21-month Lifespan: Silicon Valley's largest mobile-internet bubble in recent years--color

It's a big gamble to give up easy work and to join the innovation company, but the color employees are more costly

Science and Technology blog BusinessInsider author Owen Thomas published an article said: from the hot to the dismal exit, the photo studio sex only persisted for 21 months, called "the biggest mobile internet bubble in the history of Silicon Valley". The failure also led to heavy losses for most color employees.

It's a big gamble to give up an easy job, but it's a lot more painful for the color staff. Because before entering color, most of them worked with Bill Ran, the color's founder, Bill Nguyen, in the online music innovation company Lala. Lala is an innovative company founded by Bill Ran and sold it to Apple in 2009 years. Apple later closed the Lala,lala technician and was subsequently merged into itunes.

Expecting the Bill Ran to reshape, many former Lala employees followed him out of Apple about a year later, creating color in 2011. Since leaving Apple, they have also given up many of the stock options that are still unfulfilled.

Color former designer Obri Johnson (Aubrey Johnson) has broken the silence, revealing some Bill Ran founder Lala and color inside the message. According to Johnson and some sources, we have received some unknown internal information.

At the end of 2009, Lala was struggling to build his business model, Johnson said. (But other insiders feel Lala more successful.) But Lala has done nothing controversial now: let the list of online music stores appear prominently in Google's search results. This also makes Google and Apple's interest in Lala arises spontaneously.

At that time, Nokia was also very interested in Lala. Johnson said the purchase price offered by Nokia at the time was only 11 million dollars, and that the purchase price was almost impossible to give Lala employees any return. Lala has raised 35 million of billions of dollars from companies such as venture capital ventures, Ignition, and Warner Music.

Bill Ran the offer by Nokia to negotiate with Google. As with Nokia's offer, Google's bid is very low. But Google's interest in Lala is enough for Bill Ran to hold talks with Apple. "One day in November 2009, Bill Ran went to dinner at the home of Apple's late founder Steve Jobs, with Apple executive Eddy Coux (Eddy Cue), the incumbent CEO Tim Cook," Bill Ran said. And some other executives at Apple. Steve opened the door in the course of dinner: ' Bill, I'm giving you a number now, if you think you can give and take, we're going to settle this now, OK? ' Then Steve passed a piece of paper to Bill Ran, and he nodded after reading it, and the takeover ended. ”

Apple offered Lala a 80 million dollar bid. After most of the buy-out funds belonged to Lala investors, the remainder became a bonus for the Lala technical team. Johnson emphasised that the deal was done in the form of a stock exchange. According to Apple's current stock price, the total price of the deal was essentially 196.48 million dollars.

But not all Lala employees make pots full of them. In March 2011, Apple's share price was around 350 dollars, and Lala employees had already gained huge profits. Few of them were able to expect Apple's share price to double. Based on their subsequent actions, it seems that former Lala employees prefer to be pressed on Bill Ran rather than on jobs.

The value of Apple's share options to Lala in December 2009 has increased by more than twice times, according to the top price of apple at 700 dollars last summer. In other words, 80 million dollars has been inflated to 300 million dollars. Even in today's stock prices, these options are worth about 200 million dollars.

Color raised 14 million dollars in the first round of funding. The round of financing was led by Bain Capital Ventures, a venture capitalist, and the company was Bill Ran's previous supporter. However, Sequoia Capital in the last moment to join the color of the financing, which also allows the size of color financing from 14 million U.S. dollars rapidly expanded to 41 million U.S. dollars.

It was reported that Apple eventually bought color at a price of only 7 million dollars. Jonathan did not confirm the purchase price on his blog.

In this transaction, the final winners seem to be the former Lala employees who have stayed at Apple and have not Bill Ran with the color. Because they continue to have millions of of Apple stock options, and the world's most successful companies have a stable job. Thanks to the trust of Bill Ran, the former Lala employees who left Apple paid a heavy price. But, as we already know, color's technicians have returned to Apple again.