business.
Between the 2 options it is more of a personal choice, but one will become more clear if you have an offer. I'd suggest posting it on those flippa type sites at what you're willing to sell for and seeing if anyone bites.
I asked them about this - they don't handle marketplace businesses (Taking money on behalf of another customer), for the same regulatory issues previously stated. PoundPay (also YC) is trying to solve this issue but I haven't heard a peep out of them... Also it is quite annoying because I paid for a zaarly and it showed poundpay on my statement, I had no idea what it was.
Seems like it might be a pretty complicated thing to add... No other marketplaces that I know of have their own processing capabilities... Third party aggregation (taking payments on behalf of someone else) has many quite-complicated regulatory issues.
The only major problem I see here is the app store itself. Discoverability is a huge problem... It is the one that I am most shocked that Apple has done nothing about. I routinely have trouble finding apps that have been released, and it is easy to get lost in the crowd. My company has released a few apps (we contract for other guys) and it is almost pure luck which ones end up picking up steam (certainly not our best work).
I don't know the android market well... it seems to be better, but only on the margins. I am surprised that noone has come up with a better way.
I feel like I am becoming a ridiculous Samurai supporter in a world of Stripe supporters on HN (odd because we know they have many large customers), but my large (seasonal business, 8-figures a month for 5 months a year) contract employer chose Samurai last month and we've been very pleased. We still are splitting our transactions between them and another provider but we've been very satisfied w/ Samurai thus far and will probably migrate all of our transactions to them over the next couple of months. They have an amazing API - can do the stuff referenced in the above article... See: https://samurai.feefighters.com/developers/samurai-js and were fantastic to work with. They also have a campfire room that is usually staffed and helpful
I ended up choosing them for my non-day-job gig as well (saas business) and am very happy. Happy that both of these services exist, really.
Really quickly, this guy has clearly not researched the field. We (I do contract work for a large e-commerce business that does 8 figures USD a month and have a side recurring saas company that will do 5 figures a month in Jan). We looked at Litle, Braintree, Stripe, and Samurai. We quickly eliminated Stripe because it's expensive and then had an RFP for the other guys. For my contract job, Samurai ended up winning out over Litle and Braintree (Ended up being between Litle and Samurai in the end). I can't recommend the FeeFighters guys highly enough... I worked with them on my contract gig and ended up using them for my side project too. They have a fantastic API - http://samurai.feefighters.com/developers and were just great to work with. For my contract job (big bureaucratic company) we just tokenized ~a million credit cards with them and have shifted about half of our transactions that way.
Stripe is way better than paypal. It is also really expensive. Unless you are a hobby website, I wouldn't give it much thought, except for something to grow up out of. For real businesses, I think the flexibility afforded by a real merchant account plus gateway (Braintree, Litle, or Samurai) is worth a lot.
Yes, he is Chairman, but not involved on a day-to-day basis. Note that in the link you posted the most recent article wrt microsoft and bill gates is in June 2008
If he was really running the show I think things would be very different (ie they wouldn't have f'd nearly everything up like ballmer has)
