Facebook said yesterday that it bought the company, FriendFeed, for an undisclosed sum, acquiring a service that lets people share news and photos. At Google, the four founders helped create Google Maps and Gmail.
“It just was an opportunity we couldnt pass up,” Bret Taylor, a 29-year-old graduate of Stanford University, said in an interview.
Their experience reflects the Silicon Valley model of employees leaving secure jobs to make a bet on a startup, said Paul Saffo, a consulting associate professor at Stanford, near Palo Alto, California. Twitter Inc., the messaging service, was started by two former Google employees. YouTube, the most popular online video site, was co-founded by two former workers at PayPal.
“When you spend your whole life bumping into people who have started big things from nothing, you get the bug,” Saffo said. “People want to change the world, and see the money as their just reward.”
As part of the acquisition, all 12 FriendFeed employees will join Facebook, the worlds largest social-networking site. Started in 2007, FriendFeed, based in Mountain View, California, lets people post videos and updates from other sites on the Web.
Facebook paid about $50 million in cash and stock for FriendFeed, the Wall Street Journal reported today.
Valley Insiders
FriendFeeds founders also include Paul Buchheit, 32, who helped create Gmail; Jim Norris, 28; and Sanjeev Singh, 36.
“Among the Silicon Valley insiders, they were viewed as a prime property,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut.
The purchase of FriendFeed comes amid a slump in acquisitions of venture-backed companies. There were 121 purchases of venture-funded companies in the first six months of this year, compared with 192 a year earlier, according to the National Venture Capital Association in Arlington, Virginia.
“Our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use,” Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday in a statement.
Gmail
Buchheit, who studied computer science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said on his blog that he always wanted to join a startup. He moved to California in 1998 for a job at Intel Corp. before moving to Google.
Singh worked on Gmail and Googles search appliance, which helps businesses scour their networks. Norris helped start Google Maps and worked on Googles infrastructure team. He met Taylor after he left Google and went to Benchmark Capital, the Menlo Park, California-based venture-capital firm, where they were entrepreneurs in residence and developed FriendFeed, according to the companys Web site.
Benchmark is an investor in FriendFeed, according to the venture-capital firms Web site.
Taylor led a team of Google employees that worked on Google Maps, which is now the most popular maps service in the U.S., according to researcher ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia.
Build It
“He can sort of take a problem and he can figure out what the solution should be, and then he can also go out and built it,” said Avichal Garg, a former Google employee who knows Taylor and co-founded a test-preparation startup called Prepme.com.