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According to a Monday report in Bloomberg Businessweek, Square has acquired the "five- to ten-person" engineering team of Yik Yak for $3 million. That leaves just a handful of employees at the Atlanta-based social networking startup. In December 2016, the company already fired 30 of its 50 employees.
Since late last year, Yik Yak has largely gone silent. Its Twitter account hasn't posted since January 4, and its corporate blog has not posted since a month before that. According to Bloomberg, Square has not acquired any other companies since it bought the food delivery startup Caviar in 2014. (Square was founded as a mobile payment company in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who also founded Twitter.)
Sounds like bad news for Yik Yak, good news for Yik Yak's engineers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:36PM
If I understand the acquisition correctly, it was a "win" for the Yik Yak owner/investors and presumably a win for Square who got not only "five to ten" valuable developers, but presumably a team that is greater than the sum of its parts, along with rights to practice certain IP, etc. $3M may seem high for ~9 employees, but the IP alone could have gone for that.
I was recently "acquired" as part of an ~$85M deal that was mostly IP, but also included ~20 employees of all types. As part of the acquisition, I received approximately 6 months' salary as a bonus for staying on for at least a year post acquisition, along with continuous employment through the transition - a very nice deal for me.
And, yes, we are being traded like slaves - but slaves with the option to hurt ourselves financially and pursue other opportunities if we so choose. Employment at will, if you've got a better deal then take it. Thing is, the deals being offered to wage slaves are often a small fraction of the actual value of the labor to the employer - very few true profit sharing opportunities out there for people who join with talent but no investment capital.
Oblig. John Lennon Quote: "You're all F-ing peasants, as far as I can see."
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