They were purchased by Hudson's Bay Company, which was founded in 1670. It almost seems anachronistic to see a historical institution from the 17th century buy up a hyped tech company.
TechCrunch's front page headline for this is "Gilt Gets Acquired For $250M by Saks Fifth," which wouldn't be as interesting and isn't even accurate since Saks is just another HBC subsidiary. This is like if the East India Company bought Groupon.
Well, what really happened is that NRDC Equity Partners, formerly National Realty & Development Corp, a mall developer, did a sequence of deals. These resulted in them owning Saks, Macys, Lord and Taylor, and Hudsons Bay. After a few reverse mergers, Hudsons Bay became the parent company. NRDC's business is buying troubled retailers and turning them around. They're surprisingly good at it.[1]
Yes. The preferred will get the payout. If there were any holders of debt (which is senior to preferred -- his is why the yield on preferred shares of mega corps are higher Than the company's bonds), they will get paid before the preferred.
Execs will renegotiate their compensation contracts with the acquirer and likely have fairly lucrative contracts (often happens to sweeten the deal).
A 1x liquidity preference is standard, but it is common now to see larger multiples - especially in high-value later stage rounds, where the preference to those investors would also be stacked before earlier investors.
So, yes, I doubt common holders got much here, it is also possible that earlier investors didn't get much either.
For founders and employees this is usually made up with a separate bonus or earn-out from the acquiring company - which has been the source of conflict of interest claims from investors in some of these deals (where the acquisition price is much less than the 1x preference but the founders get a separate payout/earnout/signing bonus).
It already makes me feel a bit old to remember the days when Gilt, Fab, LivingSocial, and Groupon were all riding hot as variants of discount deals and but one by one have fallen from grace.
Back in the 1990s, people seemed to constantly talk about "Internet time." Referring to the sense that a year online, seemed like forever - especially given most people had spent very little time online, the Web was expanding at a rate essentially never seen before, there was little to compare it to historically, it all seemed to change a lot in one year. It still sometimes feels like the Internet time effect, when you refer to the brief era of Groupon's boom - it seems like it was a decade or more ago, when it was just three to four years.
Amazon has merely a slice of ecommerce. They have a commanding lead only in their type of ecommerce: being the new age Walmart of the Web. That leaves room for the other 80% of the market (in Walmart's case, they couldn't dominate most categories eg: dollar stores, Target, Costco, Home Depot, paint stores, convenience stores + gasoline, banking, pharmacy, clothing, tens of thousands of boutiques, grocery stores, Macy's & upscale, jewelry, video games, electronics, liquor stores, and on and on).
You have to do what Amazon isn't doing. Ultimately as ecommerce doubles in size in the US over the next ten years, Amazon is not going to get most of that. It's a staggering opportunity in terms of scale.
They couldn't beat eBay at auctions. They couldn't beat Craigslist at classifieds. They can't beat Priceline or AirBnB. They couldn't beat Google at search. They couldn't beat Apple at phones. They won't own online restaurant ordering. They will probably fail at trying to own services (Angie's List, legal, health, whatever). Amazon is going to lose in most things not directly tied to what they do today.
Amazon's inability to dominate the other 80% of ecommerce, is your opportunity.
This is OT but how come submissions which have less than 12 points appear on the first page? Has anyone figured out the HN algo? There are many other posts with far greater points yet this appears. Maybe techcrunch has higher ratings?
It has a time decaying value function. If the points accumulate rapidly upon submission, you can reach front page with as few as 5 up votes. This often happens for github repo submissions.
I can't remember where dang explained this, but there is a human factor in the algorithm. Some posts are artificially bumped to low on the front page for a small period of time to see if they gain traction. The selection of those posts is up to the moderators. This might be one such post.
EDIT: As I recall, the human-curated selections get put in a pool which the computer randomly promotes for a time to see if it gains traction.
[+] [-] stephenboyd|10 years ago|reply
TechCrunch's front page headline for this is "Gilt Gets Acquired For $250M by Saks Fifth," which wouldn't be as interesting and isn't even accurate since Saks is just another HBC subsidiary. This is like if the East India Company bought Groupon.
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://business.financialpost.com/executive/management-hr/ho...
[+] [-] spaceflunky|10 years ago|reply
Does that mean that the investors got all the money and anyone holding common stock was basically screwed?
[+] [-] hkmurakami|10 years ago|reply
Execs will renegotiate their compensation contracts with the acquirer and likely have fairly lucrative contracts (often happens to sweeten the deal).
[+] [-] nikcub|10 years ago|reply
So, yes, I doubt common holders got much here, it is also possible that earlier investors didn't get much either.
For founders and employees this is usually made up with a separate bonus or earn-out from the acquiring company - which has been the source of conflict of interest claims from investors in some of these deals (where the acquisition price is much less than the 1x preference but the founders get a separate payout/earnout/signing bonus).
[+] [-] ojbyrne|10 years ago|reply
http://recode.net/2016/01/06/one-kings-lane-once-valued-at-9...
Lots of unicorn blood to be spilled.
[+] [-] colmvp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SatoshiRoberts|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|10 years ago|reply
You have to do what Amazon isn't doing. Ultimately as ecommerce doubles in size in the US over the next ten years, Amazon is not going to get most of that. It's a staggering opportunity in terms of scale.
They couldn't beat eBay at auctions. They couldn't beat Craigslist at classifieds. They can't beat Priceline or AirBnB. They couldn't beat Google at search. They couldn't beat Apple at phones. They won't own online restaurant ordering. They will probably fail at trying to own services (Angie's List, legal, health, whatever). Amazon is going to lose in most things not directly tied to what they do today.
Amazon's inability to dominate the other 80% of ecommerce, is your opportunity.
[+] [-] throwawaythat1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venning|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: As I recall, the human-curated selections get put in a pool which the computer randomly promotes for a time to see if it gains traction.
[+] [-] bcassedy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techterrier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|10 years ago|reply
btw, did Facebook deliver any dividends?
[+] [-] hkmurakami|10 years ago|reply
http://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/dividend-history
[+] [-] SatoshiRoberts|10 years ago|reply