Google made another acquisition announcement today - they’ve bought a company called Zenter (”a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations”) to help complete their upcoming Powerpoint/presentation application. The price wasn’t disclosed.
This is another liquidity event for Y Combinator, which funded Zenter (we covered their debut here).
Google has been rumored to be creating an online Powerpoint clone since February. In April the rumors were confirmed by Eric Schmidt and then on the Google blog. As with the other applications in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, most of the technology seems to be imported. Google previously acquired Tonic Systems for their presentation technology.
Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features. It complements Tonic, which focused on the back end technology for converting powerpoint presentations into Java objects. Zenter takes a more social look at slide shows, letting users share their projects and incorporate content directly from the web, including Google Images.
You can see coverage on other Y Combinator startups (like Weebly, Buxfer, Writewith, Overhear.us, Snipshot, Justin.tv, and Xobni) here and here.
Beyond presentations, I would like to see a project management tool and diagram creation tool. Please acquire companies with those product soon!
thnx
Now, how many people saw this coming? Some things are just better as surprises:)
Kudos to Zenter guys!
Huge congrats to Zenter and Y Combinator!
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
… self-serve job security …
Did Zenter even make it out of private beta? Google cached pages suggest they didn’t, so they must’ve been doing something right.
Wow, great job, and great timing.
I remember commenting on a previous post where you discussed google’s new presentation stuff, I think I said “so much for zenter” !
ha
nope, zenter never made it out of the gate.
So I guess it’s safe to say, that Zenter wouldn’t have had this opportunity at such an early stage without Y Combinator’s publicity and connections.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com.....aring.html
Google says they purchased the “assets” meaning the team wasn’t taken as well?
Nevermind the team was bought as well.
so, this is just another Google ‘HR acquisition’?
then what is the big news?
this post sounds so….breathless
Here’s some inside info…
1) Google already has a PPT knockoff.. started internally.
2) They acquired these guys to help with internal codebase.
3) This was a HR-buy.
4) Price was low.
kevinL - I bet you are right.
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
… a guy and company who doesn’t have the Y Combinator’s connections :p
Any idea what the buyout price was? $1M? $3M $5M
I’d be curious to see what YC’s ROI was on this deal.
Kudos to PaulG and YC.
If are 40s… can you still get Y-Combinator VCs?
I don’t think they discriminate on age. Just happens that the willingness to code and live on ramen goes up as the age goes down.
bdb you don’t happen to work for the gliffy guys ? I’m sure they hope google need a diagram tool unfortunate it sucks.
Congrats to Zenter but the price wasn’t very high. Google pays $1 MM per employee or so in options that lock you up for 4 years. This is maybe a 75% premium to what they would have made by just become developers at Google. Good for them. This is certainly not a “payday” that you sit around boasting about. Y Combinator is still a joke. Their only strategy is to get bought out. None of their businesses can actually generate cash flow.
- Y combinator is a good company / they only take 6%-10%
- and give you 3 of the most connected months of yoru life.
- Say this company had 10 employees / all are now millionaires /
- That is a great job for that company. End of story.
-RB
Really, Jay, you know the acquisition price?
Look out Microsoft … and the sad part is … Microsoft has the ability to do all of this … they are just holding out and this could potentially hurt them!
Darin
With all these PhDs and rock star programmers working at Google, they still had to buy a small company to help out with ‘powerpoint over the web’?
*sigh*
This is great news and more kudos to Paul Graham and co.
I am pulling together a Y Combinator-like program in Australia and welcome TechCrunchers as participants.
Ping me at rand dot leebdutoit at gmail dot com if you are interested.
Jay, Reddit, Scribd, Weebly, Twitter, Loopt, Justin.tv, and iminlikewithyou are just a few YC graduates. Seems like they must be doing something right. Would you care to substantiate your claim that YC is a joke?