No speculation as to the size of the acquisition, but I guess anything between $10-100m is possible, which would give YC a return of about 3% (6% adjusted down to 70% twice) of that, or somewhere between $300k and $3m?
"YCombinator: turning $15k into $300k in 3 years"
Not bad.
Edit: This is based on the idea that BackType is successful, and had other options (which may not be the case, since their QuantCase/Compete graph is going down)... if they were about to go bust, the price could be considerably lower... but if they were doing well, I imagine investors would have blocked a sale lower than $10m.
Quantcast/Compete is almost no relationship to reality when you are talking about b2b startups or startups with sub-10M/month uniques. They are wrong in magnitude and growth trends as often as they are right, in my experience.
Also, if an investor DID block a sale, that fact would come up any time they were competing to fund future YC companies, so it probably wouldn't be worth it for an investor to do that... Yet another value that YC provides.
I think it is more sub $10M. Their product will be discontinued, so it appears they are buying the team. Bactype looks like a company with a handful of employees so you probably want to count $1M/engineer or maybe $1.2M.
I've been told by people close to the company that it was in the $50-100 million range. Given how aggressive the Backtype guys are, this doesn't shock me at all.
Interesting. Will we see a number if it was $50-100M in stock/cash - at what point do companies need to file with the SEC (or does Twitter not need to file since its still private?) I'm assuming it was at least partially stock, as Backtype investor Paige Craig's tweet suggests (http://twitter.com/#!/paigecraig/status/88304617397563392).
It would be very hard to believe that there was much cash in the deal. The Wall Street Journal is reporting twitter is raising another round that will value them at $7 Billion (see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230480310457642... ) If you value twitter stock at $7B then perhaps they received $50M in stock,
BackType has raised a total of $1.32m according to http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backtype
No speculation as to the size of the acquisition, but I guess anything between $10-100m is possible, which would give YC a return of about 3% (6% adjusted down to 70% twice) of that, or somewhere between $300k and $3m?
"YCombinator: turning $15k into $300k in 3 years"
Not bad.
Edit: This is based on the idea that BackType is successful, and had other options (which may not be the case, since their QuantCase/Compete graph is going down)... if they were about to go bust, the price could be considerably lower... but if they were doing well, I imagine investors would have blocked a sale lower than $10m.