Twice

[rdl]

The genius here was Bill Nguyen turning a failing company and a pittance $11mm offer from one failing company (Nokia) into an $80-160mm buyout from a real company (Apple), essentially though hustle alone.

But it's zero-sum genius. I can respect him for being good at playing a specific game, but it's not a game I want to play myself.

[jacoblyles]

This is how business people get paid the big bucks.

All your startup's engineering work = $11 million

A month of CEO hustling = $149 million

[lmm]

I struggle to even respect it. He ripped them off; the world would be better off without his "hustle".

[jyou]

And he almost did it again - if he "exited" at the peak of Color.

[gatsby]

Fascinating story.

Fast Company did a piece on Bill Nguyen about 18 months ago: (http://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-boy-bubble) and included an infographic on his track record:

http://infographics.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/bill-nguyen...

For a bunch of companies that have widely been considered failures in terms of product and number of users, he has had some unbelievable exits and financial successes.

[rokhayakebe]

Keep in mind most acquisitions for product integration kinda fail, well at least most of the acquisitions I hear off. The company I work for is small printing co, they made a small acquisition (sub $2M or $3M)a few years back, I doubt they got more than $500k in revenue from it.

[bane]

How are those acquisitions doing now?

[guptaneil]

The point of this post is to talk about Bill's hustling when selling Lala, which is a very interesting story.

The author should have left the last word out to make a much more powerful story about Lala rather than changing the focus of the article to Apple's "genius," especially since there was no genius involved on Apple's part. Just good luck for Apple, and horrible luck for the Color team.

[jusben1369]

I disagree. I thought the last paragraph was great. Life is never a single event. Round 1 to Lala and their engineers. Round 2 to Apple. There'll be Round 3's!

[aubreyjohnson]

The title of this is a little misleading as I don't really discuss anything about Apple acquiring Color. I just link to the rumor articles.

[jtoeman]

thanks for adding that - i read through it three times trying to find a link to page 2 or something. :)

[RandallBrown]

I miss Lala, at least the final streaming iteration. It had iTunes Match for FREE years ago. You would upload your library to Lala, they would decide what they already had and just let you stream that, then anything they didn't have would get uploaded. It was iTunes in the cloud. Their webapp was phenomenal, especially by 2009 standards.

I had big expectations for Lala after Apple bought them. I thought they might actually get a true iTunes in the cloud built.

[acdha]

This is what MP3.com offered in 1999. The only difference was the legal agreements so the record companies wouldn't sue on dubious grounds.

[ceworthington]

+1 to this. I am on Rdio now for $10/mo, and I easily would have paid Lala the same monthly fee for their service.

I assume they were in bad shape because they had to pay every time someone streamed a song, and not enough of their users wound up paying them for streaming access. Too many loss leaders.

[ValentineC]

Looks like the post has disappeared from Aubrey's blog.

Google Cache of his original post: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.au...

Gizmodo also has his post mirrored: http://gizmodo.com/5977076/the-amazing-story-of-how-bill-ngu...

[zaidf]

Google was worried, they moved fast.

This is what I'm unsure about: how much of google's worries was a result of Lala being a worthwhile company and how much of it was a result of Bill's propping it up? Let's remove Bill for a minute. Let's say Mr. No-name-CEO reaches out to his contact at Google and presents the deal for Lala. My gut would be that Google guy would likely simply pass on the deal because he doesn't perceive Lala to be much of a competitive threat or a great product, not to mention the little traction they may have had was a result of Google's partnership(which I'm assuming they could easily opt out of). What am I missing? What made google worried, lala inc. or lala inc. with a salesman CEO with an acquisition offer?

[jaggederest]

Mr. Nguyen appears to be a hotshot startup salesman. Much like the proverbial car salesman, he can pump up something, sell it to a sucker, and pocket the commission.

[capkutay]

He was relieved of day to day activities by the board about a month or more before the Apple acquisition...was that acquisition really his doing?

[speeder]

I do not understood the tale :(

Why it was genius?

[draz]

Those employees were given options at Apple ($80M worth) that were probably lost once they left the company to work at Color. Then Apple ended up getting them back on the cheap. So instead of $160M, Apple ended up paying $80M + $7M.

[huytoan_pc]

Fascinating story but how is Apple genius here? Was it Apple's all along to acquire Lala, let Lala's engineers go before they exercised their options, somehow made Color a failure, then bought the all the engineers back on the cheap? The real genius (or at least real good biz person) in this story is Bill Nguyen, Apple just did what makes sense for them, it just happens that two of their acquisitions are Bill's companies.

[alpb]

No mention of the Color in the article, I guess but that was a great story.

[lnanek2]

This is how the Finance people in NYC interview for a job. Give them a number and they'll shop it around and start a competition. :)

[brackin]

The piece was removed for some reason?

[sidcool]

Why is this top link?

[simonw]

Because 70 people voted it up.