Think Twice Before You Sell Out
Posted on April 19, 2007, under Development, Search, Tools and Services.
It’s been all over the blogosphere lately Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert have resigned from Google where they have been employees since May of 2005 when their company Dodgeball was acquired. An official quote sheds some light to their reasoning behind the departure.
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. And while it was a tough decision (and really disappointing) to walk away from dodgeball, I’m actually looking forward to getting to work on other projects again.
This isn’t the first time that Google has shelfed an acquisition, I have been waiting to see something out of Measure Map for sometime but feel it’s a lost cause. Google isn’t alone with this, it’s not too uncommon for large companies to acquire a smaller company for the technology, talent, or just to remove them from the market. And while some might think selling out to the man is a great deal: you get some cash, stock options, and going to work for the #1 company to work for; at the end of the day there is still a direction to take the service or product that is being acquired. Entrepreneurs have a great deal of passion for their product, and sometimes being acquired means more resources and a wider audience, sometimes it means having to deal with someone else telling you the new direction of that product.
Many have balked at Kevin Rose of Digg.com and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook for not selling out when the price is right, but I say that this just proves they are more motivated by making the service better than a pay day. Turning down millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars isn’t easy, I guess it depends on your driving force.
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