Wow, this is really good news. Omnisio, how long did it take you from the inception of the idea to selling it?
Why did Google/Youtube spend $15mil acquiring the company instead of creating a similar service? I think more than the technology itself, Google would like to hire the Omnisio team.
Startups consist of much more than just "number of lines of code written." It's not that black and white.
When you make an acquisition, you inherit not just code, but you inherit the massive amounts of iterations the product went through. That's part of the problem these days: everyone looks at a product and they forget the painstaking amount of time and dedication that went into getting it that far. It took a lot of sleepless nights and coffee.
Not to mention, you're inheriting the users (which also have an acquisition cost, even to Omnisio, it may have been going around and talking to people individually about feature requests and bugs, etc).
In addition, you're acquiring the talent behind the startup. These are people who not just understand how to code, but they develop products with the user in mind. They have the determination and persistence to get updates done and out the door. If you sit these guys in front of a board, or in front of investors, they have already proven that they will not flake out or give up. This is something that sounds trivial, but a lot of people lack the self-motivation to direct a project like this into completion and market adoption.
I'm missing a lot of other things, but that gives you an idea that the startup you look at is far more than just pages that show stuff.
Also, major props to the really strong UI work at Omnisio. UI is becoming one of the most overlooked aspects of technology. People focus a lot on the engineering or code or architecture or scaling, but forget that the usability is really what makes it enjoyable to use the product in the first place.
Why did Google/Youtube spend $15mil acquiring the company instead of creating a similar service? I think more than the technology itself, Google would like to hire the Omnisio team.